Friday, September 21, 2018

Amid outcry over enabling scalpers, Ticketmaster revises its messaging

After reporters went undercover to reveal the underbelly of the ticket-reselling ecosystem, Ticketmaster was in a PR pickle.

Reporters from the Toronto Star and CBC News attended a ticket-selling conference in Las Vegas where representatives from Ticketmaster seemed ready to help would-be scalpers circumvent the company’s marketplace safeguards. The ticketing platform is a subsidiary of Live Nation and controls much of the live event ticket trade in North America.

The controversy centers around a product called TradeDesk that helps scalpers resell tickets.

NPR reported:

In footage obtained by the journalists, a man purported to be a TradeDesk sales representative told them that the scalpers he works with have "literally a couple of hundred" Ticketmaster.com accounts apiece — a violation of Ticketmaster's own terms of use — through which they can buy huge swaths of tickets for resale, and that Ticketmaster's "buyer abuse" division does not investigate at least some TradeDesk users.

During the March video presentation, the CBC reports, a Ticketmaster employee said that 100 scalpers across North America were using TradeDesk to each sell somewhere between a few thousand and several million tickets per year — "I think our biggest broker right now has probably grabbed around five million," the representative is reported to have said.

Scalpers make money by using bots to buy large numbers of tickets and then resell them at higher prices—and Ticketmaster gets a cut both times the ticket is sold.

CBC crunched the numbers for Bruno Mars concert held Saturday in Toronto. It reported:

Ticketmaster charged $350,000 in service fees for the Bruno Mars concert — and then nearly doubled that revenue with resales.

[…] For example, Ticketmaster collected $25.75 on a $209.50 ticket on the initial sale. When the owner posted it for resale for $400 on Ticketmaster, the company stood to collect an additional $76 on the same ticket.

CBC counted more than 4,500 Bruno Mars resale tickets on Ticketmaster, meaning that if Ticketmaster sells every seat in the arena for Saturday's show, it would collect an initial $350,000 in service fees, plus $308,000 in fees on scalped tickets, for a double-dipped total of $658,000.

Ticketmaster's statement to CBC News didn't address questions about its fees.

After refraining from commenting on initial reporting, Ticketmaster now denies it is working with scalpers—but acknowledges the existence of the TradeDesk product.

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Variety published its statement:

“It is categorically untrue that Ticketmaster has any program in place to enable resellers to acquire large volumes of tickets at the expense of consumers. Ticketmaster’s Seller Code of Conduct specifically prohibits resellers from purchasing tickets that exceed the posted ticket limit for an event. In addition, our policy also prohibits the creation of fictitious user accounts for the purpose of circumventing ticket limit detection in order to amass tickets.

“A recent CBC story found that an employee of Ticketmaster’s resale division acknowledged being aware of some resellers having as many as 200 TradeDesk accounts for this purpose (TradeDesk is Ticketmaster’s professional reseller product that allows resellers to validate and distribute tickets to multiple marketplaces). We do not condone the statements made by the employee as the conduct described clearly violates our terms of service.

“The company had already begun an internal review of our professional reseller accounts and employee practices to ensure that our policies are being upheld by all stakeholders. Moving forward we will be putting additional measures in place to proactively monitor for this type of inappropriate activity.”

The response is much stronger than the original statement from Ticketmaster, which implied scalping was an inescapable fact of the business.

CBC reported:

In an earlier statement to CBC, Ticketmaster did say that as long as there is an imbalance between supply and demand for live events, "there will inevitably be a secondary market."

"As the world's leading ticketing platform, representing thousands of teams, artists and venues, we believe it is our job to offer a marketplace that provides a safe and fair place for fans to shop, buy and sell tickets in both the primary and secondary markets," wrote Catherine Martin, senior vice-president of communications, based in Los Angeles.

Music industry insiders see this as a PR fiasco for Ticketmaster.

CBC reported:

CBC shared its findings with Alan Cross, a veteran music journalist and host of the radio program The Ongoing History of New Music, who suspects the ticket-buying public will be far from impressed: "This is going to be a public relations nightmare."

He said there have been "whispers of this in the ticket-selling community, but it's never been outlined quite like this before."

"It does seem a bit stinky, doesn't it?"

Ticketmaster hasn’t made it easy to learn about the TradeDesk offering.

CBC continued:

Neither TradeDesk nor the professional reseller program are mentioned anywhere on Ticketmaster's website or in its corporate reports. To access the company's TradeDesk website, a person must first send in a registration request.

Angry social media users propose finding an alternative ticket source.

Others weren’t surprised by the reporting, perhaps indicating that Ticketmaster already had a reputation problem:

Social media users clearly aren’t impressed with Ticketmaster’s statement, either:

NPR notes that the statement fails to address the main allegation of the CBC/Toronto Star report.

It wrote:

In a follow-up statement provided to NPR the morning of Sep. 20, Ticketmaster denies having a program that allows customers to buy large tranches of tickets, which was not at issue in the CBC/Star report.

What do you think of Ticketmaster’s response(s), PR Daily readers?

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