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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   35144 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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Live concerts and premium graphics cards are luxury goods and services. The songs themselves remain extremely affordable through streaming services, and graphics cards released 5 years ago can handle the vast majority of games so long as you do not insist on playing on max settings. It's hard for me to see anyone's rights are deprived because their desire to go to a live concert or play games at the highest settings cannot be met. All the outrage that that either TS or LN is price gouging just sounds so stupid--it's a concert, people. If you don't like the price, don't go. We're not talking about overcharging for gasoline prices when a hurricane is about to hit.

It's a no-win situation for musicians. Price the tickets too low and scalpers will re-sell them, and people complain about tickets being sold out. Price too high and people complain about prices. The only solution is more quantity, such as more concerts in the same city.

Part of the problem is the uncertainty. No one know how popular something will be. Some acts sell-out very fast and others do not ,even if the prices, artist, and venue the same.

Isn't the winning move to secretly price them higher, by having 'scalpers' be the scapegoat but actually internalizing the scalping? A way to do that would be to have ticketmaster ""scalp"" for you, and pay you most of the profit. Not that they're doing that, I haven't looked at all.

Price too high and people complain about prices

I wonder if that's part of the reason for the giant "service fees" and such that the ticket vendors charge – by claiming a large part of the price is from the vendor, they are effectively unloading the bad publicity on them instead of on the artist. It doesn't really matter that much for Ticketmaster if people hate them, but it does for a musician with a fanbase to think about.

Honestly, this is why I think there's not more industry pushback on how awful ticketmaster is. Ticketmaster's actual business model is being a professional bad guy taking the flak for the artists' high ticket prices.

It's a no-win situation for musicians.

Is it though? People may have unrealistic expectations of how much concerts should cost because of the stupid existing system whereby they are nominally one price (practically unobtainable face value), but in reality another (free market resale / scalper price). If the system is replaced wholly with dynamic pricing, then expectations can adjust. People can complain all they want about how expensive a vacation to Bora Bora is, but that doesn't make the island businesses scalpers.

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