Here 'tis. Not sure I agree with the sentiment 100%, but it is certainly worth consideration in the future.
Kevin Libin: How The Tragically Hip could have foiled the scalpers—but didn’t
Is it tactless to wonder how The Tragically Hip ticketing fiasco would have played out if frontman Gord Downie had waited until after seats for the band’s upcoming tour had sold before revealing he had terminal brain cancer? The band presumably had its reasons for rolling out the tragic news the way it did, although band members and management have known about Downie’s condition for months. They pre-arranged an exclusive about the diagnosis with the CBC a day before announcing dates for the band’s Man Machine Poem tour, its last ever, and a week before releasing a small batch of tickets. Those early tickets were supposed to be available only to members of certain clubs — members of the Hip’s fan club, and American Express cardholders. Maybe the band and its managers hoped this would ensure the first tickets would go to only diehard Hip lovers and, er, business travellers. Well, they could hardly have made a bigger hash of it.
Whatever the odds were of a true-blue Hip fan getting into a show before the cancer news broke, they can only have been decimated. The Hip is a terrific and legendary Canadian band, but it’s no hit factory. Its last chart-topper was a decade ago. Tickets for the latest tour might have sold briskly even if no one knew of Downie’s illness. But once that news broke, demand went through the roof. Anyone with a touch of nostalgia for youthful days rocking out, beer in hand, to “Fifty Mission Cap” or wearing out a Hip CD on a summer roadtrip — i.e., an entire generation of Canadians — naturally felt that pang to see the band one last time, even if they’d never planned to before. Diehards were suddenly competing with a nation of lapsed but sentimental fans and, of course, the scalpers who saw them coming a mile away.
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What followed was disaster. No one knows how many tickets were made available for pre-sale, but it can’t have been a lot, and a great deal (again, no one knows the number) were snapped up by scalpers using automated ticket-buying “bots,” who immediately jacked up the price on resale sites. Fan and media outrage ensued. But while it may be indelicate to say so, had the Hip and its managers really wanted only their most devoted fans to get seats at affordable prices, it could only have been more effective to hold back revealing Downie’s situation for a week or two.
The scalpers have been taking all the blame, naturally, and politicians keep threatening to finally think of some way to stop them. But scalpers are just a symptom of a screwed-up system. We all know tickets are scarce and typically priced well below what the market will bear, leaving room for anyone who can get one to flip it for a profit. But even that simple supply-and-demand lesson masks the absurdity of the concert business, where everyone who stands between the band and the audience is in on a scheme to extract more money out of a ticket than the price printed on it.
In his edifying investigation into ticket resellers in New York earlier this year, state Attorney General Eric Shneiderman complained that while “in many areas of the economy the arrival of the Internet and online sales has yielded lower prices and greater transparency, event ticketing is the great exception.” It’s not hard to see why. While the Internet has made the dynamics of most transactions more transparent, the world of concert tickets is murkier than ever. Former Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard describes the process “like a mysteriously devastating airplane farter: tickets leak out little bits at a time, nobody can figure out where they’re coming from, and the whole thing reeks.”
Shneiderman’s investigation found that on average less than half the tickets for a concert are made available to the public. About a third go to pre-sales (fan clubs, credit card members, etc.). But a huge chunk also goes to “holds” — tickets reserved for the “artists, venues, agents, marketing departments, sponsors, promoters and executives.” No one’s saying what the breakdown was for the Man Machine Poem tour, but it’s a poorly kept secret that elsewhere in the business the managers, the venue operators, the industry insiders and even the band itself will take “hold” tickets and flip them for resale. In the worst cases, Shneiderman found just 15 per cent of tickets were made available to public buyers.
An investigation found less than half the tickets are sold to the public
In the Hip’s case, something certainly stinks. “Scalped” tickets at London, Ont.’s Budweiser Centre soared from $167 after the pre-sale but before general tickets went on sale, to $332 for nearly the identical spot afterward. At Winnipeg’s MTS Centre, a nearly identical floor seat went from $184 to $358. And at Edmonton’s Rexall Centre, a lower-level seat across from the stage went from $261 to $396. Adding supply should have brought the price down. But no one knows how much supply was actually added. Were resellers expecting more, only to find, to their delight, that supply would be even tighter than anticipated?
Hate those scalpers all you want, but the power to fix this lies entirely with the bands and their managers. When LCD Soundsystem announced its “last-ever” show in New York in 2011, ticket sites were cleaned out in seconds and scalped seats demanded thousands of dollars. Lead singer James Murphy fought back, implored fans not to pay so much, and instead added more shows and released a flood of more tickets from “holds” into the public. LCD Soundsystem has (blessedly) since regrouped and will perform again. That, sadly, appears not to be an option for the Hip. But assuming they, too, wanted to hurt resellers, who says they couldn’t add a few free, corporately sponsored concerts in city parks? The scalpers couldn’t do anything to stop them. But the promoters, agents, managers, marketers, venues and other insiders quietly milking the current system certainly might try.
