Tuesday's post on using Craigslist to buy secondhand concert tickets drew a response from a company called FanSnap, which uses live feeds to aggregate ticket listings from online marketplaces and broker sites (such as StubHub and TicketNetwork) and eBay auctions.
FanSnap would argue Craigslist is fine for price-sensitive fans who don't need to go to a particular show and who are willing to meet and negotiate with other individuals, pay cash where necessary, and run the risk of buying a fake ticket. (Although the only time I've ever seen a fake concert ticket was in 1989 on the streets of Manhattan, when I bought a very realistic counterfeit to a Jane's Addiction show at the Ritz.)
Fans who want a slightly more convenient buying experience might go with eBay, where they can use PayPal and rely on seller ratings, while fans who absolutely need a guaranteed ticket can go with a marketplace like StubHub, which offers a toll-free customer service line, money-back guarantee, and other benefits. FanSnap operates on an affiliate-oriented revenue model, so it gets a commission from sites on which sales are made.
FanSnap shows you where tickets are located in a seating chart of the venue.
I ran a search on FanSnap for Pixies tickets, and it found more than 70 listings for the sold-out show this Friday, compared with about 30 listings on Craigslist. (The Craigslist screenshot in Tuesday's post showed only listings that had been added on that day.) Prices were similar to Craigslist--lower in a few cases--and the site has some great design touches, like a seating chart of the venue that maps tickets to particular locations. Craigslist, of course, is purposely and resolutely lo-fi. I still think there's something refreshing about dealing with a real fan, face to face, but I can see reasons why others wouldn't want to.
Correction at 8:00 a.m. PDT, Nov. 12: This post mischaracterized how FanSnap aggregates ticket listings. The site uses live feeds from its sources, which allows ticket listings to be updated immediately as prices change.
Ticket scalping has been a hot topic in the music industry for years, causing a lot of uproar and complaints among music fans.
The sad fact of the matter is that lots of parties in the music industry try to sell secondhand tickets for a markup. Ticketmaster owns a premium resale service called TicketsNow. It also owns a resale exchange, TicketExchange, which lets any individual (including scalpers) buy or sell a ticket. Even artists and managers frequently take their allotments and sell them on broker sites for a markup, as The Wall Street Journal has reported.
Worst of all is the fan club scam, where fans pay for the right to get in line for presale tickets--but joining the club doesn't necessarily get you a ticket before the scalpers have snapped them all up, as Keith Urban fans in Nashville recently discovered.
I can't get too angry, though. I haven't bought a ticket from a scalper in years, and I've never gone through a ticket broker. I get good seats well after they go on sale and can usually get into sold-out shows. And they almost never cost me more than the original retail price.
It's not magic: it's Craigslist. I wait until a few days before the show, then run a search for the band I want to see. Inevitably, I find a few people who bought a ticket then had an irresolvable conflict. These are normal people--not scalpers, just fans like you and me--and they almost always settle for what they paid, or even less. If I'm not happy with the price, I move on--there always seem to be more sellers, especially the on day of the show.
You can't get tickets to this Friday's Pixies show through the official site for the venue, STG Presents, but there are plenty of tickets at fair prices on Craigslist.
This month alone, I've scored floor seats to Steely Dan well after they were gone from Ticketmaster's site, and a pit ticket to Friday's Pixies show, which is entirely sold out. I've had such good luck that I'm considering abandoning Ticketmaster and other ticket sellers completely. The seats are better, they're the same price or cheaper, and I'm usually helping a fellow fan out of a jam.
There are ticket brokers and other professionals gumming up the ads on Craigslist, but you can scope them out pretty quickly--they often list ticket prices as $1 (because they're actually selling lots of tickets at different prices) or have some other giveaway like an overly generic headline ("Great seats") or obviously inflated prices. Regular fans tend to list the exact seat number in the ad and a price that's pretty close to what they paid.
There will always be some demand for professional ticket brokers; people who want to impress an important business client with great seats don't want to wait until the last minute and risk striking out. And for some shows, fans would rather sacrifice a body part than sell their tickets--I'm thinking of the early shows on the 2007 reunion tour by The Police, for instance. But for many shows, Craigslist is a far better deal than the professional sites. Which makes me wonder how long they'll last.
FanSnap announced Monday a $5.5 million funding round, which it aims to use on completing the build-out of its search engine.
FanSnap, which launched its ticket search engine beta in September, received funding from existing investor General Catalyst Partners, which led the round.
The FanSnap site is designed to allow users to search for tickets based on a number of criteria, from price range to number of tickets sought, as a well as an at-a-glance ticket price range based on the stadium section using a colored map.
The site gleans its data from 56 ticketing providers including StubHub, Ace Ticket, and TicketNetwork.
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