Today marked the final major on-sale date for the Phish summer tour until April 4. I got 2 tickets for Hartford and the show sold out in 3 minutes. Meadows holds 30,000 people. It’s getting old having to deal with the scalpers and the crappy sites of Ticketmaster and Live Nation.
Most people with whom I have been in contact had a hard time getting tickets, many getting shut out completely. I would like to see Phish step up and start working the sales a bit better. They can do like Radiohead has done and put names on the tickets. It makes for non-transferable tickets, but it prevents scalpers from buying them up. If they do this, they can have a policy where you can cancel your order. They can require everyone pick up their tickets at will call showing the card used to purchase them along with a photo ID. Any tickets that have been returned or not picked up by a certain time (say half an hour before showtime), can be sold to the general public at the door. You’re not likely going to see scalpers lining up at the door to buy tickets just to turn around and sell them.
The Phish organization, or what’s left of it, will have to do something. They came back in full force. The fans who had followed them loyally throughout their 20+ year career are being shut out of tickets or forced to buy from scalpers on Craigslist or eBay or forced to go the ticket broker route, paying well above face value.
The only way to really lower the cost is to increase supply and play stadiums. Many people don’t want to see Phish going that route. They want the smaller venues. However, tickets are going to be hard to come by for a while. I imagine we won’t see the magic wear off until Phish has been touring for a year or so. Once that time comes, we’ll see who is just in it for the experience and who is in it for the music.
I’ll be at Great Woods on June 6. I think there’s going to be some sort of Tweetup for all you people on Twitter (I’m @RunawayJimPVD if you wanna follow me). Leave a comment if you wanna meet up. I don’t know how we’ll arrange it, but it will likely be through Twitter. I’m also expecting a Tweetup at Hartford on August 14.
Update: I forgot about Shoreline going on sale today at noon local time. Good luck to everyone trying to get tickets. You’ll probably need it.
Jim, continuing our conversation on Twitter yesterday about StubHub, the fact is that the resale of tickets has been legitimized by the sellers of tickets (Ticketmaster, LiveNation, etc), state governments and the sports leagues, amongst others.
This has made it easy for casual non-fans to buy tickets only to resell for profit. On Ticketmaster, the entire upper deck at the new Yankee Stadium has been sold out for the entire 81 game season. However, those tickets are being sold on StubHub, TicketsNow and other sites. Sometimes for way above face value and other times for way below. I got tickets for a Wednesday afternoon game in late April, face value $20, for $8 a piece!
However, we are talking about Phish and the high demand there is for these shows. The Phish organization, in its statement on the Ticketmaster Red Rocks incident said, “We are focused on the ticket broker activity in our tickets and the inability of the existing ticket systems to stop this. We are actively seeking options to limit this.”
Here’s some ideas.
1. Make deals with StubHub and TicketsNow to set a maximum price that their tickets can be resold for.
2. Make deals with StubHub and TicketsNow to get access to the EXACT seat locations of Phish tickets listed on the sites. Therefore, the mail order (or online lottery) tickets can be traced to the seller, and ban them from getting future ticket requests fulfilled.
3. The Pearl Jam Ten Club method. ALL fan club tickets are will call.
4. Allow MusicToday to charge an annual fee to create a fan club. This would limit the # of people requesting tickets. I know the Dave Matthews Band Warehouse (which I have been a member of since it started in December 1998) has a very strict policy on members reselling tickets higher than face, even if its not for DMB.
5. Sell the tickets the same way that StubHub does. Start them at a high price and gradually lower the prices. This would prevent a show from selling out in 5 minutes like the current “lets put all the tickets on sale at the exact same time, tie up phone lines and make our website crash down” system is today.
Although I believe that everybody deserves a chance to see a show regardless of how much they can afford, the truth is that the relatively low prices that Phish charges for tickets has allowed non-fans to hoard tickets for resale. This has also made dedicated fans scared to the point where they buy tickets to shows they can’t go to in order to use as trade bait. If all tickets started out at $200 each or even $500 a piece, with the price gradually going down to $50 over the course of a month, they wouldn’t sell out immediately, giving fans better control over what tickets are available.
What do you think?
I bet as long as the demand is still pretty high, Phish would sell out the day tickets go on sale if they started at even $200 per ticket. I think $500 would be a bit much.
The Phish lottery should most definitely be a will call lottery. If you enter and get tickets, you need to be at the show with the credit card used to purchase the tickets. If you don’t pick the tickets up by a certain time (maybe half hour before showtime is too harsh), the tickets get sold at the door. If this is part of a fan club deal with an annual fee, so be it. I’d still prefer it to require you pick up the tickets with the credit card used to purchase them. Scalpers will join the fan club. As long as they know they can sell tickets for $300-500 without a problem, they won’t have a problem paying $50 annually to get in on the pre-sales.
Here’s the problem with Ticketmaster and Live Nation. They allow people to get hundreds of tickets as long as your cards are in different names and addresses. I’d like to see them log IP addresses and only allow one transaction per IP address per show. It’s not the perfect method, but it would help.
There will always be a secondary market, even if it’s not through organized sites like StubHub or TicketsNow. The scalpers will go underground again and sell tickets in the lots. I bought from a scalper once. My girlfriend was unexpectedly home from college and a bunch of us were going to see DMB. His tickets were $30 at the time. Guy drives by asks if we need any tickets. I get in his car (stupid on my part) and he sells me a ticket for $50. He had a whole bunch of them to sell. The benefit of underground sales like that is there’s a better chance of getting a ticket for close to face value, if not actually face value. The scalpers don’t want to see the show. They don’t want to lose money. In the lots, they can get desperate. If we can drive the secondary market back to the lots, it would help the fans.