So StubHub and Ticketmaster are going at it again. Or more accurately, StubHub is whining like a little kid and crying to their mommy for help. Here’s the link… http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-02/stubhub-vs-ticketmaster-can-a-scalper-be-a-fan-s-best-friend-
See, this is all about access to tickets…. StubHub wants folks to be able to do whatever they want with their tickets: the ability to resell them, etc. Their latest tiff is about limits that Ticketmaster is enforcing with one of the NBA teams about resales.
I’m not going to go into all the details, you can read the article linked above for that, but Ticketmaster isn’t doing anything that hasn’t been done for decades. Not to mention that it’s a business decision by the clients (e.g. the teams) not Ticketmaster. Sending tickets out at the last minute so they can’t be resold our counterfeited is a legitimate thing to do and solves a number of issues. Feel free to contact me and I can explain more….
But to back it up… sending tickets out last minute has been done for just about every major event for decades: World Cup, Olympics, etc.! A clause on the back of season tickets has said that they can’t be re-sold, again for decades, and if I wasn’t traveling, I’d scan an old Lakers ticket and show you.
So StubHub is just crying because they can’t make money off the sweat of someone else’s brow. And the clients don’t want them to do that, so they have a contract with Ticketmaster for resale, where they get a cut of the vig. Makes sense to me.
StubHub, if you want to play in the ticketing business, do the hard work and develop a primary ticketing service and stop whining! As the joke goes, “wanna impress me Stevie Wonder, drive!”
Oh, and my last thoughts on this… I was involved in the last anti-trust case against Ticketmaster in the 90’s. That was defeated, hands down, and this one will be to. StubHub doesn’t have a case because Ticketmaster isn’t doing anything that their clients aren’t asking them to provide a service for. No one is holding a gun to their heads, and StubHub can’t provide the services that they require, so they are getting it where they can, from their primary ticketing provider! Period.