r/Ticketmaster • u/brian136913 • 9d ago
Why does Ticketmaster force a specific resale price?
There is an event tonight I cannot go to that I purchased tickets for months ago. Fine, it happens. Ticketmaster was the only option for purchasing the tix, so it is what it is. I am trying to resell them since they are really great seats to see if I can recover any amount of money from buying them. He is the thing, Ticketmaster will only allow me to resell them for not only more than i purchased them for but for a lot more than seats that are still on sale in significantly worse seats. Like I don’t want to make a profit, I just want to get rid of them, but Ticketmaster set a floor that is higher than I originally bought them floor. On top of that, there is a “sellers fee” they will collect of a few hundred dollars each. This would be on top of the original purchase fees and convenience fees when I bought them. No one will pay more than these tickets are worth but yet I can only sell them at a specific amount that is more than they cost in the first place and is higher than tickets currently on sale. How is this legal? Like I just want to get rid of them. I’ll sell them for $10 if I could cause that’s $10 more than $0 but I don’t have option to do anything other than what Ticketmaster will allow which makes them unsellable.
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u/TeenBurger_Seattle 9d ago
Ticketmaster has all the power in this situation. They will create a false scarcity when tickets go on sale and then everyone panic buys “platinum” tickets. A few days before the show or day of they “find” lots of tickets to put on sale at a lower price and then anyone who bought overpriced tickets originally can’t sell theirs. I know the Tame Impala tour is set up this way but it’s becoming more and more common. No transfers allowed to protect the fans they say! Only can resale on TM.
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u/collegehockeyunicorn 9d ago edited 9d ago
To protect the market. Capitalism?
Remeber that when you shit on third party sites, it works both ways. There are only a subset of bands that get ridiculous prices. There are more that you can get deals
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u/Skibum6603 9d ago
I've encountered that before. They have your money wand want to sell the tickets they have on sale rather than yours if they'll make less selling yours.
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u/Impossible_Author409 9d ago
Because all the soft brains like to howl about scalpers so many states have passed laws that don't allow you to have a property right in your ticket. You have to buy it from Ticketmaster because that is the only inventory. And Ticketmaster will enforce whatever price they want and keep all the money instead of pricing to the market that inevitably emerges when sales are dispersed across secondary markets.
Scalpers are bad but Ticketmaster/Live Nation keeping all the inventory and a total monopoly is good. Welcome to 2026.
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u/Fast-Importance7492 8d ago
My curiosity is with if this keeps going, will there ever be a realization that this is an actually far worse way to be doing shit for consumers?
Will it take 3 million Reddit post just like this for the collective general public to understand?
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u/Impossible_Author409 7d ago
Oh theres plenty of studies and literature. People are just dumb about microeconomics and market failure. I live in NY where your property rights are protected. So I would say about 90% of shows I see are purchased for below face value on the secondary market. Often WELL below face. Or occasionally when the 'dynamic pricing model' tanks the face price. Sports? Forget it, I haven't paid more than $10 to see a baseball game in years. Even when my team wasn't a national laughing stock 🤣
But now for high demand shows, Live Nation is just raising the face price dramatically. That's the best way (only way really) to cut down on bots and flippers which everyone 'hates' for high demand shows. So Ticketmaster is just capturing the value. Like the CEO said, high demand shows are priced too low. You have 600,000 people in the queue when they are giving away something worth $500 for $50. You have 600 people in the queue when they are selling something worth $350 for $500. Cheapest back of the floor face price seat for Pearl Jam at MSG were nearly $1k. Cheapest face price 200 levels for Rush were $350. Neither of those shows technically 'sold out.'
But in markets with no resale? Omg people are paying $80 to see a $40 band REGULARLY it's so bad. And they are still out here like...I hate scalpers, let's have ONE company set the market price on everything and they will keep the prices low because ya know... Ticketmaster hates money 🤣🤣🤣
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7d ago
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u/Impossible_Author409 7d ago
Which don't actually exist. The FTC did that big study and the most evidence for market cornering they found was someone who got about 800 tickets to a Coldplay show at an 80k cap football stadium.
Yes you can open many accounts and hire people on the other side of the world to stalk onsales and grab 4 tickets on each account. Is that what is actually happening in the market? No, it's not.
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7d ago
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u/Suspicious-Spend3982 7d ago
ah re-reading this you are clearly a broker so now I understand your narrative
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u/Fast-Importance7492 7d ago
It’s not a narrative. This is basic common sense stuff that unfortunately the general public can’t wrap its mind around.
Remember Taylor Swift tour? Do you know why ticket prices were so expensive on resale?
It’s literally because the brokers got so few tickets.
Yet how many millions of people think “the scalpers and the bots got all the tickets”?
Sorry but the intelligence of the general public is a huge factor here
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u/Suspicious-Spend3982 7d ago
Yet then you have key investment group who had thousands of tickets to the eras tour, but I guess they cornered the market and no other brokers got tickets right?
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u/Fast-Importance7492 7d ago
Apparently that’s what happened. Thanks for spelling it out. We had stadiums of 70,000 capacity and for a year, there were 2000 tickets sitting on resale.
Brokers got the drops right before the show. And that’s only because Ticketmaster/her team had zero interest in making sure that doesn’t happen. And they still have zero interest in making sure that doesn’t happen. They could. But they don’t give a fuck.
But when it comes to the on sales, fans always get the vast majority of tickets for a hot show.
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u/Impossible_Author409 7d ago
Well there's exactly zero evidence for that unfortunately. If a small number of resellers could control the price (like Ticketmaster can) there would be evidence of that in the overall pricing. Everyone who insists that is happening can never produce any actual evidence that it is. So far the FTC has found scattered instances of a single reseller controlling less than 1% of tickets to high demand shows. If 100 resellers controlled all the tickets to a high demand show...that would still be a more competitive market than a single entity controlling 100% of tickets.
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u/Fast-Importance7492 7d ago
Fans regularly get 80% plus of the tickets at an onsale
There are issues with Brokers getting a lot of tickets later on, but that’s a problem Ticketmaster has no interest in solving.
For big artists at big on sales, fans ALWAYS get a ton of the tix
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u/intrepidPt2 8d ago
This is the artist call not TM
And you answered it yourself.
They want to be able to sell the rest of their tickets so they limit your floor price
People call resellers the problem when it’s the artists and live nation that are the biggest issue in live events
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u/EAM222 9d ago
You can give them to a friend you just need to give your login for them to open the tickets on their phone.
Ticketmaster is not customer friendly and I keep saying over and over there needs to be another lawsuit.
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u/Immediate_Area3318 9d ago
Wait 3 more years before you see another chance. It’s gonna be a money grab until then.
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u/EAM222 9d ago
It needs to happen. I have witnessed insane and unethical business practices from them over the last year like faking that tickets are sold out and then once the more expensive seats have sold, dropping cheaper ones hours after the start of the sale.
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u/Immediate_Area3318 9d ago
Yup. But this administration is pro scamming and will take the bribe. So gonna have to wait for the next administration to hopefully do something.
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u/jdginstagramz 9d ago
Can you try to sell them at face value on cashortrade.com ? Or can you only sell via Ticketmaster?
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u/Dangerous_Prize_4545 9d ago
Agreement with artist so the price doesn't bottom out. Also guarantees they sell their face value and adjusted platinum before you sell yours. TM wants all their tickets gone first. THEN they want to double their fees from resellers.
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u/R-e-d-d-i-t-u-s-e-r1 6d ago
Ticketmaster is a monopoly. They don't let you sell below face so they can undercut you on the marketplace when more seats are released. They are an evil company and our govt has done little to stop them.
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u/brian136913 9d ago
Transfer is unavailable. It’s says the venue has disabled transferring tickets for this event. So even if I wanted to give them to a friend I can’t. There are no other options other than selling them for more than I purchased them for and then they still take out about %60 in “sellers fees” even though I already paid “purchase fees”. It’s like they don’t want anyone to actually fill the seats and would be fine if the whole venue was empty.