Why You Don’t Have Tickets to See Hamilton
January 25, 2017 | By Andy Lynch
Hamilton is coming to San Francisco. Chances are, you don’t have tickets to see it.
Don’t feel bad - there are a ton of people in the same boat and a number of reasons why.
Roughly 150,000 people were reported to have waited online for the chance to buy tickets to the upcoming San Francisco run of Hamilton, the Tony award-winning musical. Judging by the angry comments regarding long waits and server crashes, almost no one was satisfied with the process.
One of the more restrained fans summed it up, “Super disappointed... I hope there is better website support for the next round.”
As anyone who has ever purchased a ticket to a major entertainment event knows, this a common experience. In January of last year, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman released a report on the state of this marketplace and the negative effects it has on consumers. What he found was an industry that lacked transparency and encouraged price-gouging at the expense of event-goers.
First, it’s estimated that over half of the available seats are taken off the market before tickets go on sale to the public. These seats are saved for insiders, performers, venue owners, and various presales. In the case of Hamilton, 90,000 people waited online for the presale, which was only available to American Express cardholders.
Second, the re-sale market for tickets is outrageous. The national re-sale market for event tickets is estimated to be over $5 billion. This marketplace exists because artists and event promoters usually charge significantly less for tickets than what people are willing to pay on the open market. This allows middlemen and brokers to purchase tickets in massive quantities and then resell them at a hefty profit. Ticketmaster has estimated that 60% of the most desirable tickets are often purchased by brokers with this intent.
Third, the robot invasion of live entertainment. The vast majority of this broker purchasing is done with the help of ticket bots, which bypass the verification steps on ticket sites and purchase as many tickets as they can. In December of 2014, 15,087 U2 tickets were reportedly purchased by two bots in just one day. It’s impossible to know how many of the 150,000 people waiting to purchase Hamilton tickets were actually bots, but it’s a safe bet that there were a large number of them. These bots also use sophisticated algorithms to circumvent the ticket limit per person, which in the case of Hamilton was limited to 6 per individual.
The most irritating part about this process is that it’s completely avoidable. Requiring ticket vendors to publicly provide information about how many tickets are actually onsale to the public would increase transparency in the marketplace. Legislation to crack down on ticket bots, though they can be difficult to keep up with, would also be a step in the right direction.
Most importantly, a shift towards non-transferable paperless tickets, which require an event-goer to show identification and provide the credit card used at purchase, would hamstring the brokers on the resale market.
But until any of these reforms come into effect, you’ll have to check Stubhub for your Hamilton tickets, where one seat for a Saturday night showing is starting at $849.
Hamilton is playing at the Orpheum Theater from March 10th - August 5th. They are currently sold out of all tickets, and probably always will be.