The last time Olivia toured, she did small venues and ticket resells were huge; something like $80 cost and $100-300 profit depending on city/venue. Anyway, she just put out her 2nd album and the first single seems to be doing pretty well on the radio. Now she’s doing an arena tour. You can sign up for the Ticketmaster verified fan here.
With that out of the way, a few weeks ago, PFS (yeah mint coin PFS) sent out an email that he was buying Travis Scott codes/tickets. I was taken aback when I saw that because I didn’t think the tour was going to be a slam dunk like Taylor’s tour (and I even balked initially at Taylor.) Look, I’m not trying to dunk on PFS. People can do whatever they want with their own money. I’m just saying I wouldn’t have done that. While Travis has a new album out, I was still unsure if people have gotten over what happened at Astroworld. It was a RISKY buy that you’d have to be very selective with; I would have only bought $50 cheap seats in the big cities just to be on the safe side.
I only bring up the PFS email because I saw this blog article. Now I don’t know how long Harlan has been ticket reselling but it sounds like he’s new to it, and I can’t help but wonder if he jumped on these Travis Scott tickets because of the PFS email. I was reading the blog and he lost me when he said “Kansas City.” Look, if you are new to ticket reselling or even if you don’t resell tickets, you should take a step back and think about the demographics. Does Kansas City look like they listen to rap or do they listen to Luke Combs? That was his first mistake – picking KC instead of a big urban city.
I’m not sure how much he paid for his tickets (hopefully he bought the cheaps.) The second lesson learned here is when you’ve bought a bad flip, YOU NEED TO SELL ASAP. You have a depreciating asset that will hit $0 on the date of the concert. No one is going to wait until the last minute to buy Travis Scott tickets, especially when face value tickets are available from Ticketmaster and other people are trying to dump. This is where loss aversion comes into play. If it’s too painful to lose half your money now, then you are going to lose it all in a few months. It’s just like stocks – you buy a turd like Lucid Motors like I did and instead of taking your 25% hit, you think it’ll go up and now you’re down 90%. And mentally, you’re okay with losing 90% cuz you had mentally prepared for the loss over time vs just cutting your losses at 25%.
The third lesson learned here is that Ticketmaster will eventually stop giving you Verified Fan codes. No one knows the algorithm, but if you live in WA, but you’re doing VF in NY and CA for multiple hot artists and you’re transferring the tickets, eventually TM will flag your account in the backend and you won’t ever get a VF code again (like all of my TM accounts.) While there wasn’t VF for Travis here, you need to think about this if you decide to sell codes/tickets to a buyers group in the future. You only have so many bullets before TM bans your account from winning VF. So be selective on VF.
ONCE AGAIN, I’M NOT TRYING TO DUNK ON HARLAN. I THINK THERE ARE IMPORTANT LESSONS LEARNED FROM HIS BLOG POST. And if it makes him feel better, I lost over $20K on Blackpink tickets that I went “all-in” on too. It happens when you’re learning something new. Just gotta get over that loss aversion and you’ll be good. Now will I go all in on Olivia? Yes! And I’ll even buy in Kansas City too.
You are all scumbags and absolutely should be flagged – get a real job.
okay
Another thing to look out for:
The BC i opted-in with installed broker s/w for re-selling onto my TM account.
So it’s possible my TM account has already been flagged due to this installed s/w which might adversely impact my VF. I sure hope not!
Thanks, Vinh – this has been on my mind since I did opt-in with a buying group for TScott.
It also did cross my mind that VF may flag accounts based on X-fer activity.
So far, I’ve X-ferred on 2 concerts so far: TSwift (4 tix via VF) and TScott (8 tix – no VF needed).
But now I’m thinking even though TScott was not through VF, it still may feed into the algo.
So I’ll need to be very selective moving forward.
Thanks for sharing your experience and Lessons Learned – it is very helpful!
You’ll eventually be flagged; we don’t know the exact algorithm, but you should consider making a fresh account for the inevitable block.
Thanks, Vinh – I’ve read that in P1/P2 mode, if you have someone else in the same household, you could just setup another account in their name, phone # and email. Having the same address might be a risk, though, but who knows if it will matter to the algo or not….
Thanks for keeping us in the loop on these and letting us know what to look out for as well, it’s really helpful!