The Weird History of Concert Tickets Part 1

Let’s define a “concert ticket”...it is a contract between you, an act, a promoter, and a venue that allows you admission to specific event at a stated time and place...seems simple enough...let’s continue...

A concert ticket can cost money that goes to covering costs and making a profit for those staging the concert...or in some cases, it can be free and is used mainly for tracking attendance...

Fair enough...a concert ticket can be pre-printed on card stock...it can be printed by a machine when you buy it...it can be a bar or QR code on a piece of paper you print out at home...it may have a little hologram thingy on it or some other sort of security device...that ticket may be tied to the credit card used to buy the ticket—or it may not...and when you go through the door, a person may take your ticket, tear your ticket in half, or just scan it...

But maybe you don’t have a physical ticket at all...you have an e-ticket which has been living on your phone for months...you poke through a bunch of screens until you finally find it, holding up everyone in line and thinking to yourself you should have really called it up earlier because you couldn’t remember where you stored it and then get that scanned...

Fine...that’s a concert ticket...but who are the people behind issuing and redeeming all these tickets?...what entities get to determine how much we have to pay?...how come we have to buy so many tickets through Ticketmaster?...and what about these services charges and dynamic pricing and scalpers who somehow get their hands on tickets in second if not before tickets go on sale to the general public?

And here’s a bold statement: everything you know about concert tickets is probably wrong...

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