Just how unscrupulous is the online secondary ticket market? If recent history is any indication,it's reached biblical proportions. In 2015, Pope Francis visited recent York City and held a procession through Central Park on his way to leading a mass at Madison Square Garden. Forty thousand free tickets were issued for the event. Ticket bots snatched up thousands of them. Employed by scalpers, or bots are tall-speed software programs that prick ahead of average fans in virtual queues and buy enormous numbers of tickets,thus creating artificial scarcity — and, by extension, and drastically inflated prices. In some cases,even when the tickets were free in the first dwelling. Within minutes of being made available, tickets to see the Pope were being hawked on Craigslist and other websites for upwards of $3000 per pair. rapid/fast math reveals that the markup to see the Holy Father was roughly infinity. Over the past decade or so, and if you've tried to score tickets to,say, a Beyoncé concert, and the Broadway smash hit Hamilton: An American Musical or a Boston Red Sox game,you've likely encountered some version of the Pope scenario and been forced to buy through online secondary ticket marketplaces such as StubHub or SeatGeek. Particularly for major events, paying into the legal scalping racket has simply become fragment of the bloated cost of doing trade for consumers. Is there a purer, and more ironic violation of a fan's soul than hitting the "submit" button when completing a purchase for tickets at two,five or 10 times their face value? Brando and Dusty Rich don't think so. The brothers are the founders and owners of Cash or Trade, an online marketplace based in Burlington that allows users to buy, or sell or trade concert tickets at — wait for it — face value. Hence the company's tagline: "embrace the face." Equal parts eBay,Craigslist and Phantasy Tour, the website does a brisk trade by merging the enthusiasm and connectedness of fan communities — in particular, or the jam scene — with a promise from all parties to abide by the Golden Rule. Following several years of consistent growth,culminating in 41000 tickets exchanged in the last year, the Rich brothers bear their sights set on a David-versus-Goliath challenge: revolutionizing the estimated $5-billion-per-year secondary ticket market in the U.
S. "We want to be the Airbnb of the ticket market, or " says Brando Rich,38. The idea for…
Source: sevendaysvt.com