WHAT YOU CAN DO to FIGHT the SCALPERS

[Say No To Scalping]

As you have all probably noticed, Professional Scalpers have bought up nearly 2/3 of all tickets to this year's festival. Her are just some of the professional scalpers:

STUBHUB.com (owned by eBay)

The following are all "powered" by Ticket Network Direct, so quite possibly owned by one parent company:
TICKETGUMBO.com
TICKETRAZE.com
TICKETSFINEST.com
FRONTPAGETICKETS.com
AZHOTSEAT.com

And I believe that a separate company owns the following ticket brokers:
TICKETTURBO.com
FINDTICKETSFAST.com
AMERICANHOTTICKETS.com
MIGHTYFINETICKETS.com

They are certainly in cahoots because they are all selling Coachella Festival passes for the exact same prices. Unfortunately, scalping is legal in California to a certain degree, which is why Coachella will probably not be selling tickets over the internet next year.

There's likely nothing we can do about this years scalping, but if enough people voice their concerns to the right people, it's possible we can prevent this from happening next year and the year after that...

What you can do is send a complaint to the new California Attorney General Kamala Harris.

Go to the link below and file a complaint with the Attorney General's office about each company listed above... it only takes about ten minutes to submit one for each. Here is the AG's site:

http://ag.ca.gov/contact/complaint_form.php?cmplt=CL

After you have filed a complaint, make sure you 'bump' this Thread with something like "I complained to the Attorney General" so that we can keep this message at the top of the Topic Page.

If enough of us voice our complaints, we will be heard. Perhaps we will be able to take the Festival back from the Ticket Brokers listed above next year.

Good luck Coachellians!

[Hannahrain]

As you have all probably noticed, Professional Scalpers have bought up nearly 2/3 of all tickets to this year's festival.

I would like to see a source for this, please.

[Say No To Scalping]

I have filed a complaint about ALL of the bastards listed above!

[Hannahrain]

I'm asking you respectfully to please back up your claims.

[jonniebgood]

I think this is a great initiative.

I just checked some of the webpages you listed.
Stubhub.com has 684 Coachella tickets available. http://www.stubhub.com/coachella-mus...-2011-1043595/
Ticketgumbo.com and ticketraze.com are the same page. They have 106 Coachella tickets on this page http://ticketgumbo.com/ResultsTicket...l+-+3+Day+Pass & http://ticketraze.com/ResultsTicket....l+-+3+Day+Pass
I won't keep going, but there are thousands of tickets that are bought by professional scalpers, but I don't think 2/3 were. Although, I don't know many people who were willing or able to buy their tickets 4 months in advance.
I'd love to get the actual number of scalpers if you can source that though.

[EightiesRule]

As you have all probably noticed, Professional Scalpers have bought up nearly 2/3 of all tickets to this year's festival.

Lets see, there are 684 tickets listed on Stubhub for Coachella. If Coachella sold 50k in event tickets and 8k in camping tickets, that is under 2% of the tickets are available for sale.

Katy Perry has over 1000 tickets for sale for a show Nokia which holds only 7k.

I don't think scalpers bought many tickets.

[jonniebgood]

Just looked into this a little more and I don't think professional scalpers bought the majority, I think people just purchased extra tickets if they had the money.
Last year, after the whole camping ordeal, I can see how people just fronted the extra cash to make some extra cash.
Last year camping sold out so quick, but 50% of the people around me didn't even buy them off the Coachella webpage. They bought them from a scalper.
If scalpers learned anything from last year, it's to buy 3 day tickets and camping tickets and scalp them.
How many people fit into Coachella camping? Now go look at all these sites and count the number of camping passes... not to mention craigslist and the $500 price tag to sleep in tent. It's ridiculous... but you can pay for your coachella ticket if you buy 2 camping passes and sell one.
Anyway, I don't think the pro's own this game... I think a couple thousand people bought some extra tickets to sell, a couple thousand bought them for friends that can't go and a couple thousand are pro scalpers... but about 30,000 people just love Coachella!!!!

[monkey]

I can totally see how this racket, what with literally hundreds of tickets being sold on stubhub and all, is completely ruining the integrity of the festival. Its a damn shame but at least we now have this super effective, perhaps too effective, plan to right things.

[jonniebgood]

This is what's mainly referred to as "mainstream" in my opinion. But how can it not be? The festival is brilliant!!!
When I think of mainstream, I just think of more scalpers, more people in the tent area stealing, more people selling bunk shit... basically more people there to make a profit... including goldenvoice.
I'd love to find out how many people on this board are selling an additional ticket or two at a high price, or making a profit somewhere down the line just to cover the expenses of this expensive festival.
No offense to anyone who's reading this and thinking I'm talking about them... if you don't make a profit and are there for the music like the majority, let's meet up and burn one, drink one and watch some concerts; but if you are...
I'm not gonna pay $500 for camping, $700 for a 3 day pass, $200 for a shuttle, $600 for your room at a motel 6, $2500 for your fuckin house, or even two dollars for one of your beers.

[Say No To Scalping]

Well, you asked for it... sorry for the detailed, and long explanation...the attempt is to convince my fellow music lovers of the wrong-doing and to leave this thread for you guys...my peers. It's all up to you now, Coachella lovers! We can win this fight and take back our music in 2011.... and POSSIBLY this year!! LOUD VOICES ARE REQUIRED to right ANY wrong (thanks for the initiative and assistance JonnieBGood, maybe we can share a drink in April!)

Proof of exploitation:

Any of us can do a simple search on Craigslist Los Angeles with "Coachella" to see -- beginning on January 20th (which is ONE DAY BEFORE TICKETS EVEN WENT ON SALE) that these websites were already advertising tickets. Secondly, most of these sites were selling tickets for the EXACT SAME PRICE... oddly enough, at the nice round figure of $809 (they are now down to the mid-$600's, which is a good sign that us fans are RESISTING).... You have to admit that $809 is an ODD price for any honest, registered, 'scalping members' of these website to ALL agree on?...yet they ALL listed this price. This should be enough explanation of the highly-visible shenanigans, but I'll continue....

The other point... amount of tickets sold:

If you do a little more research, you'll find that Mr. Tollett sold 75,000 tickets last year. THIS YEAR, Mr. Tollett was in an interview in which he discussed the numbers. He stated that he sold 75,000 tickets last year, AND they added a stage next to Sahara tent along with 10 more acres (8 football fields), which could easily handle an extra 10,000 - 15,000 minimum .... JUST speculating.
The only bad news he reported was... he said that he planned to sell LESS tickets this year. This is understandable because if you were standing in line last year at the Gate that ran out of bracelets on Friday like myself... you know how crazy things were with the new 3-day bracelet, especially for the THOUSANDS (again, like myself) WITHOUT a ticket. They may sell more tickets still for this year -- with the extra acreage and having already addressed last year's problem of having too many ticket-less people on the premises. If you don't have a bracelet, they're not even allowing you within one mile of the parking area, so I've heard.

A google search will show you that -- last year -- thru the first weekend, only 11,000 tickets were sold. This year thru the first weekend: 51,000... WOW!

.. Think about that...That's not a minor nuance in ticket sales.... that's a HUGE discrepancy... SOMETHING FISHY WENT ON IN THOSE 5 DAYS.

These Ticket Brokers probably heard about 2010's craziness at Coachella and realized that people WILL (as they were on last year's Friday) pay an arm & a leg to get in the door.

In referencing the numbers from last year, not many more than 11,000 tickets should have been sold when the tickets were shockingly announced as 'sold out' on Wednesday. It was reported they had sold 51,000 by Monday. I'm hoping they haven't sold all 75,000 for my friends' sakes. If so, scalpers / Ticket Brokers could have bought well over 50,000 of the total. Regular festival partakers wouldn't be buying near that amount on their own.. definitely no more than 30,000...but even that's being way generous. Most of us tend to wait a few weeks.

If you look at the quite long list of Ticket Brokers/scalpers above, you can see what would happen if just ONE of those companies hired a handful of workers EACH to crash the website and buy up the tickets....until they were all gone. StubHub or one of the others probably decided to finally exploit the best music festival in America.. and the others heard about it so it became an all-out race between the Brokers. If you buy 1,000 tickets and mark them up ridiculously, it will easily earn your company over a half-million dollars.

(I wouldn't be surprised AT ALL if eBay happened to be the parent company of ALL of these crooks.)

Hopefully they didn't sell them all: In a week or two, Mr. Tollett maybe will announce that a remaining 25,000+ tickets will resume sales.... but we'll HAVE to buy them in person at TicketMaster locations.... this may keep the majority of the rest out of the Brokers hands... thus salvaging this year's Coachella for several more thousand of us.

So girls... don't go giving up your bodies to get in... AND guys... don't go paying $2,000 for two tickets just to get some ass.... Cross our fingers that thousands more tickets will resume sales again.

Good luck Coachellians!

P.S. Mr. Tollett: please invite "Bear Hands" or "Daft Punk" to fill the vacancy vacated by "Kings of Leon".

[GuyInTucson]

The whole point of selling less tickets was to make it less crowded. They aren't releasing extra tickets and if more become available, it will be because of people defaulting on their layaway payments and their orders being cancelled.

[GuyInTucson]

Oh and it sold out fast because it has grown by a significant margin over the past 2-3 years. It's natural. I know a ton of friends that intended on going this year. Some got their tickets early, some did not. Had you been reading this board in the past couple of months, the idea was that it was going to sell out fast. Perhaps we didn't realize it would sell out THAT fast but it was obvious - at least to me - that Coachella was selling out regardless. It has become a brand name that sells itself.

[gaypalmsprings]

[insbordnat]

FURTHERMORE, a google search will show you that -- last year -- after ONLY 5 days, only 11,000 tickets were sold. This year after five days: 51,000!!! WOW!!

.... Think about that! That's not a minor nuance in ticket sales.... that's a HUGE discrepancy... SOMETHING FISHY WENT ON IN THOSE 5 DAYS.

Let me guess. You also believe 9/11 was created by the government and that there is no evidence of missing planes.

....Here's the key point: It only took ONE money-loving entrepreneur to hear about 2010's craziness to realize that people WILL (as they were on last year's Friday) pay an arm & a leg to be a part of the festivities.)

The preceding should convince you that there were about 40,000 tickets purchased out of the norm in only one week. Regular festival partakers COULD NOT account for this huge of a gap... maybe 2,000 to 5,000, but that's being generous.

If you look at the quite long list above, you can see what would happen if just ONE of those companies hired 5 workers EACH to crash the website and buy up the tickets non-stop....until the tickets were gone. StubHub didn't realize that others were like-minded. Ticket National Direct didn't realize that StubHub caught wind. And the other hundreds of websites were also possibly thinking they were the only geniuses that would be able to easily make a cool $250,000 with the purchase of about 1,000 tickets.

You make a lot of assumptions. How do you know regular festival partakers could not account for ticket sales? That's just your perception but there is no evidence behind it. Further, I don't really recall the 2010 "craziness". Ticket scalping can be a risky business, especially if it doesn't sell out. While a scalper is likely to recover face value, given operating costs/payroll/overhead, if you don't turn a profit you've incurred a loss. Therefore, they'd want a guarantee it'd sell out, otherwise they could lose substantially. I think there are scalpers who caught wind it was selling out and made a move. But again, I don't know how you can assume this was primarily due to scalpers activities. You'll have to provide better proof.

(Another side note: I wouldn't be AT ALL surprised if eBay was the parent company of ALL of these bastards....wouldn't surprise me one bit)

I would. A public company such as eBay is not going to get caught up in petty shadyness such as this. You do realize that engaging in this type of business to make a measly profit would be corporate suicide, right? A company bringing in revenues of $8 billion+, bottom line profit of $1.8 billion, and approximate value of $40 billion wouldn't mess around with scalping/ticket brokerage, given the risk/reward.

StubHub (owned by eBay) provides a place for others to do it, but they aren't going to mess around in the purchases/resales of tickets themselves. If you think otherwise, then you really don't understand much about business.

Here's the Hope: In a week or two, Mr. Tollett is going to announce that the remaining 25,000+ tickets will resume sales.... but we'll HAVE to buy them in person at TicketMaster locations.... this may keep the majority of the rest out of the said Bastards hands... thus salvaging this year's Coachella for us true regulars. === I hope everyone doesn't realize this opportunity, but I am confident that my buddies will be able to get theirs in that 25,000-ticket time period.


So girls... don't go giving up your bodies to get in... AND guys... don't go paying $2,000 for two tickets just to get some ass.... TICKETS WILL GO ON SALE AGAIN... just be ready!!

You are totally delusional.

P.S. Mr. Tollett: please invite "Bear Hands" or "Daft Punk" to fill the vacancy vacated by "Kings of Leon".

Now I know you need medication.

[guedita]

Oh, I see. You didn't get a ticket, and now you've done "research" to validate your disappointment.

[BCSBuzz]

Lets see, there are 684 tickets listed on Stubhub for Coachella. If Coachella sold 50k in event tickets and 8k in camping tickets, that is under 2% of the tickets are available for sale.

Katy Perry has over 1000 tickets for sale for a show Nokia which holds only 7k.

I don't think scalpers bought many tickets.

THIS.

OP you obviously have no clue what you're talking about. Looking at secondary market tickets vs total tickets sold and it's far below the average for damn near any other broker held show. Trust me, people, including brokers did not expect this to sell out so fast. There have been a few who have posted on here who were expecting to buy later and couldn't.

What you're seeing is a combination of several factors:

1) Prices hit a point at which, for the original buyer, $$ > going to Coachella.
2) Some broker sales.
3) Some short sellers who are going to cover their short at a later date for what (they hope) will be a lower price.
4) Coachella concertgoers are typically college age kids give or take a few years. They don't traditionally have a lot of disposable income and have seen, I'm sure, that in years past they could make a bit of extra cash to supplement their own tickets, buy beer/bud/whatever, or pay for parking, lodging, etc.

IMO and that of most brokers I've spoken to, the majority of tickets on the secondary market now are fan sales and speculative shorting.

Also, the reason all the ticket sellers you mention have the same tickets for the same price is because they're all pulling from a centralized database of tickets, most of which are not even owned by the site you visited. You're dramatically inflating the number of tickets you perceive as being "bought up by scalpers" because you fail to understand how a system like TicketNetwork works. And the point about "crashing" the Ticketmaster website is laughable. You had five days to buy. Nothing was "crashed" and your conspiracy theory about hiring a bunch of ethugs to buy up tickets is laughable, since a one handed monkey could have bought a thousand tickets in the span of a week.

[guedita]

Has anyone informed the OP of "Layaway?"

[PlayaDelWes]

MORON

Well, you asked for it... sorry for the detailed, and long explanation...the attempt is to convince my fellow music lovers of the wrong-doing and to leave this thread for you guys...my peers. It's all up to you now, Coachella lovers! We can win this fight and take back our music in 2011.... and POSSIBLY this year!! LOUD VOICES ARE REQUIRED to right ANY wrong (thanks for the initiative and assistance JonnieBGood, maybe we can share a drink in April!)

Proof of exploitation:

Any of us can do a simple search on Craigslist Los Angeles with "Coachella" to see -- beginning on January 20th (which is ONE DAY BEFORE TICKETS EVEN WENT ON SALE) that these websites were already advertising tickets. Secondly, most of these sites were selling tickets for the EXACT SAME PRICE... oddly enough, at the nice round figure of $809 (they are now down to the mid-$600's, which is a good sign that us fans are RESISTING).... You have to admit that $809 is an ODD price for any honest, registered, 'scalping members' of these website to ALL agree on?...yet they ALL listed this price. This should be enough explanation of the highly-visible shenanigans, but I'll continue....

The other point... amount of tickets sold:

If you do a little more research, you'll find that Mr. Tollett sold 75,000 tickets last year. THIS YEAR, Mr. Tollett was in an interview in which he discussed the numbers. He stated that he sold 75,000 tickets last year, AND he added a stage next to Sahara, which could easily handle an extra 5,000 - 10,000 minimum .... JUST speculating.
Anyway, the ONLY bad news he reported was... he said that he planned to sell LESS this year. This is understandable because if you were standing in line last year on Friday like me... you know how crazy things were with the new 3-day bracelet, especially for the THOUSANDS (again, like myself) WITHOUT a ticket. He actually addressed this problem already though. We've read that we can't even get within a mile of the parking area without our tickets! So, basically, that problem is solved! (great news, right?)

FURTHERMORE, a google search will show you that -- last year -- after ONLY 5 days, only 11,000 tickets were sold. This year after five days: 51,000!!! WOW!!

.... Think about that! That's not a minor nuance in ticket sales.... that's a HUGE discrepancy... SOMETHING FISHY WENT ON IN THOSE 5 DAYS.

....Here's the key point: It only took ONE money-loving entrepreneur to hear about 2010's craziness to realize that people WILL (as they were on last year's Friday) pay an arm & a leg to be a part of the festivities.)

The preceding should convince you that there were about 40,000 tickets purchased out of the norm in only one week. Regular festival partakers COULD NOT account for this huge of a gap... maybe 2,000 to 5,000, but that's being generous.

If you look at the quite long list above, you can see what would happen if just ONE of those companies hired 5 workers EACH to crash the website and buy up the tickets non-stop....until the tickets were gone. StubHub didn't realize that others were like-minded. Ticket National Direct didn't realize that StubHub caught wind. And the other hundreds of websites were also possibly thinking they were the only geniuses that would be able to easily make a cool $250,000 with the purchase of about 1,000 tickets.

(Another side note: I wouldn't be AT ALL surprised if eBay was the parent company of ALL of these bastards....wouldn't surprise me one bit)

Here's the Hope: In a week or two, Mr. Tollett is going to announce that the remaining 25,000+ tickets will resume sales.... but we'll HAVE to buy them in person at TicketMaster locations.... this may keep the majority of the rest out of the said Bastards hands... thus salvaging this year's Coachella for us true regulars. === I hope everyone doesn't realize this opportunity, but I am confident that my buddies will be able to get theirs in that 25,000-ticket time period.

So girls... don't go giving up your bodies to get in... AND guys... don't go paying $2,000 for two tickets just to get some ass.... TICKETS WILL GO ON SALE AGAIN... just be ready!!

Good luck Coachellians!

P.S. Mr. Tollett: please invite "Bear Hands" or "Daft Punk" to fill the vacancy vacated by "Kings of Leon".

MORON

[bottomfeeder]

Regular festival partakers COULD NOT account for this huge of a gap...

Your "argument" is unconvincing. What makes no sense is that you admit you were there last year to witness the clusterfuck of a sold-out festival first hand, and yet that didn't tell you (as it did everyone else who jumped in on layaway or the moment tickets went on sale) to get in on it right away.

Me and my friends, all Coachella vets, knew based on last year's experience that the possibility of a quick sell-out this year was not only possible, but imminent. We knew if we wanted to get in, we needed to get in ASAP and not wait like we used to do back in the day. This is a different Coachella. Glastonbury sells out in a matter of hours. You had five days to buy tickets and for whatever reason you didn't react. You ASSumed you had plenty more time.

Next time if you want in, you need to get in QUICK and not screw around about it. This is an important lesson I'm afraid you and many others are missing, instead redirecting all your frustration at ticket scalpers.

If this is indeed an "artificial" sell-out as you claim (it's not), the scalpers will get theirs in the end when ticket prices plummet and they are left with tens of thousands of unsold passes (2/3 x 51,000 = 34,000). If that were the case then you shouldn't worry, because that would result in 3-day passes being practically given away by April. The market is self-regulating in that way.

But that isn't going to happen. There are a few thousand tickets being sold by scalpers and entreprenuerial festival goers, no doubt. That would be the case with any high profile event. But this is a LEGITIMATE sell-out. The demand for tickets exceeds the number of tickets sold. I believe ticket prices in the secondary market will level off to around $500 at some point between now and April. You should just be patient and jump in when it does.

And next year, if you plan to go, BE PREPARED. You fucked up. Deal with it.

[fetuspiniata]

What most people aren't even considering is that while scalpers may be total scumbags who make large profit margins for little to no real work. THEY DO PROVIDE A SERVICE! They allow the 15,000(total guesstimate :P) of you who slept on buying tickets to buy the remaining 5,000(again, total guesstimate :P) in a secondary market.

I bought my pass the day they sold out and at that point GV had raised the price $50 and I was more than glad to jump on it at that point. Last year after it had already sold out I got my ticket through WET and just skipped out on them and payed the $400. If I hadn't got my ticket this year I would have been smart and just waited this shit storm out. Because, if all of the crazy #s of scalped passes being thrown around is true than prices will eventually drop as the festival nears.

Good luck, hope to c u at the fest... if you're not there, enjoy the webcast!

[fetuspiniata]

Your "argument" is unconvincing. What makes no sense is that you admit you were there last year to witness the clusterfuck of a sold-out festival first hand, and yet that didn't tell you (as it did everyone else who jumped in on layaway or the moment tickets went on sale) to get in on it right away.

Me and my friends, all Coachella vets, knew based on last year's experience that the possibility of a quick sell-out this year was not only possible, but imminent. We knew if we wanted to get in, we needed to get in ASAP and not wait like we used to do back in the day. This is a different Coachella. Glastonbury sells out in a matter of hours. You had five days to buy tickets and for whatever reason you didn't react. You ASSumed you had plenty more time.

Next time if you want in, you need to get in QUICK and not screw around about it. This is an important lesson I'm afraid you and many others are missing, instead redirecting all your frustration at ticket scalpers.

If this is indeed an "artificial" sell-out as you claim (it's not), the scalpers will get theirs in the end when ticket prices plummet and they are left with tens of thousands of unsold passes (2/3 x 51,000 = 34,000). If that were the case then you shouldn't worry, because that would result in 3-day passes being practically given away by April. The market is self-regulating in that way.

But that isn't going to happen. There are a few thousand tickets being sold by scalpers and entreprenuerial festival goers, no doubt. That would be the case with any high profile event. But this is a LEGITIMATE sell-out. The demand for tickets exceeds the number of tickets sold. I believe ticket prices in the secondary market will level off to around $500 at some point between now and April. You should just be patient and jump in when it does.

And next year, if you plan to go, BE PREPARED. You fucked up. Deal with it.

and what he said!

[socalguy100]

Coachella didn't have a history of selling out until last year. When tickets sold out last year, I think a lot of people decided to buy early this year. I know that was my thinking. They sold 70,000 tickets or so over 5 days this year. Next year, don't be surprised if they sell that many in the first three days because all the people who didn't get tickets this year will be jumping the gun to buy tickets when they go on sale.

[insbordnat]

Coachella didn't have a history of selling out until last year. When tickets sold out last year, I think a lot of people decided to buy early this year. I know that was my thinking. They sold 70,000 tickets or so over 5 days this year. Next year, don't be surprised if they sell that many in the first three days because all the people who didn't get tickets this year will be jumping the gun to buy tickets when they go on sale.

Try the first 12 hours.

[pewpew87]

yea ill be buying my ticket and an extra 2-3 to sell next year

[guedita]

Coachella didn't have a history of selling out until last year.

False. 2007. Stop.

[furnace]

Also, Sunday 2006 sold out.

[socalguy100]

False. 2007. Stop.

I said Coachella didn't have a "history" of selling out.

I didn't say it had never sold out.

[socalguy100]

Try the first 12 hours.

Wouldn't surprise me.

[guedita]

Oh, I'm sorry. I misread the term "history," then. I thought it was a word you could use to indicate something that had happened in the past.

[Radiohead]

[QUOTE=Say No To Scalping;2012702]

The preceding should convince you that there were about 40,000 tickets purchased out of the norm in only one week. Regular festival partakers COULD NOT account for this huge of a gap... maybe 2,000 to 5,000, but that's being generous.[QUOTE]

This is a major presumption, and it's not really supported at all. We have no idea how many tickets were purchased on lay away, but it seems fair to think that it was quite a few (so we really don't know how many tickets were actually sold during that one week). Plus, the festival's notoriety became huge after it sold out in 2010, so it makes sense that there was just a much larger demand this year and people rushed to get tickets.

Also, how does complainging to the Attorney General do any good when these businesses are operating legally?