What happened to all the Wilco Tickets?
Posted in How To buy concert tickets, Ticket Analysis on 08. Mar, 2010
There was an article published in the News & Observer of the Triangle area in North Carolina over the weekend. It is article about people complaining about not being able to purchase tickets, this time to Wilco at the Durham Performing Arts Center. The author does a pretty good job of giving an overview of the situation for the upcoming Wilco show. The biggest number left out is how many tickets are actually on the secondary market and does this show have more tickets than normal for a concert on the secondary market? The generally accepted number for tickets appearing on the secondary market is that 10%-15% of a venues capacity shows up on the secondary market. As of this writing there are 214 Wilco tickets on Stubhub. Over the past month 47 tickets have sold on Stubhub. This puts us at 271 tickets which is basically 10% and after accounting for previous sales on Stubhub, eBay, and Craigslist, we should be right at 15%.
Brent complains in the article that he tried for 30 minutes to get tickets. Why wasn’t he able to get any? Let’s look at the numbers:
- 2700 capacity
- 1050 pre sale tickets to member’s of the venue and/or the promoters mailing list
- 300 fan club tickets (Ticketmaster’s venue contracts do not allow for more than 10% of a venue’s capacity to be sold off TM site, Wilco Fan Club handled by Front Gate Ticketing)
- 250 students tickets only available at the box office
- 100 likely holds for the venue that will be sold to friends/workers/local luminaries
That leaves 1000 tickets available for the public on sale. Of that 1000 tickets 10% were bought by the “evil” resellers leaving us with 900 tickets. So let’s dig a little deeper. 900 tickets for sale and there are people trying to buy 2, 3, 4 or maybe more but let’s put the average at 3. From that we get that only 300 people were able to buy tickets for the “public” on sale. How many people do you think were trying to buy tickets?
What Could Brent have done to better his chances at acquiring tickets at “face” value?
- signed up for Wilco’s mailing list and tried to buy the fan club tickets. (Those most likely sold out in 30 seconds)
- signed up for the venues’ mailing list for a pre sale tickets password
- searched blogs, forums, twitter for the password (shameless self promotion, ask me on twitter @ticketanalyst I’ll give it to you for freeeeeee)
- paid a student to buy tickets for him (would you prefer giving a starving student $20 or the “evil” reseller $100)
What does the Ticket Analyst recommend Brent do now?
Brent needs to scour Craigslist. There are currently over 200 tickets left for a show in a smaller metropolitan area which is a sizable supply. Fan Club tickets should be arriving now that it is about 2 weeks before the show. Setup an RSS feed (if you don’t know how, it is a great help to keep tabs on Craigslist postings, so you should learn to make it work for you) for “Wilco Tickets” on the local and regional Craigslist sites. The tickets posted by brokers on StubHub and other secondary sites will show up on Craigslist with a phone number. Don’t be scared if it is a broker they will soon be happy just getting their money back, or less. Use a credit card and get the address of their business and Google them to double-check legitimacy before purchasing. If dealing with someone local meet up with them somewhere safe and vet the tickets. I predict that you should be able to buy tickets at or under face the week of the concert.
12 Responses to “What happened to all the Wilco Tickets?”
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