Wen 丨 Liang Jialie
After the beginning of the year, the performance market was "crazy".
Zhang Jie, Li Ronghao, Hua Chenyu, Xue Zhiqian, Lu Han, Zhang Jingxuan, Yang Qianwei, Liu Ruoying, Wang Yuan and other singers have opened concerts one after another, and the ongoing concert tours have been on Weibo hot search in turn, and new concerts are still being officially announced, so it is not lively. But under the pomp and circumstance, there are also hidden worries.
On April 21, we learned from the performance ticketing platform Damai that in February and March, Barley intercepted "scalper" machine brushes and human flesh crowdsourcing 4 million times. In the wave of retaliatory consumption after the epidemic, scalpers are gaining momentum more than ever, scalper ticket prices have doubled as the norm, sky-high tickets have reappeared, and consumers, ticketing platforms and organizers have also launched a new round of anti-scalper war.
Recovery comes with scalpers
Consumer polarization
After the beginning of the New Year, concert tickets have become the norm for seconds, and Zhang Jie's "Yao Beidou" tour Xi'an Station was sold out within a dozen seconds after the tickets were issued. The retaliatory consumption boom predicted by the market during the epidemic period has arrived as scheduled, and major singers have also seized this rare opportunity to hold concerts in groups.
It is fitting to use "crazy" to describe the performance market in the first half of the year. Before the epidemic, the ticket price after the opening of the concert usually dived, but this year, the scalper tickets can still be sold at a higher price after the opening of Liu Ruoying's concert in Wuhan, and the ticket price is also going higher and higher on the opening day of Zhang Jie's concert in Xi'an, which shows that after three years of silence, the public's high demand and enthusiasm for concerts are high.
Even scalpers have used "horror" to describe this year's performance market. Some scalpers call Zhang Jie "Jay Zhang" and Xue Zhiqian "Xue Valuable", because in previous years, these two singers' concerts, scalpers could get tickets at a discount, and this year's price increase did not necessarily mention tickets.
"After the epidemic ended, the price of each star has become the standard of Jay Chou before."
Although the ticket is more difficult to get, in this rare wave of nuggets opportunities, the presence of scalpers is stronger than ever, and the tickets for major concerts are available for seconds, but in an instant, scalper tickets are flying all over the sky. The concert scalper ticket premiums of Jay Chou, Mayday, Zhang Jie and others have reached several times.
Zhang Jie's concert originally priced at 1680 yuan of in-house tickets was speculated to more than 8,000 yuan, some even reached 10,000 yuan, in early June Shenyang Station tickets, the ticket price of 380 yuan rose to about 1,000 yuan in Xianyu, and the ticket price of 1280 yuan rose to about 2,000 yuan.
After Zhang Jingxuan's concert tickets went on sale, fans were hard to find, and scalpers claimed that they had thousands of tickets in their hands, 480 yuan, 680 yuan, and 980 yuan.
It can be said that both the offline performance market and scalpers are waiting for this year's outbreak. According to the "2022 China Performance Market Annual Report" released by the China Performance Industry Association, the overall economic scale of the performance market in 2022 will be 24.36 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 31.33% compared with 2021, of which the box office revenue of concerts and music festivals will be 1.663 billion yuan, and the number of projects will be significantly reduced compared with 2021.
The performance market has been down for three years and finally survived, but the recovery and ticket speculation have led to the trend of "whole network scalpers" and "national scalpers" in the market.
Judging from the announcement released by Xingtai Light and Shadow Culture, the organizer of the Jay Carnival concert last month, many platforms such as Ferris wheel ticketing, ticket cow network, ticket network, idle fish and Taobao have scalpers making profits through ticket scalping.
Many people who were not interested in the concert began to hoard tickets to do "financial business", on Little Red Book and Idle Fish, many people just grabbed tickets and began to scalp tickets at a premium, and some scalpers even started a ticket theft business, and many people posted their experience of being stolen tickets on the Internet.
In the soaring performance market, consumers are gradually moving to both ends, and some people choose to buy tickets from scalpers, after all, in the case of tickets in seconds, scalpers are one of the few ways for many people to get tickets. Some trade with scalpers, and there are those who are firmly against scalpers.
On the Internet, a large number of ticket requests and ticket issuance information are marked "scalpers do not disturb", and those who ask for votes often follow the sentence "only accept a slight premium".
The real-name system is difficult to solve
Why can't scalpers be eradicated?
"Scalper flood" is a well-worn topic, consumers have been suffering from scalpers for a long time, and in the past few years, some ticketing platforms, organizers, and singers have also been fighting with scalpers along the way.
At the 18th ChinaJoy in 2020, Damai's face recognition real-name system technology was applied to large-scale commercial exhibition sites, previously, Lin Junjie's concert stipulated that consumers must bring their ID cards to collect tickets on the spot, and repeatedly canceled "scalper" orders, this year, some scalpers said that Wang Yuan's concert "opened the top shield interception ticket grabbing machine". However, for rampant scalpers, these methods have not been completely eradicated.
In previous years, the market was calling for the real-name system to land, and now concerts are basically purchased for the real-name system, but scalpers are still not extinct, because there is still a difference between the "real-name system" and the "dual real-name system".
"Real-name system" generally refers to the real-name system to buy tickets, Zhang Jie, Xue Zhiqian, Jay Chou and other singers concerts are for the real-name system to buy tickets, real-name system ticket purchase can indeed effectively prevent scalpers from large-scale malicious ticket swiping, but when admission, people who buy second-hand tickets can often enter the venue with their ID cards.
The "dual real-name system" requires three certificates in one, that is, one person, one vote, one certificate, and admission through face recognition, and the concerts of singers and groups such as Wang Yuan and Times Youth Group are all "dual real-name system". The dual real-name system combines real-name ticket purchase with real-name ticket inspection, forming a relatively complete anti-scalper closed loop.
However, at present, most of the domestic concert market cannot do the "double real-name system". On the one hand, because there is no clear legislative regulation of ticket refund in the performance market, the "dual real-name system" blocks the secondary flow of tickets, but the market does not give the exit of "refund", once the ticket buyer cannot watch the performance, he can only bear the loss himself, which is unacceptable to many people; On the other hand, it is difficult to get a real-name system for the free ticket part. The free tickets are mainly reserved by the organizer to maintain the qualifications reserved for various relationships, and the organizer cannot restrict how to redistribute the people who get the free tickets.
Therefore, the performance market is still dominated by the real-name system of concert ticket purchase, and the proportion of dual real-name system (real-name system ticket purchase + real-name system admission) is not high. In the final analysis, the "dual real-name system" has not been popularized on a large scale, and the obstacle is not in technology, whether it is face brushing technology or electronic ticket production capacity, it is not difficult for the market, at best, it can only be regarded as an increase in labor costs and technical costs. The difficulty of the dual real-name system lies in the complex interest relationship of the market and the imperfection of the market mechanism.
In fact, the organizers who seem to have the most power to speak are often just hosts who contribute money and effort, and of course want to make money. However, whether this performance can be held, whether the venue is willing to rent, and whether the sponsor invests money or not, there are too many relationships that need to be opened up by the organizer. The gray areas involved in these relationships often need to be cleared through ticket giveaways. The free ticket entered the market again, and it became a scalper ticket.
The subtle relationship between many organizers, venues, second-hand tickets, and scalpers is the common understanding of the market, and the complex interest relationship between them is also determined by the actual situation of the performance market. Concert tickets are often several times premium, which seems to be promising, but in fact, most concerts are loss-making, and only a few head singers' concerts can make profits, and an industry practitioner once revealed that some concerts still have the risk of losing money even if the premium is nearly ten times.
An old story from 2019 is enough to tell. IN 2017, CONTEMPORARY ORIENTAL ADVANCED 170 MILLION YUAN TO WANG LEEHOM'S MUSIC COMPANY HONGSHENG CULTURE HOLDINGS, AND IN 2018, WANG LEEHOM'S CONCERT ONLY BROUGHT 134 MILLION YUAN IN REVENUE TO CONTEMPORARY ORIENTAL, THAT IS, CONTEMPORARY ORIENTAL INVESTED IN WANG LEEHOM'S CONCERT WITH A NET LOSS OF NEARLY 50 MILLION YUAN.
If the profitability problem of concerts cannot be solved, it is difficult for scalpers with the ability to distribute, raise prices, and transfer risks to truly disappear. Therefore, whether it is a big-selling show or a hard-to-sell show, it is difficult to avoid scalpers. Taking a step back, even if the scalper disappears, a "new scalper" will emerge.
Take the "dual real-name system" as an example, it can prevent scalpers, but it cannot prevent proxy shooting. The extreme scarcity of some concert tickets determines its price and value, and the supply and demand relationship between market supply and demand determines that it will inevitably derive secondary transactions, such as scalpers, and the same is true for proxy auctions and robberies. Of course, scalpers themselves are illegal, and there is no controversy at present.
However, the field is also chaotic today. First, many agency auctions are closely related to scalpers, and in the outside world, the success rate of proxy auctions has always been a mystery, and some practitioners said that even if the proxy auction successfully grabs tickets, it will not necessarily hand over the tickets to customers, but change hands and sell them to scalpers at a higher price.
Second, many people take pictures of themselves as scalpers. Some netizens once shared their experience: Daipai got his account password, but lost contact before the ticket was issued, and only contacted him after the tickets were sold out, saying that "because the account could not log in, the ticket grabbing failed", and then the daipai began to sell high-priced scalper tickets to himself.
Nowadays, the "technical fee" of proxy photography is also very high, and many of them are even close to or even higher than the ticket price. At present, the price of Zhang Jie's Hefei concert is basically more than 200 yuan, and the price of idol groups and singers such as Times Youth Group and Wang Yuan even reaches 1,000 yuan.
In the future, whether proxy photography will become a new scalper army is also a question that requires the industry and consumers to be vigilant.
Mirror Entertainment (ID: jingxiangyuler) original
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