{"id":345,"date":"2009-06-21T19:25:08","date_gmt":"2009-06-22T00:25:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/craig.dubculture.co.nz\/blog\/?p=345"},"modified":"2009-06-21T19:25:08","modified_gmt":"2009-06-22T00:25:08","slug":"scalping-pt-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/craig.dubculture.co.nz\/blog\/2009\/06\/21\/scalping-pt-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Scalping pt. 2"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_346\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/craig.dubculture.co.nz\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/021009_greenday21stcentury.jpg\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-346\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-346\" title=\"Green Day, 21st Century Breakdown\" src=\"http:\/\/craig.dubculture.co.nz\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/021009_greenday21stcentury.jpg\" alt=\"Old men make amusing post-punk rockers.\" width=\"300\" height=\"252\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-346\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Old men make amusing post-punk rockers.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>I see Green Day are touring NZ.  The last time they were there was on the American Idiot tour, and it was a fantastic show.  Go if you can, I am going to the Hamilton, ON show in three weeks.<\/p>\n<p>The band and their Aus\/NZ promoter (Frontier Touring Company) have announced <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nzherald.co.nz\/entertainment\/news\/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&amp;objectid=10579997\">anti scalping measures<\/a>. This is <a href=\"http:\/\/craig.dubculture.co.nz\/blog\/2008\/04\/05\/ticket-economics\/\">a topic of personal interest<\/a>, so I'll mention them here:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>you only get a receipt when you buy a ticket, and you don't get the ticket until 30 days before the date (so you can't sell on Trade Me, which requires you have ticket in hand to sell)<\/li>\n<li>300 GA tickets, a maximum of 2 per person, are available from the box office of the venue, in this case Vector Arena in Auckland, the day tickets go on sale.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Lets look at the second measure first.\u00a0 With a total capacity <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vectorarena.co.nz\/index.cfm\/PageID\/47\/ViewPage\/Concerts\">in the 12,000 range<\/a>, Vector probably has a GA limit of at least 3,000.\u00a0\u00a0 Therefore, this would imply that 10% of the audience - those lucky 150 people who work in downtown Auckland and can justify queuing for the morning - will get tickets through.<\/p>\n<p>Or, professional scalpers will pay a homeless guy $10 to queue and then take their place at 7.59am.<\/p>\n<p>90% of the GA tickets, and presumably the total 11,700 other tickets, will go on the 'tubenet like always before.\u00a0 Which leads back into the first measure.\u00a0 Even if you're only sent a receipt, without Trade Me taking an active part, there will be auctions that read \"$300 pen with free Green Day ticket receipt\".\u00a0 New Zealand is both blessed and cursed to only really have one public marketplace, and it's one that has expressed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stuff.co.nz\/sport\/27114\">no interest<\/a> in not taking its cut of the auction proceeds in the past.<\/p>\n<p>Compare and contrast with what we have here: all GA tickets and the best seated tickets are pick-up on the night only, with the purchasing credit card.\u00a0 If this were matched with a facility where you can return unwanted tickets to the retailer for a fair refund (minus handling perhaps), and have them invalidated, and made available to the pool again - yes, this means checking back later could actually have good reason! - I consider this the perfect solution.\u00a0 Sure, there will be people who try and sell the invalidated tickets, but a number-checking web site could clear that up quickly.<\/p>\n<p>Now, on-street scalping will never stop, but it's probably not a bad thing that it exists.\u00a0 Fern and I went to see The Police on the strength of people standing outside who wanted to sell their tickets at face value (albeit a young couple, not the regular toothless hobo scalpers at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto). I even sold a ticket for R.E.M. in London to a scalper when we didn't have a fourth person who wanted to go.<\/p>\n<p>A couple of weeks ago, tickets for Game 5 of the Stanley Cup, the NHL ice-hockey finals, were going on the street in host city Detroit for 1\/3 face value, owing perhaps to the fantastic economic climate in host city Detroit.\u00a0 Some friends of mine made the 3 hour drive down for Game 7, the final in the best-of-7, but by that point the scalpers had figured out which way up to hold their calculators and were charging between $500 and $2100.\u00a0 The game was instead watched from the Windsor Casino.\u00a0 You have to be prepared to walk away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I see Green Day are touring NZ. The last time they were there was on the American Idiot tour, and it was a fantastic show. Go if you can, I am going to the Hamilton, ON show in three weeks. The band and their Aus\/NZ promoter (Frontier Touring Company) have announced anti scalping measures. This [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[67],"tags":[38,74,73],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/craig.dubculture.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/craig.dubculture.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/craig.dubculture.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/craig.dubculture.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/craig.dubculture.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=345"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/craig.dubculture.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":349,"href":"http:\/\/craig.dubculture.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions\/349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/craig.dubculture.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/craig.dubculture.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/craig.dubculture.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}