Thursday, December 01, 2016
New York Bars Scalpers From Using Bots To Snap Up Tickets Before Everyone Else
Consumerist: Perhaps you’ve been here before: you’re waiting patiently, albeit a bit anxiously, for the moment when you can buy tickets to a concert or sporting event online. But despite your best efforts and quick action, you find that someone has swooped in and snapped up all the tickets, leaving you to the mercies of online resellers that may jack up the cost of tickets.
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6 comments:
While I think it’s definitely a step in the right direction for there to be some tangible repercussion to using bots to scalp tickets, I’d be curious to see how effective the new policy is. It seems to me that if one were making able to control a decent portion of the market for a big name event, it might not be a huge disincentive for something to be bumped up to a misdemeanor. It also seems that whenever I go to an event, there are a million scalpers trying to flip tickets, and though I’m sure not all of them are using bots to get tickets I imagine it would be a rather laborious task to hunt down anyone of them that might have. Regardless, if New York’s new position on scalping helps me and others find reasonable prices for tickets to big shows, then I’m all for it.
One of the largest complaints about the entertainment industry as a whole (and theatre in particular) is its inaccessibility due to cost. In recent years, art based industries having been trying to cut cost and reduces prices while still maintaining decent salaries for their artists. Some of these initiatives have been successful, like the introduction of show lotteries or student ticket prices. But the issue of Bot-based scalping has really yet to be addressed. I know there was some conversation regarding the issue last year, but from what I understand, little action has been taken. I’m glad the state of New York is passing legislation regarding this issue. Criminalizing the use of bots is definitely a step in the right direction, although I fear such crimes are hard to monitor. I’ll be interested to see if this legislation actually deters the use of bots for ticket scalping, but at the very least the state of New York has made their position clear.
I’m really glad to see New York taking a stand on this. Ticket Scalping is a difficult issue for artists to take on alone because the companies behind it are quite large and have very little overhead and lots of profit to fight you in court for years, and even then your case is shaky at best. This is not to diminish the wrong that the scalpers do, it is simply very difficult for individuals to actually stop it. Hopefully this legislation will allow those artists to have a stronger legal footing when it comes to taking on these scalpers even if the state doesn’t take action on its own. I hope we can see this kind of policy spread to the rest of the world sometime soon because I think it is desperately needed at many venues.
Wow I’m really glad to hear this. Ticket bots are not just unfair, but bad for the entertainment industry. I think it’s unfortunate that they’ve been allowed to be used for this long even! Ticket bots make people less optimistic about buying tickets, and they drive up prices with no benefit to the event producer or the customer. I hope my home state and many others adopt similar legislation to prohibit the use of software bots. My mother is our family’s ticket-buying expect and often times despite her best efforts, shows or concerts get bought out before you even get a chance. Then you’re left with crappy seats, or really expensive ones you didn’t want in the first place. It is entirely a system designed to screw you over and rip you off, and I’m glad Governor Cuomo is giving an example that this is a law worth implementing. I think the fact that this law is being implemented in the home of Broadway means it could have a potentially power impact on other performance-heavy cities.
I'm going to cut to the chase: Ticket bots discourage people from buying tickets. And isn't that what the whole point of selling tickets in the first place is? The number of times I have heard that concert tickets were $25 to find out that I had to buy them on some third party website for four or five times that price is over six at this point. When this happens, people give up. If ticket prices keep climbing this high, then you're cutting out the lower class from partaking in your art. I've hovered over the purchase tickets button at 11:59pm only to have the clock turn 12:00 and everything is sold out. You're flooding a free market with bots and that's not what capitalism is. People do have to resell tickets, I'm not saying that that doesn't happen, but that's a different issue. By destroying this false market, hopefully we can diversify our audiences and get more butts in seats. And maybe finally I can get some Red Sox tickets that aren't in the bleachers in the middle of August.
I'm so happy the New York is doing their best to fight ticket bots, and I think it's something that should extend to a national level. There's a reason that shows like Hamilton have ticket prices nearing a thousand dollars, and it's mostly due to the fact that the people who actually want to see it don't buy those tickets. This problem extends beyond theatre and into the world of concerts as well. When a ticket bot snaps up all of these tickets when they're first released it makes it impossible for some people to see shows that would actually really appreciate being there. One person's greed can cut off access to shows to thousands of people who now have no way to pay this increased price. It's both wrong and unfair that people use these bots, and I hope that his law is able to hold a lot of weight and take the perpetrators down.
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