The days of driving down to your local arena, parking and going inside the box office to purchase a ticket to an entertainment event are long gone.
As some venues may still offer the option to buy tickets in person, several of them have switched over to the online format, selling tickets exclusively on TicketMaster.
This poses a huge issue: ticket resellers.
Ticket resellers use bots to buy up large amounts of tickets and resell them at higher prices.
It’s unfair.
They have taken the fun and excitement out of getting tickets.
There should be more laws in place that prohibit ticket price-gouging from happening.
For starters, ticket resellers make concert tickets less accessible.
Once a ticket reseller logs into the queue with their 100 bots, your chance as a regular consumer to get tickets is significantly lower.
By the time it’s your turn in the queue to purchase tickets, they’ve already been sold to the bots ahead of you.
Ticket resellers not only make them less accessible by taking up spots in the queue, but they also make the tickets cost significantly higher.
Ticket resellers are greedy and almost always charge double the face value price.
They are preying on desperate fans who want to see their favorite sports teams and musicians.
I experienced this firsthand when trying to purchase Drake and 21 Savage tickets.
Tickets started at $169. These same tickets are now selling for as high as $921 by ticket resellers.
This is such an unfortunate situation when you want to buy a ticket to see your favorite artist, but the price for a single ticket is the amount of your biweekly paycheck.
This leads me to my next point: unhappy customers.
The situation with ticket resellers upsets a lot of entertainment fans, and rightfully so. Leading some fans to even file lawsuits against Ticketmaster for allowing this issue to go on.
There is a current lawsuit now in Los Angeles, filed by Taylor Swift fans against Ticketmaster and their parent-company Livenation, for allegedly imposing higher prices on fans in the presale, sale and resale market, according to cnn.com.
This poses an even bigger problem, a PR crisis.
Now, Ticketmaster and LiveNation have a reputation for allowing resellers to infiltrate their sites and cause chaos in the ticketing industry. All of this could be prevented if there were federal laws in place that inhibited ticket reselling and held these large companies accountable. Currently, there aren’t any federal laws in place.
However, 16 out of 50 have a law that make reselling illegal. These states issue fines for up to $1,000 and a jail sentence of a year if the person is a first-time offender.
States such as New York, New Jersey Alabama, Georgia and Illinois require a special license to even resell tickets.
If all 50 states implemented some form of action against ticket reselling, entertainment fans across the country would appreciate it. It would offer everyone a fair chance at seeing their favorite artists and sports teams.