Street Sweeper Social Club

Musak streetsweeper, nin, nin|ja

I knew it had to work like this, but I never knew exactly how..  great read.. 

As we approach on-sale dates for the upcoming tour, I've noticed lots of you are curious / concerned / outraged at the plethora of tickets that somehow appear on all these reseller sites at inflated prices - even before the pre-sale dates. I'll do my best to explain the situation as I see it, as well as clarify my organization's stance in the matter.

NIN decides to tour this summer. We arrive at the conclusion outdoor amphitheaters are the right venue for this outing, for a variety of reasons we've throughly considered*. In the past, NIN would sell the shows in each market to local promoters, who then "buy" the show from us to sell to you. Live Nation happens to own all the amphitheaters and bought most of the local promoters - so if you want to play those venues, you're being promoted by Live Nation. Live Nation has had an exclusive deal with TicketMaster that has just expired, so Live Nation launched their own ticketing service. Most of the dates on this tour are through Live Nation, some are through TicketMaster - this is determined by the promoter (Live Nation), not us.
Now we get into the issue of secondary markets for tickets, which is the hot issue here. The ticketing marketplace for rock concerts shows a real lack of sophistication, meaning this: the true market value of some tickets for some concerts is much higher than what the act wants to be perceived as charging. For example, there are some people who would be willing to pay $1,000 and up to be in the best seats for various shows, but MOST acts in the rock / pop world don't want to come off as greedy pricks asking that much, even though the market says its value is that high. The acts know this, the venue knows this, the promoters know this, the ticketing company knows this and the scalpers really know this. So...

The venue, the promoter, the ticketing agency and often the artist camp (artist, management and agent) take tickets from the pool of available seats and feed them directly to the re-seller (which from this point on will be referred to by their true name: SCALPER). I am not saying every one of the above entities all do this, nor am I saying they do it for all shows but this is a very common practice that happens more often than not. There is money to be made and they feel they should participate in it. There are a number of scams they employ to pull this off which is beyond the scope of this note.

StubHub.com is an example of a re-seller / scalper. So is TicketsNow.com.

Here's the rub: TicketMaster has essentially been a monopoly for many years - certainly up until Live Nation's exclusive deal ran out. They could have (and can right now) stop the secondary market dead in its tracks by doing the following: limit the amount of sales per customer, print names on the tickets and require ID / ticket matches at the venue. We know this works because we do it for our pre-sales. Why don't THEY do it? It's obvious - they make a lot of money fueling the secondary market. TicketMaster even bought a re-seller site and often bounces you over to that site to buy tickets (TicketsNow.com)!

Full post:

Musak nin

Just yesterday we met up with the Harrimans for dinner at a BBQ place in the middle of Alpharetta called Smokejack (which in all seriousness has the absolute best pulled chicken BBQ sandwich I have ever had the pleasure of eating - but only on their lunch menu) so I was going to show Carr a few of the public places to park near the downtown Alpharetta area, there are a few places to park around the restaurant that are close (they also have a small child, so the closer the better) so I went on to Google Maps and made a marked up/annotated map showing the area where the parking was pretty easy.    Carr mentioned that he didn't know you could mark up maps and send it to people and I proceeded to tell him you could not only do that, but also if you want to get deeper into geo-visualizations of data you can mess around with the xml/layering in Google Earth (stand alone app) you can actually dynamically create the xml/layer files on the fly via code which creates dynamic overlays on the google earth.  I IM'd him this link, which shows Nine Inch Nails showing a visual representation of who all downloaded their album The Slip which was released a few weeks ago, and true to form Trent Reznor was cool enough to share their data (along with Top Spin, the company that handled the distribution) with the world and allow people to see it graphically on Google Earth.  This data was not only great to see just out of curiosity for me, but it also does give you a sense of how the band decides where they want to stop on their tour going on right now (Aug 13th at Gwinnett Arena for all you Atlanta peeps - see you there) and how data like this (and of course the ability to gather it in real time) effects decisions like tour stops.   Here are a few thumbs of some of the data as it is displayed in Google Earth:

  

also you can grab the KMZ file if you want to dl Google Earth (free).

Now comes the cool part that I read about this morning.  Suddenly yesterday a point showed up on the map that you are seeing above outside Burbank, the coordinates didn't say anything except 'under a rock' and that was it.  Someone then went out to this lat/long and their found a rock and low and behold picked it up and found, what else?  tickets to the NIN Los Angeles show.    From as I understand it these points are now popping up all over Cali and the treasure hunt is on.  Here is a description from an another article I read this morning:

On Monday night, I trespassed in Griffith Park, ran from men with flashlights and retrieved a valuable envelope hidden inside a drainpipe.No, I’m not a secret agent. Just a Nine Inch Nails fan.To kick off the band’s upcoming tour, they are hosting an exclusive concert in Los Angeles on July 19. Spots on the guest list go to the craziest fans, and I’m on it.The band posted a file to its website with concert tour locations a couple weeks ago that visitors could download and open in the Google Earth software. Last Friday, a mysterious place marker appeared on the map, labeled “under the rock,” that pointed to a location in Burbank. Beneath that rock was an envelope giving the lucky discoverers entree to the show.

The author of this article and his brother found another point via Google Earth and set out to it, low and behold the coords led to a drain pipe with tickets:  

(photo by Mark Millian)
 

nine inch nails, nin, fuckingawesometreasurehunts

New NiN:

I'm half way through it, I am really digging it.  I have been listening to Ghosts a lot more lately when coding and it has really really grown on me.   Interested to see where this Halo goes with me.  Like I mentioned, I like it so far.

100% Free.

Good Stuff.   Can't wait to see them live.

nin