Time is money and Swifties lost it all while waiting for tickets

What a waste! Like around a million Australians, I spent time yesterday trying to buy Taylor Swift tickets. I spent ages and got nothing. 

It’s a huge waste but it would be so, so easy to solve. Just auction those tickets off. Any business person can tell you what the correct response is when demand is higher than supply – raise prices. Making people spend time instead of money harms everyone.

When we pay for something in time, we all lose. Time is money, so they say, but if you make me pay in time to buy your goods, you can’t spend what I paid. Queueing to buy things is a huge waste. When you spend time buying things, it’s a cost to you. You lose time and nobody gets it. This is a negative sum.

But when you spend money to buy things? It’s a cost to you, you lose that money, but somebody else gets it. For society, this is zero sum. The loss to one party is a gain to the other. It’s zero sum — There’s no waste.

The right price

For a commodity like Taylor Swift tickets, the right price is hard to find. It’s rare, like a house. And like a house, the answer is to auction the tickets off: let the buyer tell you how much they are willing to pay.

Swift hasn’t been to Australia since 2017 and her next tour is not your regular Friday night gig. She’s now the biggest act in the world and will play a giant 3.5-hour set with extremely elaborate staging, at the biggest stadiums in the world. No woman has headlined the MCG since Madonna in the 1990s. But Swift will easily sell out two nights there and three in Sydney (now three and four nights as per the latest news of one show each being added to the two cities due to ‘excessive demand’).

She has set prices far higher than pop rival Ed Sheeran, for whom tickets topped out at $189. Seeing Tay Tay will cost $389 for an A-reserve ticket, or even more if you buy that ticket via a “VIP package”, costing over $1000 and including a lanyard, trinkets, and four posters. 

But even at these lofty prices, Swift fans are beating down the doors. It’s obvious supply can’t meet demand. 

To see what prices the market would actually bear, we can look at the US ticket resale site StubHub. 

As Taylor Swift rests her vocal cords ahead of this Friday’s show in Cincinnati Ohio, tickets are being advertised from $1700 to $20,000 for a front-row seat. But that’s the rust belt. Swift closes her US tour on a Friday night in Los Angeles — tickets to that show are being advertised for $1500 to $53,000. 

It’s hard to overstate how much of a pop culture sensation this woman is. People are willing to do anything to see her show — even from 150 metres away, in the top deck of the MCG, with seagulls circling and the sound echoing and swirling.

So we got the situation we saw yesterday.

Thousands of Australians who were supposed to be working instead spent half the day in Ticketek hell.

https://twitter.com/AbbirDib/status/1673966418054856706

This is what happened to me with Sydney tickets, I was only trying to buy 1 and it still didn’t work no matter what day or what tickets I put in and then it timed me out!! 😡 I never got a chance to buy Melbourne. 7+ hours wasted thanks to @Ticketek_AU

— Kim (@ChicSnowsurf) June 28, 2023

naurrrrr like it was REAL bad. all the girls at work today had their lil ticketek screen on they phones out we all waited hours and hours and I don’t know a single person that got a ticket except some friends of friends one of my friends literally cried lmfao I FEEL SICK https://t.co/mSDJR3MNk6

— ᴀʟᴇx (@movietwink) June 28, 2023

Technically it wasn’t a queue. You joined the waiting lounge and then were selected randomly to go through to purchase. Not first-in, best-dressed. Nevertheless, it involved waiting. And in fact, the random element of it meant that you had no idea how long you might be waiting, so you had to pay at least some attention, checking in on that browser tab every now and then.

Normally the way ticket markets work is that scalpers buy the tickets upfront and they apply the rigours of the market, selling them at the actual price people are willing to pay. But in Melbourne, the event has been declared protected by the Victorian government, meaning scalping is banned.

The market for Taylor Swift tickets is a rare example of the government coming in and capping prices. They don’t do it for gas and they don’t do it for housing. But they do it for pop?

I support the government intervening when it can create real benefits. But making sure ‘true’ Taylor Swift fans attend while rich people can’t doesn’t seem to have a particular social benefit. Does it?

Devil’s advocacy

The upsides of the pricing system are these

• Fairness. Not everyone has $1000 to buy a Taylor Swift ticket, but everyone has 24 hours in the day. This is an example where the government puts its fingers on the scale to stop being rich from being the only thing that matters. (Now, why they will legislate fairness for tickets but not other things is unclear!)
• Vibes at the event. If everyone present are 16-28-year-old superfans, the noise in the stadium is going to raise the roof.  Every person will sing every word, except when they are choking back sobs of joy. Whereas if half the people present are 40-50-year-olds checking their phones for text messages from the babysitter and hoping the encore doesn’t go too long, the vibe is sucked from the air.
• There’s maybe an upside for the artist too. When there’s a bunfight for your goods, people notice. It creates buzz (wait, is this article just part of that buzz!?). Everyone comes to know Swift tickets are in hot demand. That builds her brand. If they just sold the tickets smoothly and nobody complained about missing out, would awareness be so high? A sense of being at a rare event that other people missed out on will probably drive merch sales too. “I was there,” matters only if lots of other people wish they were. And merch sales are hugely profitable for artists. But why is the government using the law to help an artist create buzz?

Expensive tickets seem to be an exception to the rules that usually apply to luxury goods. If it’s a car or a first-class plane ticket, nobody complains about the company being unfair to the many many people who want the item. Everyone accepts that Lambos and seat 1A are scarce, accepts the fact rich people will be the buyers, and generally admires the company more for selling an expensive good.

But when it comes to concert tickets, prices at the scale feel like an insult. Bruce Springsteen sold 11% of tickets to his recent tour using “dynamic pricing” and fans got MAD. 

Bruce Springsteen wanted to charge me £487.50 + fees to see him at Villa Park, Birmingham, tonight under the despicable dynamic pricing system. And so, after a 39-year love affair, I walked away. You've gotta take a stand somewhere, no matter how much it hurts. pic.twitter.com/VBPexpZzNL

— Train Songs Central (@trainsongsbook) June 16, 2023

An artist risks their brand by putting prices up high, and bands that price tickets low “for the fans” are celebrated. It sort of makes sense.

True fans saw the act before they were cool. For them, the new price looks like a cynical attempt to punish them for the fact other people followed them onto the bandwagon. (A cool pricing structure might be that a ticket stub from the last show gets you a 20% discount, and buying a ticket to the 2024 tour gets you a 20% discount on the next tour!)

It’s certainly clear that the current ticket-selling system isn’t helping anyone. A competitor to Ticketek is badly needed – and Swift could afford to tour again very soon!