So When Is The Best Time To Buy A Ticket?

Andrew

Things have changed since launching StubHubz in 2017 to track ticket prices on StubHub (secondary market ticket reseller). Life was simpler:

  1. tickets went on sale and were immediately bought by bots and listed on StubHub at extremely high resale prices
  2. prices on StubHub would be flat or slowly decrease (perhap picking up again from scarcity)
  3. before crashing the day of the event as everyone tries to offload their excess tickets before they become worthless

As a fan, you had a simple choice of buying early to guarantee entry or gamble by buying cheap tickets on the day of the event at the risk of ending up with no ticket at all. Buying on the day favours events where most of the tickets are general admission (i.e. small/medium standing-only venues where the bulk of the tickets are perfect substitutes vs. a seated arena/stadium where you want to buy early to get that perfect view) and you only want a small number of tickets (trying to buy for a group especially in seated venues will be more difficult).

TicketMaster takes on StubHub

While the above advice still holds, two changes changed the scene:

  • In 2018 TicketMaster shutdown two of its ticket resale websites sites only to roll ticket reselling directly into the TicketMaster website itself. Fans could now sell their tickets back to TicketMaster and also purchase verified secondary market tickets. This should hopefully stop careless sellers posting photos of their tickets with the barcodes onto auction sites and wondering why the eventual buyer is demanding their money back.
  • To further its own resale market, TicketMaster now delivers electronic tickets 1-2 days before the event in order to prevent scalpers immediately posting them to StubHub after purchase. I haven’t seen this practice migrate it’s way to New Zealand yet and I hope it (and adding 25% services fees) stays in the US.

These moves don’t address the problems rife within the primary and secondary ticket market, they just move the revenue from service fees from StubHub to TicketMaster.

StubHubz is retiring

Adding to StubHub’s anguish I’m retiring StubHubz because StubHub changed their APIs so you now need their “standard” API account plan (suggested for partners with up to 10,000 ticket listings and gross $10M revenue) to access the pricing information within the Market Intel API. The account plan tiers suggest there are businesses profiteering from reselling (the top enterprise plan is suggested for >100,000 ticket listings and >$100M revenue).

It’s possible in the future StubHubz will be reborn with TicketMaster support if their International Discovery API will work for New Zealand events. Fingers crossed.