Don’t Get Scalped: the Real Truth About Ticket Brokers
Ticket brokers are legitimate businesses that purchase tickets to events from licensed vendors and then resell them to people, usually end users/event attendees. Often, a profit is made because the brokers purchase the tickets early, and then wait for demand (and therefore feasible asking prices) to rise. Once the licensed/official sellers run out of tickets and the event is declared sold out, brokers can ask for even higher prices. Of course, things do not always work out this well for brokers. It may happen that demand for an event crashes, and brokers may be left with tickets that can only be sold at rock-bottom prices.
Ticket brokers are often lumped together with scalpers in the popular imagination. Of course, many brokers would prefer that this association did not exist. Fortunately for them, there are ways to distinguish between scalpers (or touts, in British English) and more legitimate resellers. Scalpers tend to operate as individuals or small groups, and tend to sell their wares in the street without paying attention to any rules or restrictions. Brokers, on the other hand, are legitimate companies that have to follow national and state laws in order to be considered as such.
Many ticket brokers are taking advantage of the Internet in order to procure and sell tickets. Sometimes, they even try to use automated programs (essentially ticket-buying bots) that find lucrative events being advertised online, and then purchase tickets before or at the same time as fans do. These same fans will then have to buy tickets from brokers at much higher prices. Many official box office operators do not mind brokers buying tickets from them in bulk early in the game. Some even set up special presales to attract brokers. However, using bots is considered rather dishonest. Therefore, many box offices use anti-bot measures on their sites. For example, any purchaser will have to prove his/her humanity by getting past a Captcha or ReCAPTCHA setup in order to buy tickets. Basically, Captcha displays an image which contains visually warped or skewed letters or numbers. A purchaser will have to type the symbols in the image in order. Usually, a program will have trouble figuring out the image, but a real person will not. Captcha technology is used on many different kinds of websites in order to weed out bots. Also, lawsuits filed against brokers that use bots may discourage more companies from using “non-human” means to procure their wares from box office sites.
These days, many box offices or official licensed sellers are trying to get a piece of the market that brokers do. For example, a box office may sell tickets at auction instead of a flat price, in order to take advantage of rising demand. In order to prevent resale, the tickets themselves may be modified so as to connect them with the original buyers.
Though brokers are an established (and sometimes welcomed) part of the ticket market, their place remains ambiguous. Crafty brokers will have to keep abreast of all developments in order to retain—and hopefully increase—their market share.