If you want to ask what is the hottest in 2023, it is undoubtedly concerts, music festivals and various Livehouse scenes. Along with this, the difficulty of ticket grabbing has also become a hot topic that has been mentioned frequently. Many spectators who are waiting for the day are still unable to escape the fate of "selling out when the ticket is opened" after reading countless strategies and making all the preparations, and the difficulty of grabbing concert tickets far exceeds the train tickets for the Spring Festival, which makes everyone think: What kind of people won this hand-speed war?
No one can answer this question for sure, but almost everyone will point to scalpers to blame and profiteers. For example, on the eve of the Mayday Bird's Nest concert, fans first launched a boycott of scalpers, and then suspected of being reported by scalpers, resulting in the cancellation of fan group tickets, and the war between the two sides finally burned on "Huale Extraordinary" - as the organizer, the Beijing Dongcheng District Cultural and Tourism Bureau interviewed them and asked them to pay attention to the scalping of scalpers.
Officials have been paying attention to the scalping phenomenon. On September 13, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the Ministry of Public Security jointly issued the Notice on Further Strengthening the Standardized Management of Large-scale Commercial Performance Activities and Promoting the Healthy and Orderly Development of the Performance Market (hereinafter referred to as the "Notice"). Among them, it is particularly noteworthy that large-scale commercial performance events with more than 5,000 people are clearly required to implement a real-name ticket purchase and real-name admission system, and a refund mechanism should be established, and the proportion of tickets sold to the public has also been increased to no less than 85%, and the remaining 15% of tickets should be bound to personal information 24 hours before the performance.
The scene of Jay Chou's concert in Tianjin filmed on September 8, 2023. Photo/Visual China
An industry insider told China Newsweek that the "strong real name" and "85%" provisions in the notice will curb the re-buying and scalping of some performance tickets, but it is not enough to eradicate the existence of scalpers, and at the same time, it is necessary to accelerate the implementation of a relaxed and perfect ticket refund mechanism in order to better protect the economic rights and interests of ordinary consumers and combat scalpers more thoroughly.
Where do scalpers' tickets come from
Traditionally, scalpers are people who constantly ask potential spectators "Do you want tickets" from the sidelines. But in fact, this is only the outermost scalper, they are just the end of the buying and selling chain, and there are many middle and upstream links together to form this gray industrial chain. Industry insider Ah Yu told China Newsweek that in addition to collecting tickets from individual sellers and taking tickets from public ticketing channels, some scalpers' ticket sources actually come from the organizers.
Large-scale performances usually need to invest in artist remuneration, production costs, publicity costs, implementation costs and other high costs, and the box office has a certain degree of contingency, only relying on normal ticket sales can not completely guarantee profits, the organizer will often in addition to the public sale, part of the ticket premium to scalpers.
It's a way to reduce risk and a means to expand profits. The scalper itself also has multiple layers of grading, the organizer will sell the ticket to the first level scalper, the first level scalper is then distributed to the second level scalper, the second level is then distributed to the third level, and there will be a series of small scalpers under the third level agent, and the ticket price will increase with each distribution, which leaves considerable room for price speculation. Therefore, even in the case of "demand exceeding supply" this year, the organizer will still leave tickets for scalpers, not only to drive interests, but also to maintain relationships, because maybe the next time you have to sell more tickets through them.
At the same time, in addition to ordinary tickets, the organizer will generally prepare some tickets as "invitation letters". Some of these tickets will be given away as gifts to strengthen the relationship between the parties, and some will also go to scalpers, although it will not be too large, but the final price is much higher than ordinary tickets.
Both ordinary tickets and invitations are directly accessible to ordinary consumers, and the "no less than 85% of the number of public sales" required in the Notice is intended to limit this operation. As early as July 2017, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism made a similar stipulation that the number of tickets sold to the public should not be less than 70% of the approved number of spectators, and in April this year, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism issued the Notice on Further Strengthening the Management of the Performance Market and Regulating the Order of the Performance Market.
However, in the specific operation, due to the lack of interoperability of the online ticketing system, the supervision is very difficult, and in fact, there are still loopholes that can be exploited. The real-name ticket purchase and admission system in the latest "Notice" and the two provisions of the remaining 15% of tickets to bind personal information 24 hours before the performance are "plugged" measures in this regard.
Around 2017, mainstream ticketing platforms such as Damai.com required users to bind ID card information when registering, but in essence, this is not a real name system. Because the paper ticket will not display the information of the ticket buyer, the admission identity does not need to be consistent with the ticket purchase identity, and it does not prevent resale. Even if the purchase port limits the number of purchases, scalpers can realize ticket hoarding through "technical plug-in + human sea tactics".
Some "scalpers" have developed software specifically for ticket grabbing, which can grab tickets as soon as ticket sales open, find buyers, and then modify information through the transfer function of the formal ticketing platform to complete premium sales. The success probability of machine brushing is not as good as that of manual, and the platform will also carry out some technical identification and interception, so scalpers will also hire a large team to attack the ticketing system, and many such recruitment accounts can be found on many social media platforms.
In view of this, after 2020, some concerts have gradually begun to implement "strong real name", requiring admission to have an ID card consistent with ticket purchase information, and some must also swipe their faces for verification. This move has increased the difficulty of reselling and to a certain extent dealt a blow to scalpers' hoarding of tickets. The confirmation of the Notice in the form of policies will undoubtedly accelerate the widespread implementation of "strong real names" and further reduce the trading space in the secondary market.
Dealing with chaos cannot be a sore foot
However, "strong real names" is not a perfect solution. Just after the release of the "Notice", second-hand platforms and social platforms are still full of scalper information, and in the strong real-name siege, they have found a new way to fight - robbery.
The so-called robbery is to collect a deposit in advance, get the buyer's account number and identity information, and then the professional team will help purchase tickets. Usually a team has thousands of sought-after players, and whoever finally grabs the ticket will fall into whose pocket. The success rate of the robbery often depends on the level of the deposit, the higher the deposit, the more sought-after people are willing to take orders, and the greater the chance of grabbing. After the deal is concluded, if someone pays a higher deposit, the ticket may also be sold directly by the order grabber to the more expensive customer.
The lax implementation of the ticket inspection link also weakens the existence of strong real names. A concert not long ago, originally a strong real name, but later many netizens broke the news that you can enter if you have a ticket, and there are not only relevant signs on the scene that "forgot to bring your ID card to enter the process", but also audiences with mismatched faces can also take the artificial gate.
As for the tickets that the organizers intend to leave for scalpers and the invitations that are "not for sale", there is still more room for manoeuvre. Therefore, in the view of Ah Yu, an insider in the industry, "'strong real name' can eliminate scattered scalpers without special channels, and 'internal scalpers' that have interests with the organizer and even the venue cannot be completely eliminated." Even if scalpers have ways to bypass obstacles, ordinary consumers may be mistakenly injured by the "side effects" of these obstacles.
For proxy auctions, the ticketing platform will screen for abnormal orders, and orders that exceed the limit for the same ID and orders that exceed the limit through the same or fictitious payment account number, delivery address, recipient, and phone number may be canceled. The problem is that this move ultimately restricts only consumers, and because scalpers only use consumers' personal information to operate on their behalf, they are basically shadow-like existences, and invisible scalpers will not be punished.
Not only that, because it cannot be returned and transferred, the audience who really cannot attend temporarily due to personal reasons has to bear additional losses, so such as Liang Jingru and Liu Ruoying's Shanghai concert and Ren Xianqi's Xi'an concert have triggered consumer rights protection incidents. Although some performances are refundable, there are still many unreasonable time limits or handling fees.
"The freedom of refund is to transfer the risk of ticket from the hands of the ticket buyer to the side of the organizer," Ah Yu told China Newsweek, adding that the current concert's unlenient refund policy is actually protecting the interests of the organizer and ignoring the rights and interests of ticket buyers. Tian Jingquan, CEO of the well-known performance organizer Jingqi Extraordinary Film and Television Company, told the media that he did not agree with the establishment of a universal refund mechanism: "Taking extreme cases as an example, the performance time is set after 30 days, and the ticket is only sold for 20% 10 days after the ticket, and the estimated loss may cancel the performance." But if the ticket refund is allowed, 60% of the ticket is sold in 10 days, but the refund is 20% in the last 10 days, at this time all the rehearsals of the artist have been carried out, this performance or not?" For large-scale concerts, which have a high upfront investment, if the loose and universal refund policy is opened, the organizer will feel pressure due to the increased uncertainty.
Ah Yu believes that the implementation of strong real names must be accompanied by the implementation of relaxed refund rights, which is also a fundamental means to compress the profit space of low income and high sales: "The relaxed refund policy means that performance tickets are no longer a shortage of 'only less, not more', and audiences who do not buy tickets at their favorite price in the first time can check and buy tickets on the official website at any time, rather than only through scalpers and second-hand markets." At the same time, viewers who have purchased tickets will not have to dispose of their tickets to scalpers because they cannot drop tickets or face discount pressure. Similarly, today's train tickets can basically eliminate the phenomenon of scalpers, and they are also complemented by strong real names and relatively relaxed refund policies. “
In fact, thinking about refund mechanisms may reveal something key to governing the ticketing market. To completely solve the chaos, we cannot simply rely on curbing scalpers, or only set norms at the consumer terminal, but must circle the entire industrial chain within a normal business framework. Just like the previous concert of singer Wu Qingfeng, the artist team drew up a contract in advance that the performance tickets were not allowed to flow out, cutting off the possibility of reselling from the source, fans could buy the original price tickets, and the organizer did not lose money, and the scalper had no other way but to stay outside the venue and try to squat to collect tickets.