OFF: TicketMaster bidding

[Paul Mather]

On Fri, Sep 19, 2003 at 06:02:57PM +0100, M Holmes wrote:

=> > I don't believe there is any correlation between fan loyalty and the
=> > size of your wallet, measured in absolute terms.
=>
=> Me neither.

Great!  I'm not sure why you tried to derail this into an argument
over socialism or the Common Agricultural Policy or other
politically-charged topics.  My main disagreement with you was your
statement that the "most keen" fans will be the highest bidders, in
other words, that how high you can/will bid directly correlates to how
big a fan you are.  I don't buy that (no pun intended).

=> I do believe there's a correlation in what's bid. It's what
=> you'll give up, not what you have let afterwards.

And I believe what you give up is not easily measured by how much you
bid.  (I also believe that what you give up is a relative measurement,
not an absolute one.)

=> > then I would concede that the highest-bidding fan
=> > was indeed the keenest.  But they're not.
=>
=> Just about every economist in the world disagrees. The common reckoning
=> is that people will bid what something is worth to them.

"Worth" is a subjective term, and not easily quantified by looking at
absolute bid prices.

If I have $1 billion in assets and you have $10,000, and (even though
I've never heard of the band in question) I want the child of my
secretary to have front row seats at a hot-ticket concert, I may
readily bid $1000 to ensure that simply because $1000 may not even
register on my financial radar.  For you, though, it would probably be
a struggle to justify that amount for a single ticket.  In relative
terms, $1000 is "worth" less to me than to you.  And, of course, in
terms of who is the biggest fan in this scenario, well, the "keenest
fans are the ones with the highest bids" theory would say that would
be me.

With the Pareto distribution of incomes, as a price threshold rises
linearly, the numbers of people who can afford that price drops
exponentially.  In other words, it is harder to be a winning bidder as
prices go up, irrespective of how diehard a fan you are. ;-)

("Luckily" for us, the kinds of bands we listen to rarely sell out
shows, so being priced out of a venue entirely is unlikely to happen.
Being priced out of "the best seats" is another matter.  C'est la
vie...)

For me, Cameron Diaz or some other celeb or corporate type paying
$5000, say, to attend a small-theatre Rolling Stones show tells me
*nothing* about how big a fan he or she is of the band vs. anybody
else.  It just tells me he or she has $5000 to burn on a ticket.  (And
the fact that several celebs were reported to have stayed only long to
be caught on film by the photographers [i.e., seen to be there] makes
me suspicious that some weren't very big fans at all.:)

If you're wondering why anyone would go to a show of a band they
didn't particularly like, hey, I know plenty of people who buy those
season lawn passes to their local shed and end up going to just those
kind of shows just to use up their ticket allotment. :-)

=> > But the choice of how many gigs you can have is limited by the touring
=> > calendar, the availability of cash cow bands, and the geography of
=> > venues.
=>
=> All of which can be increased with investment of that extra money.

Unless something has changed, I don't believe you can increase the
number of days there are in a year no matter how much money you have. :-)

Cheers,

Paul.

e-mail: paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu

"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production
 deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
        --- Frank Vincent Zappa