Secondary Ticket Industry

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Technological advancements have significantly altered the way in which many industries operate. In particular, as technology progresses, moving society towards media-based forms of acquiring goods, the ticketing industry has undergone drastic changes. These changes provide sports fans with new options for purchasing tickets. Sports tickets have been ‘scalped’ since the mid-1800s, typically on the sidewalks surrounding stadiums. These scalpers sought to make a profit off of demanding fans that had not been able to obtain tickets prior to the event. Over the past decade, this act of ticket reselling has evolved immensely with the widespread use of the Internet. Thus, with the popularity of web services like StubHub, the secondary ticket market has become larger than ever. While many fans believe that the strong secondary ticket market serves to benefit consumers as well as the ticket industry as a whole, this is not the case. …show more content…

Often, season ticket holders are “willing to lose money on 80% of the games with low demand in hopes that [their] investment makes it to the playoffs where the real money can be made” (Lawrence, 2014). This willingness to undercut box office prices draws fans in with tickets that are significantly cheaper than those offered by the teams directly. This idea has become ingrained in society; “fans have been conditioned to not even think about checking the box office…Instead, fans have been trained to find one of the hundreds of websites out there that are doing their best to get fans the cheapest ticket possible” (Lawrence, 2014). In this way, these brokers possess exceedingly more marketing power than the primary ticketing industry due to the low prices they offer and the established assumption that these prices are the best

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