r/Music • u/longlivelivia • 4d ago

discussion what is the point of having a coded presale if everyone can sign up?

basically just the title. For Sabrina Carpenter, like 90% of the venue tickets were sold at the presale. What is even the point of having a presale and an onsale??? Why make it something you can just sign up for with no prior requirement??? IIRC for taylor’s lover tour before it got cancelled you could sign up and they only accepted a limited amount of people, not EVERYONE. that is how it SHOULD be.

17 Upvotes

65% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

76

u/Gnarlroot 4d ago

Hype and the illusion of exclusivity. It's just psychological reinforcement to buy the tickets because you're special and normies won't be able to.

5

u/Californiadude86 4d ago

I better get them now!!!

3

u/starkiller_bass 4d ago

Holy shit I’m SPECIAL??!!!

27

u/mtskin 4d ago

to get your info to market to you directly

9

u/Dangerous_Prize_4545 4d ago

And to see if they should drop a second show date in the mix or add additional locations. 

8

u/AllHailTheHypnoTurd 4d ago

I mean I didn’t know she was even touring, so it’s probably a “if you’re a fan, you’ll know the code and will be able to buy tickets before the rest of the rest of the people who don’t care as much get a chance”

21

u/probabyl 4d ago

I know it's controversial, but I liked the way Taylor's Reputation tour was handled, where you earned points for buying the album, watching her videos on Youtube, buying merch, etc in order to get better chances of presale tickets. I appreciated that there were free options like interacting with her content online, so it wasn't just a "whoever buys the most junk with my name on it wins" situation, locking out fans with limited funds. I also understand this could be considered gatekeeping and isn't a realistic model for most artists, but it is a way to mitigate all of the tickets being scooped up by bots in seconds.

8

u/longlivelivia 4d ago

i guess it could be considered gatekeeping, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing imo. i agree with you that i like this way too! i think a presale SHOULD try to be exclusive for fans so gatekeeping is okay to me in that context.

4

u/UrbanPanic 4d ago

I imagine it makes it more difficult for scalpers to score large numbers of tickets.  Not impossible, just more difficult.

1

u/maccagerl 4d ago

The secondary ticket agencies ( stubhub etc) have contracts with Ticketmaster for a certain # of tickets to resell. If they don’t sell them by a certain time they are returned back to TM.

3

u/UpvoteForPancakes 4d ago

To get that sweet, sweet data

3

u/djfishfingers 4d ago

Engagement, FOMO, the feeling of exclusivity, gauges interest in how much to sell the unreleased tickets for...it's all predatory.

5

u/[deleted] 4d ago

Because you think these kind of pre-sales actually mean anything.

And you also think that all artists have the same kind of ability to babysit stuff like this. They don’t care, that’s not even their responsibility.

1

u/HortonFLK 4d ago

Because a dollar today is better than a dollar tomorrow.