Things have changed since launching StubHubz in 2017 to track ticket prices on StubHub (secondary market ticket reseller). Life was simpler:

1. tickets went on sale and were immediately bought by bots and listed on StubHub at extremely high resale prices
2. prices on StubHub would be flat or slowly decrease (perhap picking up again from scarcity)
3. before crashing the day of the event as everyone tries to offload their excess tickets before they become worthless

As a fan, you had a simple choice of buying early to guarantee entry or gamble by buying cheap tickets on the day of the event at the risk of ending up with no ticket at all. Buying on the day favours events where most of the tickets are general admission (i.e. small/medium standing-only venues where the bulk of the tickets are perfect substitutes vs. a seated arena/stadium where you want to buy early to get that perfect view) and you only want a small number of tickets (trying to buy for a group especially in seated venues will be more difficult).

TicketMaster takes on StubHub

While the above advice still holds, two changes changed the scene:

• In 2018 TicketMaster shutdown two of its ticket resale websites sites only to roll ticket reselling directly into the TicketMaster website itself. Fans could now sell their tickets back to TicketMaster and also purchase verified secondary market tickets. This should hopefully stop careless sellers posting photos of their tickets with the barcodes onto auction sites and wondering why the eventual buyer is demanding their money back.
• To further its own resale market, TicketMaster now delivers electronic tickets 1-2 days before the event in order to prevent scalpers immediately posting them to StubHub after purchase. I haven’t seen this practice migrate it’s way to New Zealand yet and I hope it (and adding 25% services fees) stays in the US.

These moves don’t address the problems rife within the primary and secondary ticket market, they just move the revenue from service fees from StubHub to TicketMaster.

StubHubz is retiring

Adding to StubHub’s anguish I’m retiring StubHubz because StubHub changed their APIs so you now need their “standard” API account plan (suggested for partners with up to 10,000 ticket listings and gross $10M revenue) to access the pricing information within the Market Intel API. The account plan tiers suggest there are businesses profiteering from reselling (the top enterprise plan is suggested for >100,000 ticket listings and >$100M revenue).

It’s possible in the future StubHubz will be reborn with TicketMaster support if their International Discovery API will work for New Zealand events. Fingers crossed.

To celebrate my first two-night run of Nine Inch Nails concerts (this is my first of any band), there are no photos from night #2 in a refreshing change to decide to just to soak it all in and enjoy it. Instead it’s time for some charts and graphs and thinking of the shows as a whole.

First of all, damn, 39 unique songs played over the two nights (predictably “Head Like A Hole” and “Hurt” were played both nights). Some set list highlights:

• witnessing the live debut of “Perfect Drug” (about time after 21 years)
• rest in peace David Bowie with an “I’m Afraid Of Americans” cover
• NIN’s cover of Joy Division’s “Dead Souls” for The Crow movie soundtrack

Crunching the numbers, hearing at least half of both The Downward Spiral and Broken over the two nights brings me industrial metal happiness.

Sadly I think we may be at peak NIN lineup of Ilan Rubin, Robin Finck, Alessandro Cortini, Atticus Ross, and Trent Reznor. If anyone leaves, there’s going to be issues. Now that catalog is even more varied with the release of the latest trilogy, a multi-instrumental lineup is required and that’s shown in how there’s at least three people who can play bass, guitar, synth/keys now. This line ups allow NIN to pull any song out from any era rather than focus on a specific album tour + greatest hits sandwich setlist.

Finally, repeating from last night, adding Atticus Ross who produced/programmed albums back in the With Teeth era is a huge bonus to serve your nihilist rage with extra crispy anxiety.

For those going to future shows on the Cold and Black and Infinite tour, you’re in for a treat.

Update: Thanks to r/nin, the graph for night two was wrong. I’ve updated with the corrected chart.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat. Why would anyone go to the effort of creating their own site and paying for it when you can use these services for free?

Your online persona is a part of your brand and an extension of yourself. You should take care of it. Your own site allows:

1. No ads – Because everyone loves ads. Please buy my merchandise when it appears! YouTube’s tightening of advertising rules shows that we’re protective of our own brands
2. Control what your content is used for – Is Snapchat secretly building a global database of everyone’s face so they can target ads at people in the real world like in Minority Report? You can read more at the Thrillist (warning the site has a lot of those ads we all love).
3. Control how it’s displayed – While I’m no web guru (“server side for life!”), the ability to pick-and-chose the way your site appears. Do you like Facebook’s cropped photo collages and truncated text content? Or Instagram not wordy enough?