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Why does much of the public feel strongly entitled to below-market pricing for certain luxury goods and services? And on the flip side, why do some companies seem to intentionally yield profit to scalpers? Why not dynamically price every premium product/service in today's day and age?
Case study A: Taylor Swift is making the news for selling record amounts of tickets for her upcoming tour. The internet in response has been raging against Live Nation's monopoly, corporate greed, price gouging, bots, scalpers, and Citizens United over both the expensiveness and the lack of availability of her tickets. The brouhaha predates TS--over the past few months, it seems like every time a popular musician launches a tour, the same headlines resurface about greed, price gouging etc.
Case study B: Nvidia's 4000 series graphics cards have been catching flak for their pricing. Same talking points as above, minus the monopoly part because there is real competition in graphics cards.
All this seems silly to me:
Concert tickets, like most everything else, and especially like luxury goods and services, are fundamentally priced by supply and demand. The internet is livid that TS tickets are both expensive and then resold for even more, and directs its anger at TS, LN, and scalpers, arguing that real fans are being cheated somehow. But I don't understand how any of it is actually unfair. Is a concert goer a fake fan if s/he buys from the secondary market at a higher price rather than waiting in 8-hour-long virtual queues the moment tickets go on sale? Super Bowl tickets routinely sell for thousands or tens of thousands. Are your average working class fans being cheated somehow because they cannot afford that? And if the NFL set up a buggy virtual queuing system that allowed people who otherwise cannot afford it buy Super Bowl tickets at a hefty discount (maybe that's exactly how it works. Idk--I've never once thought of trying to buy SB tickets), should society be critical if they then turn around and resell said underpriced tickets for a profit, and then presume to spend the money on goods and services that deliver them more utility? It's not like there is anything particularly virtuous about making sure people who buy tickets to a ball game are committed to attending rather than being free to change their minds or profit from gross pricing inefficiencies.
Nvidia's 3000 series ran into extensive problems with extremely mismatched supply and demand for something like two years, and this of course led to plentiful scalping, which if nothing else is a huge waste of resources considering all the time and money spent on shuffling products to and from middlemen. For the 4000 series, Nvidia smartly priced its products substantially higher than before, which should reduce the mismatch and get inventory to people who want it the most. They can then cut prices and offer discounts once sales slow down in the coming months/years.
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.
But ultimately, the above is all noise to me. The simplest solution seems to be just to price all luxury goods and services dynamically. Consumers understand that airline and hotel prices are heavily dependent on supply and demand--traveling the Wednesday before Thanksgiving will cost far more than the Wednesday a week later, and flying first will cost substantially more than economy. Hotels on weekends when large conferences are in town will be priced significantly more than otherwise, and suites cost more than standard rooms. There is no scalping that happens for either product because, aside from the TSA, tickets are priced using algorithms that adjust automatically so there is no need to scalp.
So why not do that? Why not dynamically price every luxury good in high demand? Disney does it for its parks. I didn't look too closely into it, but it seems like maybe TS opted into dynamic price this time around, but clearly it's not dynamic enough if there are any scalpers who still make a profit. As for graphics cards, I think the world is better off if Nvidia prereleases the 4000 series online a few weeks ahead of public releases (since traditional retailers can't dynamically price as easily); and during that prerelease period, use algorithms to fully satisfy demand at the market clearing price. Like I mentioned, scalping is a waste of resources and productivity for all, so get rid of it. If Nvidia can retain the vast majority of profits and recapture waste from middlemen shipping and handling, that capital can be redeployed to R&D or paid back in dividends, which then can be invested in other productive enterprises.
Well, the Taylor Swift thing is superficially silly—of course basic white girls aren’t entitled to socialized ticket prices.
But Ticketmaster/Live Nation is the vertically integrated nightmare monopoly that haunts anti-trust’s dreams. While it profoundly doesn’t matter, because it’s just concerts, having a conglomerate that controls ticket sales and owns the concert venues and manages the artists that play at those venues is really kind of a textbook example of an evil monopoly. It is really quite difficult to establish a fair market price and have competition when one company owns so much of the live music scene. They are also just shockingly incompetent, speaking from personal experience—I live near and attend events at 2 Live Nation venues, and their apps and websites are failure-prone pieces of shit that fall down on the very basics of keeping you logged in and showing available tickets. I just don’t know how such a large company has such a bad UX/UI experience…oh right, monopoly power, gotcha.
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Now on the Nvidia front…yeah, that’s just whining. These cards cost so much at launch because they cost so much to make. These are fabricated on TSMC’s absolute latest process, and it’s thought the masks alone cost $100 million to fabricate. The EUV systems to make these require huge amounts of power and have very low throughput, especially for GPUs, which are just big honkin’ slices of silicon, and require lots and lots of patterning passes. And there’s a whole mess of supply issues for all semiconductors right now…including obscure problems like a global shortage of neon, because something like 70% of the world’s neon is captured in Ukraine, for odd reasons.
I think the ticketmaster situation is ultimately a distraction. Fundamentally these tickets have their supply limited by the size of the venue. If there were multiple companies selling tickets to the same show it wouldn't change the fundamental problem that supply is lower than demand at prices considered "normal". I agree with OP. It's just entitled brats complaining.
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At one point, and for a long time, people thought Facebook was unassailable, shielded from competition because of its network effect. Then Apple flipped a switch while TikTok took off and down it goes. Gradually, and then suddenly, LN can suffer the same fate.
Moreover, American industry doesn't just stand by helplessly when there is extreme profit being made in an entire sector. LYV is valued at $17B; Elon Musk can buy it tomorrow. But perhaps he doesn't want to, because LYV had a net income of -$2B in 2020 and -$650mm in 2021. In 2019, before the pandemic, it made a paltry $70mm on $12B in revenue.
This is not the hallmark of some almighty puppeteering evil conglomerate that's inundated with money stolen from children with cancer. It may own lots of components in live entertainment, but the market sure doesn't value that ownership very highly.
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