So Halsey decided to do 2 shows at Webster Hall in New York this week. Tickets went on sale last week at a stupid ass price of $17 each ($23 all in.) Let’s talk about this real fast – look I think it’s great that you want to give your fans a chance to see you for $23 a ticket. However, you’re going to need to set up some kind of mechanism where only fans can buy these tickets (and TM verified fan doesn’t really work either.) If you just let anyone buy the tickets, then you’re just asking for scalpers to flip the tickets. So of course that’s what the scalpers did.
The venue capacity is only 1,500 in NEW YORK of all places! The tickets were SUPER HARD TO BUY and it was a limit of 2. You basically had to get lucky with the queue. I put the odds at around 1% in scoring tickets. Immediately the tickets went for around $150 on Stubhub and climbed to a high of about $200. Thus, you were making around $200 for a pair net fees (a crazy 430% ROI.)
Then around Saturday/Sunday, things got weird. While prices were hovering around $120 or so, there was this MASSIVE DUMP of 8 tickets that were ‘instant tickets,’ which I heard were mobile QR codes at around $80 a ticket. That wasn’t possible to buy because a) there was a 2 ticket limit and b) the only way to “sell” the tickets were through Mobile Transfer, so who the hell were selling these tickets?
If a concert is sold out and the venue is this small, you don’t need to be an economist to know that prices should go up due to a dwindling supply. But where did all these tickets come from and why were they so much cheaper than the lowest price at the time? There’s speculation on Twitter that her manager or someone backdoor’ed these tickets to Stubhub to you know, make more money than $23 a ticket.
Then to make her fans feel better, she supposedly cancelled scalper tickets and released WILL CALL only tickets. However, she then said all the initial tickets were good, which means she didn’t cancel any scalped tickets because the fans who bought on Stubhub would have been even more pissed! So she a) held back tickets and b) must have backdoor’ed some tickets to Stubhub. I get it that people hate scalpers, but for this one, you gotta blame the artist. If she had just priced tickets at market value at say $100 to begin with, she would have had more money, less scalpers, and prob made less fans angry.
