phommel
Refugee
No news for me (except that RMG part....), but what do you all think about this development?
It's clear for me that industry/artists just want to earn even more money with this auction-thing. The solution is so easy, just sell max. 2 tickets pp on passport number...
July 23, 2008
Sherry Lawrence
U2's Vertigo Tour saw a changing of the guard in terms of concert ticketing. Not only did the old Propaganda fan club transform into the many layers of U2.com and the ticketing complications that came as a result, but fans also found themselves scouring the web to find coveted General Admission tickets from sources other than Ticketmaster, Tickets.com, or their local original ticketing company. Thanks to several grassroots online mailing lists and forums, most fans were able to get what they were looking for.
The New World of Concert Ticketing
But while U2 is busy planning its next tour, the concert ticketing business is changing. Sites like presalepassword.net help fans, brokers and scalpers get access to advance tickets. Secondary ticket brokers are now legal in 40 out of 50 U.S. states and generate a whopping $3 billion annually. According to a report on ESPN's E:60 program, major sports teams are partly responsible for the change: Season ticket holders wanted a venue to resell tickets for games they were not going to attend. For example, the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team has created its own ticketing resale site called Flash Seats, where fans can resell their tickets and the team gets a cut of the resale profit.
Given the success of this business model, Ticketmaster has also joined the ticket resale business. Ticketmaster spent $265 million to purchase TicketsNow.com, the second-largest ticket reselling site. This may appear to be redundant since Ticketmaster's Web site already has a TicketExchange feature, but as the saying goes, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." According to a Ticketmaster spokesperson in the ESPN report, the company's primary focus is to offer a fair and equitable opportunity for the general public to have access and purchase tickets.
In May, Ticketmaster CEO Sean Moriarty spoke about this to ticket brokers at a meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada. A month later, TicketNews.com described the meeting this way:
"One of the meeting's key points was Ticketmaster's commitment to the secondary market, which Moriarty said began when Ticketmaster built its first resale platform in 2002. The company's commitment is due in large part to the huge financial growth opportunities that exist in the secondary market, and Moriarty offered up a series of statistics along these lines."
While Moriarty stated that Ticketmaster does not have control over what tickets the artist releases or the original price of the ticket, its TicketExchange product offers a true-value cost for what the market will bear. It is similar to stocks: If you purchase at the initial offering, you will pay the lower price. After that, it's whatever the market will bear.
In the ESPN E:60 report, Ticketmaster spokesman Joe Freeman said that the acquisition of TicketsNow.com is allowing fans as many choices as possible to purchase the tickets they're looking for. "Fans have embraced resale, quite frankly, as the numbers show," he said.
Despite its move into the secondary ticket market, Ticketmaster is still committed to primary sales on Ticketmaster.com. In June, it won a permanent court injunction and an $18.2 million judgment against RMG Technologies. RMG created software used primarily by ticket brokers that bombards Ticketmaster.com in an attempt to buy tickets faster than regular users can. Ticketmaster sued on the basis that this software violated the site's rules, which prohibit the use of automated programs to purchase tickets. According to court records, Ticketmaster produced evidence that one ticket broker used IP addresses registered to RMG Technologies to make "more than 425,000 ticket requests in a single day". Another ticket broker, also using IP addresses registered to RMG Technologies, made "more than 600,000 ticket requests in a single day." According to TicketNews.com, Central States Ticket Brokers Association President Barry Fox said that "the ruling could give Ticketmaster a license to go after brokers who used RMG's software. This can allow Ticketmaster to enforce this judgment against other brokers. They now have a tool in order to do that." As part of the court proceedings, RMG Technologies had to hand over the software's source code to Ticketmaster.
RMG Technologies countered in the court documents that its software did not violate Ticketmaster's rules because the company had hired people in India and Sri Lanka to manually type in the "captcha" words when they appeared prior to formally processing the ticket request. RMG Technologies founder C.J. Garibay has denied there was anything illegal about RMG's software.
@U2 spoke with a ticket industry veteran who has seen RMG's software in action. Our contact asked not to be identified by name, but told us that the efficiency of the RMG Technologies software was amazing, and described seeing 100 tickets pulled in the first 10 rows for a concert with lightning speed.
States are also getting involved, thanks in large part to last year's Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana tour. Moms and dads across the United States were unsuccessful in purchasing tickets for their kids, only to find thousands of tickets available through any one of the 199 legalized ticket resellers through the National Association of Ticket Brokers. In Minnesota, Governor Tim Pawlenty signed the "Hannah Montana Law," which "outlaws ticket-buying software that enables users to snap up blocs of tickets before much of the public can."
State laws and Ticketmaster's court win may slow down the way secondary ticketing brokers obtain tickets, but it will by no means put an end to the $3 billion industry. Our ticket industry contact tells @U2 that there are brokers still using older versions of RMG's software and running it on their own servers. On top of that, our contact says RMG's software is not the only automated ticket buying software brokers are using.
U2 and LiveNation?
Which brings us back to U2. Live Nation is the band's concert-promoting partner, and U2 is slated to be one of the first bands to fully use their new ticketing system in 2009. While it is still too early for any speculation, fans are already showing concern in many online forums about how ticketing will go, hoping that what happened in 2005 will not happen again. In the new ticketing landscape, nothing can be guaranteed.
The switch from Ticketmaster to Live Nation raises many issues for U2, and many questions for U2 fans. Will Live Nation have a way to keep automated software from getting all the best tickets? Will Live Nation's system be able to handle the load that a U2 concert sale creates on its servers? Will a presale to U2.com members happen – and if so, how will the presale password not be available to those willing to pay for it through presalepassword.net? Will U2 move forward setting up its own auction site, as Paul McGuinness mentioned while at an industry convention in Los Angeles in February? How much will people pay in an official auction for a U2 concert ticket?
Live Nation did not return our requests for comment for this story.
For now, it's all about patience for U2 fans. The competition for tickets has certainly gotten tougher thanks to the legalization of secondary ticket sales and the growth of the presale password sites. We can all but hope that Larry Mullen does not have to write another letter like the one he did in 2005.
(c) Lawrence/@U2, 2008.
It's clear for me that industry/artists just want to earn even more money with this auction-thing. The solution is so easy, just sell max. 2 tickets pp on passport number...
July 23, 2008
Sherry Lawrence
U2's Vertigo Tour saw a changing of the guard in terms of concert ticketing. Not only did the old Propaganda fan club transform into the many layers of U2.com and the ticketing complications that came as a result, but fans also found themselves scouring the web to find coveted General Admission tickets from sources other than Ticketmaster, Tickets.com, or their local original ticketing company. Thanks to several grassroots online mailing lists and forums, most fans were able to get what they were looking for.
The New World of Concert Ticketing
But while U2 is busy planning its next tour, the concert ticketing business is changing. Sites like presalepassword.net help fans, brokers and scalpers get access to advance tickets. Secondary ticket brokers are now legal in 40 out of 50 U.S. states and generate a whopping $3 billion annually. According to a report on ESPN's E:60 program, major sports teams are partly responsible for the change: Season ticket holders wanted a venue to resell tickets for games they were not going to attend. For example, the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team has created its own ticketing resale site called Flash Seats, where fans can resell their tickets and the team gets a cut of the resale profit.
Given the success of this business model, Ticketmaster has also joined the ticket resale business. Ticketmaster spent $265 million to purchase TicketsNow.com, the second-largest ticket reselling site. This may appear to be redundant since Ticketmaster's Web site already has a TicketExchange feature, but as the saying goes, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." According to a Ticketmaster spokesperson in the ESPN report, the company's primary focus is to offer a fair and equitable opportunity for the general public to have access and purchase tickets.
In May, Ticketmaster CEO Sean Moriarty spoke about this to ticket brokers at a meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada. A month later, TicketNews.com described the meeting this way:
"One of the meeting's key points was Ticketmaster's commitment to the secondary market, which Moriarty said began when Ticketmaster built its first resale platform in 2002. The company's commitment is due in large part to the huge financial growth opportunities that exist in the secondary market, and Moriarty offered up a series of statistics along these lines."
While Moriarty stated that Ticketmaster does not have control over what tickets the artist releases or the original price of the ticket, its TicketExchange product offers a true-value cost for what the market will bear. It is similar to stocks: If you purchase at the initial offering, you will pay the lower price. After that, it's whatever the market will bear.
In the ESPN E:60 report, Ticketmaster spokesman Joe Freeman said that the acquisition of TicketsNow.com is allowing fans as many choices as possible to purchase the tickets they're looking for. "Fans have embraced resale, quite frankly, as the numbers show," he said.
Despite its move into the secondary ticket market, Ticketmaster is still committed to primary sales on Ticketmaster.com. In June, it won a permanent court injunction and an $18.2 million judgment against RMG Technologies. RMG created software used primarily by ticket brokers that bombards Ticketmaster.com in an attempt to buy tickets faster than regular users can. Ticketmaster sued on the basis that this software violated the site's rules, which prohibit the use of automated programs to purchase tickets. According to court records, Ticketmaster produced evidence that one ticket broker used IP addresses registered to RMG Technologies to make "more than 425,000 ticket requests in a single day". Another ticket broker, also using IP addresses registered to RMG Technologies, made "more than 600,000 ticket requests in a single day." According to TicketNews.com, Central States Ticket Brokers Association President Barry Fox said that "the ruling could give Ticketmaster a license to go after brokers who used RMG's software. This can allow Ticketmaster to enforce this judgment against other brokers. They now have a tool in order to do that." As part of the court proceedings, RMG Technologies had to hand over the software's source code to Ticketmaster.
RMG Technologies countered in the court documents that its software did not violate Ticketmaster's rules because the company had hired people in India and Sri Lanka to manually type in the "captcha" words when they appeared prior to formally processing the ticket request. RMG Technologies founder C.J. Garibay has denied there was anything illegal about RMG's software.
@U2 spoke with a ticket industry veteran who has seen RMG's software in action. Our contact asked not to be identified by name, but told us that the efficiency of the RMG Technologies software was amazing, and described seeing 100 tickets pulled in the first 10 rows for a concert with lightning speed.
States are also getting involved, thanks in large part to last year's Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana tour. Moms and dads across the United States were unsuccessful in purchasing tickets for their kids, only to find thousands of tickets available through any one of the 199 legalized ticket resellers through the National Association of Ticket Brokers. In Minnesota, Governor Tim Pawlenty signed the "Hannah Montana Law," which "outlaws ticket-buying software that enables users to snap up blocs of tickets before much of the public can."
State laws and Ticketmaster's court win may slow down the way secondary ticketing brokers obtain tickets, but it will by no means put an end to the $3 billion industry. Our ticket industry contact tells @U2 that there are brokers still using older versions of RMG's software and running it on their own servers. On top of that, our contact says RMG's software is not the only automated ticket buying software brokers are using.
U2 and LiveNation?
Which brings us back to U2. Live Nation is the band's concert-promoting partner, and U2 is slated to be one of the first bands to fully use their new ticketing system in 2009. While it is still too early for any speculation, fans are already showing concern in many online forums about how ticketing will go, hoping that what happened in 2005 will not happen again. In the new ticketing landscape, nothing can be guaranteed.
The switch from Ticketmaster to Live Nation raises many issues for U2, and many questions for U2 fans. Will Live Nation have a way to keep automated software from getting all the best tickets? Will Live Nation's system be able to handle the load that a U2 concert sale creates on its servers? Will a presale to U2.com members happen – and if so, how will the presale password not be available to those willing to pay for it through presalepassword.net? Will U2 move forward setting up its own auction site, as Paul McGuinness mentioned while at an industry convention in Los Angeles in February? How much will people pay in an official auction for a U2 concert ticket?
Live Nation did not return our requests for comment for this story.
For now, it's all about patience for U2 fans. The competition for tickets has certainly gotten tougher thanks to the legalization of secondary ticket sales and the growth of the presale password sites. We can all but hope that Larry Mullen does not have to write another letter like the one he did in 2005.
(c) Lawrence/@U2, 2008.
).
Or your adverage, working class fan into the working class/peoples band
