The landlord had told them he wanted to raise the rent to $3,500 and when they complained he decided to raise it to $9,500.

“We know that our building is not rent controlled and this was something we were always worried about happening and there is no way we can afford $9,500 per month," Yumna Farooq said.

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    Unironically no. Or, at the very least, the organisers of the concerts themselves would have to be the badguy charging giant ticket prices themselves. LiveNation is just a professional scapegoat.

    I guess tickets going to connected people rather than rich and/or highly motivated people would be an option too, if artists could get funding other ways. Lots of societies have worked that way in the past; the Colosseum was free but you had to be invited.

    Fundamentally there’s just less seats than people who would show up if it was cheap and open to anyone. Maybe you could build a bigger venue, if geometry allows, but then somebody has to pay for that too, and we’re back to real estate.

    • fatalicus@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      They are talking about scalpers, not the company selling the tickets.

      Landlords are like scalpers: they go in and buy up the supply, so they can resell (rent out) for a higher price.

      The people originally doing the selling (artists in the case of scalpers. Developers in the case of landlords) see nothing of the increased price.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        No u? There is only so many seats in a venue, and you have to exclude someone, that’s just mathematical. If I erred somewhere else point it out.

    • uis@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      So you are saying if not fo scalpers, then organizers would charge the same? And why organizers aren’t charging same anyway?

      • Rocket@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        So you are saying if not fo scalpers, then organizers would charge the same?

        Technically they could charge more. Clearly the market is willing to pay more, else scalpers could not exist. But it would require more work by the organizer to get the tickets sold, and that extra work would not necessarily be worth the added payoff. Organizers have way better things to do than to spend their days trying to look high and low for someone wanting to buy a ticket. It is beneficial to just get tickets sold as fast as possible, even if at a discount, and move on to more useful work. Those who have nothing else going on in life can justifiably spend their time looking high and low and capture the difference for their efforts.

        And why organizers aren’t charging same anyway?

        Because there is only so much time in the day. Same reason middlemen appear in essentially every industry known to man. They let people doing important things get back to doing important things rather than waste their time dealing with people.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        As I’ve heard it explained, LiveNation gives a big commission to the organisers to resell their tickets, to the point where they’re really just taking a cut for reselling it under a different name, for marketing purposes. I guess the existence of the old-style in-person scalpers kind of undermines that, I honestly never really understood how those guys existed.

        • uis@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          In-person reselling sometimes has legit reasons like person can’t or don’t want to participate anymore. But in that case people are ready to sell under nominal price.