The Morality of Ticket Scalping
by Etienne Oliver
Whether it is a sticky bench at a sports game, a seat in a concrete hall to
listen to your favorite band, or a mind-blowing play at the perfect theatre, those
seats were most likely filled by ticket scalping. Ticketmaster, Stubhub,
Seatgeek, and even the shadier options of EBay or Craigslist make millions off
of ticket scalping.
To define the
process in a simple way, the venue of whichever event that is taking place,
makes tickets available on their website. Then, ticket scalpers use bots to buy
as many as they can, and then resell them at an inflated price. This process is
possible because of the free market and deregulation in the ticket market. Now
this raises the question; is ticket scalping moral?
In the debate between ticket scalping
being immoral or morally just in the economic sense, there are arguments on
both sides. On one hand, ticket scalping takes away from the producers, actors,
artist, and/or athletes participating in the event that is being sold. For an
example many will recognize, take genius hit Broadway play, Hamilton. Hamilton’s producers
make about $600,000 profit per week the show is taking place. Meanwhile, ticket
scalpers make about $1,000,000 in profit per week. Despite this aspect of
ticket scalping, the arguments for the system being moral in the amoral economy
still win out.
Ticket scalping is just a part of a
larger whole. The economy is amoral, not immoral, and ticket scalping is no
different. The market for tickets is elastic; even though Hamilton tickets are
being resold at 10x face value, the show is still booked out until this time
next year in 2017. Ticket scalping is no different than any other economic
device when it comes to morality.
The real issue though, is ticket
counterfeit. Now, while you won’t run into counterfeit tickets by buying from
trusted and licensed sites such as Ticketmaster, EBay and Craigslist are much
different. One hot summer day I was waiting in line to get into a concert, and
had a panicked moment when my ticket didn’t scan at the entrance. I had bought
it on Craigslist the day before. Now, while I wouldn’t personally buy a ticket
to Hamilton from EBay, I had decided to risk the 25 bucks to attend this
concert. The ticket ended up being real, but in a lot of cases, this doesn’t
always work out.
Ticket scalping would not be doubted so
much if more precautions and transparency were in place to help avoid
counterfeit tickets. Tennessee, which at the beginning of this year, attempted
to pass a bill making it mandatory for ticket resellers to register with the
states and legally mandated the resellers disclose the authenticity of the
tickets to the buyers. Though this has problems all in itself, such as regular
ticket holders who often resell their seats would have to jump through some unnecessary
legal hoops. While there is no perfect solution, bills and regulation such as
this one would help decrease the number of counterfeit tickets and help make
the ticket scalping process more transparent.
Ticket scalping is not immoral, but, just
like the economy at large, and amorally benefit from people’s lack of understanding.
During this past fall, I was curious about one of my favorite sport teams, and
found out that their game sold out in 10 minutes. Over 28,000 tickets were gone
before I even got on the site selling them. At first, I thought it was actual
spectators that would be showing up, but then I realized it was mostly ticket
scalpers, who with bots, could buy thousands of tickets in the same time it
took me to click on which seat I wanted. While I had no intention on attending
this game, I continued looking and found reasonably priced tickets on Stubhub
and Ticketmaster. Even though it was because of ticket scalping, I would have
been able to attend this game because of it.
Just like the stock market or interest
rates, rumors fly wild regarding ticket scalping. Headlines similar to “Scammed
by Ticket Scalpers” or “New Scalping Technology s Keeping You Out of Concerts”
show up every other day, but the real issue isn’t the scalpers scamming
spectators, it is the spectators not knowing what the system is actually doing.
If the ticket scalping market was more transparent and regulated to avoid
counterfeits, the question of whether or not it is moral, would be asked a lot
less.
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