Low demand for Travis Scott tickets tanks resale value

Scalpers are striking out in their attempts to unload Travis Scott’s “Utopia - Circus Maximus” tour tickets via secondary markets, 404 Media’s Jason Koebler reports. For evidence, Koebler links to the StubHub page for Scott’s show at Raleigh, North Carolina’s PNC Arena next Friday (October 13), where the cheapest tickets are listed for as low as $14 as of this article’s publication, less than a quarter of their $61.50 Ticketmaster face value. The FADER has reached out to Scott’s publicist for comment.

Scanning the rest of the tour’s StubHub pages reveals that the situation improves slightly later in October, although most of those shows still have tickets available for less than half of their original price. Values predictably rise as the tour hits the major cities of the west coast in early November, fall as Scott moves inland later in the month, and rise again in December when he reaches the northeast. Resale rates are highest for Scott’s three Canadian shows — one in Vancouver and two in Toronto (the tour’s final destination) — where even the cheapest tickets are selling for roughly double face value.

According to Koebler, the buying frenzy that caused “Utopia - Circus Maximus” tickets to “sell out” almost instantly last month was spawned partly by the actions of PFS Buyers club, a credit card maxing site that’s recently pivoted from buying up rare coins from the U.S. mint to buying up tickets to buzzy concerts.

Per Koebler, their scheme operates as follows: “ticket resellers leverage the credit card point maximizing community to create a human ticket-buying botnet allowing them yet another way to bypass Ticketmaster’s ticket-buying limits and hoard tickets to resell at high prices while regular fans get left in the dust.” (The scam apparently worked better with Olivia Rodrigo tickets.)

Now, Koebler reports that PFS itself stands to lose more than $1 million on its Travis Scott bet, and that its “members,” who were told they’d be getting $25-per-ticket commissions, are being left in the lurch, with the company telling its disgruntled human botnet that it might go out of business if the “Utopia” tour continues to take what those in the scalping business call a “bloodbath.”

Ticketmaster’s lack of protection against predatory scalping — as well as its “dynamic ticketing” fees and several other controversial practices — has been a hot-button issue ever since Taylor Swift’s Eras tour broke the site last November. In the months that followed, fans sued the company on multiple occasions, and their anger caused prominent politicians, including President Biden, to take notice. The situation brought to light an ongoing Department of Justice anti-trust investigation into Ticketmaster’s 2010 merger with Live Nation.

More recently, lawmakers have introduced legislation at the state and national levels to increase transparency in the ticketing industry. In June, both Ticketmaster and SeatGeek pledged to stop including hidden fees in their pricing.