Ticketmaster recruits pros for secret scalper program
So, my problems with this article, as someone that works in the industry:<p>1. It&#x27;s not a secret.  It&#x27;s Ticketmaster&#x27;s secondary market division, TM+.  They may not advertise where people out of the industry would see it, but that&#x27;s nothing special.  They may not want to draw attention to themselves, for reasons such as this article, where they are portrayed very unflatteringly and given little chance to provide their own context.  Tradedesk, their new POS offering, is new, and has been somewhat buggy (most might be worked out now), so they&#x27;ve targeted known brokers, but it&#x27;s a free tool, so they would probably be happy to have anyone that buys and sells more than 1-2 sets of tickets a month (there are a LOT of people that do this as a little extra income, or to pay for their concert habit).<p>2. Ticketmaster has multiple divisions.  The division responsible for proving primary market tickets and the division for running Ticketmaster&#x27;s secondary market are sometimes at cross purposes.  I can tell you from experience though, Ticketmaster does a LOT to prevent the more egregious use of bots, to the point where it can bleed over to regular fans.  Every few months there&#x27;s some new site feature that makes bots harder to utilize.  Recently it&#x27;s a new queuing system and new purchase mechanism, where you select seats off the map (which they&#x27;ve had for a long time, but not during <i>sales</i>).<p>3. Distinguishing a broker account with 100 purchases on it and a corporate account for bonus gifts or a concierge service may not be as easy as it sounds.  It&#x27;s also not that hard for a broker to just use an account for a few purchases.  If I was running a concierge service and Ticketmaster cancelled hundreds of purchases all of a sudden, I would be a bit peeved that they took my money (credit, most likely) for months and then basically killed my business because they incorrectly identified me as a broker account.  Also, artists&#x2F;venues&#x2F;promoters may not actually want to you cancel tickets and put them back on the market.  Being sold out has it&#x27;s own benefits (and nobody wants to return cash they&#x27;ve already gotten).<p>4. One of Ticketmaster&#x27;s main purposes is to offload anger about pricing from artists, promoters and venues to a separate entity.  There&#x27;s a reason why there are often over 50% additional fees per ticket (and they are higher for higher costing seats, how interesting...).  It&#x27;s because many of those are set and received by the artist, promoter and venue.  It allows for pricier tickets which is hidden up-front, and the blame goes to Ticketmaster.  Ticketmaster of course tacks on their own fees for this service.<p>5. I believe the secondary market provides a useful function (otherwise I would seek other employment).  It helps artists, promoters and venues offload risk (up-front usable money <i>now</i>, instead of little by little as the tour goes on), it helps spread tickets to those that have more money than time (people that devote time still often get tickets, brokers very rarely get everything), and it allows fans to get tickets <i>well</i> below original cost in some (fairly common) cases, such as when a tour is overbought or demand lessens as it goes on.  I could find any number of events with secondary market tickets under primary market cost at any moment.<p>In the end, it&#x27;s a market.  There are tried and true ways to alter it if that&#x27;s what you want, but for the most part, I think most people are happy with how it works, and happy being able to complain about the time is doesn&#x27;t as well.  Fix and&#x2F;or make an example of the market participants that are too greedy (such as the broker that got in trouble for buying ALL the Hamilton tickets), and it mostly functions in a way that people expect and find useful.  I&#x27;ll tell you this, getting rid of brokers (if you could) wouldn&#x27;t result in much cheaper tickets.  A lot of the money left on the table would just shift to other market participants, and I doubt it would be the fans.