Scott Stinson: Ticketmaster is awful — but you can't set a cap on luxury prices
Populist blather about event prices ignores the reality — people are going to find ways to sell things for a profit.
By: Scott Stinson
The Great Baseball Ticket Crisis of 2025 is, mercifully, over, because the World Series is a time-limited event.
And thank heavens for that, because who knows what nonsense Ontario’s politicians might have spouted if it had gone on much longer.
In response to reports that Blue Jays tickets to World Series games at the Rogers Centre were being listed for several thousands of dollars apiece, members of all three parties at Queen’s Park expressed dismay at the notion that fans might be forced to pay inflated prices for a good that was in extremely high demand and also quite scarce.
Premier Doug Ford accused ticket resellers of “gouging the people,” and said the PCs were considering legislation that would put a cap on legal resale prices. (His party repealed such a cap in 2019.) Ford also heaped particular scorn on Ticketmaster, the appointed gatekeeper for Jays ducats. When “one player” controls the market, he said, “that’s not right for the people.”
The NDP and Liberals each seized on the issue by demanding action at the legislature. The former wants ticket resales to have no price increase at all, the latter is OK with a 50 per cent increase on the face value of a ticket. The NDP said Ontarians “shouldn’t have to go into debt to support their favourite team,” and the Liberals said “families shouldn’t have to choose between groceries” and a baseball game.
This is not unlike saying that families shouldn’t have to choose between an Xbox Series X and groceries. Yes they should! Expensive video-game consoles are a luxury purchase, much like tickets to a once-in-three-decades sporting event.
Look, it is understandably frustrating to the average consumer when tickets to a big game or concert are wildly expensive on the secondary market. But that’s the world in which we live now. There are theories for this: Smartphones have made it frictionless for buyers to instantly commit several hundreds of dollars to tickets, much in the same way that they make it easy to waste spend $15 on a home-delivered order of fries. And for the generation of people that isn’t bothering to save for a home because the prices are out of reach, there is more money available for discretionary spending. There is also FOMO. And YOLO. All of the acronyms.
Trying to cap resale prices through legal markets will only force those big-dollar sales into illegal channels, where the potential for fraud and scams is much greater.
The impact will also be negligible. In the United Kingdom, where they take their soccer very seriously, ticket resales are entirely forbidden. The secondary market sites that are ubiquitous here do not operate there. Has that solved the issue of ticket scalping? It has not. You can buy soccer tickets, as I did for a trip to England last year, from a resale site that is based somewhere else, like Ireland or Spain. All of the inflated secondary-market prices, none of the U.K. regulation (or tax revenue.)
Lest anyone think that this is a defence of Ticketmaster, reader, I assure you it is not. Ticketmaster sucks.
Anyone who uses it for just about any transaction comes away longing for the more pleasant customer-service experience of seeking an airline refund or trying to cancel a subscription service that you haven’t used once in eight months.
One of my kids was recently quite excited to buy tickets for an upcoming concert tour, and she enlisted her parents to each sign up for the presale window. As good parents in the year of our Lord 2025, we did so. The anointed morning rolled around, I logged into my Ticketmaster account — we all did with separate accounts — and waited politely in the virtual queue. We were all at a point in the line that seemed assured of securing tickets in a 19,000-seat venue.
And then it was my turn to buy, and it showed plenty of seats available. Success! I selected some, and clicked the purchase button. The wheel spun, and it said those tickets were no longer available. I tried different seats that it showed as unsold. Sorry, no longer available. Over and over, the same fruitless task: tickets that appear available are, in fact, already sold. I don’t know if it was bots or sophisticated resellers or some other way of manipulating the system, but it was literally impossible to buy tickets at face value anywhere in the arena.
The next morning, the general sale opened. Our expectations were low, and, lo, they were met. The whole seating chart either showed resale tickets or various corporate-sponsor things that were only available to buyers with the correct code.
Has anyone in the executive ranks at Ticketmaster ever tried to use Ticketmaster? I can only imagine not, unless they actually want their value proposition to be, “We will make it so frustrating that you will reflexively wince every time someone speaks our company’s name.”
So no, this is not a defence of Ticketmaster. It’s just a reflection of this reality: the government is never going to be able to stop people in possession of valuable tickets from selling them at a price that the market will bear, and it certainly should not decree that tickets to a high-demand event must be “affordable.”
But if Ticketmaster doesn’t do something to ensure that the act of buying tickets is not some sort of Sisyphean quest, it is going to continue to make itself an easy target. It drives people mad. And if there is one thing we know about Doug Ford, it’s that he does not like it when the people are angry.
Scott Stinson writes from suburban Toronto.
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Its not 100% about the sky high prices. Its the tactic TM has used to make more money off of every ticket they sell. Allowing scalpers to use bots to buy up tickets, or even outright working with scalpers to get them tickets, with the expectation that the scalpers resell the tickets on ticketmasters resale platform meaning TM gets the original fee from selling the tickets, then a fee from both the seller AND the buyer upon the resale. Its a pretty crooked way of doing business
I agree the market should set the price for scarce goods; however, it would be helpful to everyone if Ticketmaster had reputable, independent competition, wasn't able to directly sell in bulk to "affiliated" resellers and the use of automated purchasers (bots) was not allowed.
Perhaps if the entertainment and sports businesses were to support another option the market might create a credible, non-affiliated, alternative?
If regulators want to create or refine the oversight of the system's operations, and somehow encourage credible competition those might be good places for histrionic politicians, in all provinces, to spend their efforts. Bitching for sound bites and clicks isn't helpful and they should be working on more important things.
And yes Scott, Ticketmaster's system, both on phone and desktop, seems to want to make even everyday, lower demand purchases as difficult as possible for everyone. After dealing with them for over 13 years I still would often wish I could only have the pain and frustration of a root canal on the wrong tooth rather than have to deal with them. Whenever the venue offers the choice I will try to use their box office rather than TM.
Thanks Scott!