May 1, 2024; Ticket Reselling Introduction & Q&A
Last updated
Last updated
Video link:
Introduction:
Host: Chokey, a seasoned ticket industry expert with 22 years of experience, including roles at Ticketmaster and as the Director of Ticketing for a major sports entity.
Focus: Providing foundational knowledge about ticket reselling, tools, processes, and strategies for newcomers and intermediates.
Ticket Reselling as a Career or Side Hustle:
Tickets are a unique, time-sensitive product with potential for high profitability.
Unlike physical goods, tickets expire and can't be stored for future resale.
Primary vs. Secondary Market:
Ticketmaster is the primary ticket provider, while platforms like StubHub and Vivid Seats facilitate secondary resale.
The importance of tools like Listed for cash flow: enables resellers to get paid upon delivery rather than waiting until events conclude.
Basic Ticketing Process:
Understand the timing of ticket drops (local 10:00 AM sale times).
Use tools like song stats and seating chart resources for decision-making.
Avoid skimming ticketing calls; thoroughly review details to avoid costly mistakes.
Verified Fan Program Changes:
The Verified Fan system has been phased out due to controversies and inefficiencies, particularly highlighted during the Taylor Swift tour.
Ticketmaster is expected to replace it with a similar lottery system under a different name.
Best Practices for Resellers:
Learn Ticketmaster queue mechanics and seating chart layouts.
Use tools like "A View from My Seat" for venue insights and Google Alerts for tour announcements.
Start small, scale slowly, and prioritize understanding market demand and human behavior.
Set up a dedicated Gmail for subscribing to team/artist notifications for pre-sales and alerts.
Challenges and Risks:
Beware of non-transferable tickets and delivery delays.
Avoid overcommitting financially; scale operations responsibly.
Dynamic pricing from Ticketmaster can impact expected profits.
Success Factors:
Profits typically range between 15-40%, with outliers in both directions.
Thorough research, consistent practice, and patience are keys to mastering ticket reselling.
Upcoming Focus:
Participate in the Ed Sheeran lottery via Seeded (deadline: May 2, 2024).
Public sale for Billie Eilish tickets will be another highlighted opportunity.
(00:00) cool okay so yeah we are we are good to go if you want to just give us like an intro of who you are since this is our first of course yeah of course um everyone hi thanks for uh thanks for joining thanks for spending a couple of uh a couple of minutes of your evening with me here tonight I am choky I your brand new ticket provider um I am this is my 22nd year in the ticket industry I sold my first ticket in 2001 when I was 15 years old um and I spent eight years at Ticket Master uh I spent about five years doing
(00:38) as the Director of ticketing for a major sports entity that I would rather not name and uh I have been around the block as far as all things tickets so um I am back to uh I have gone to the primary with Ticket Master and sporting teams and I am back to my roots which is um buying and reselling on the secondary uh full-time uh so I have um this is kind of how I do things on these normally um we have a small group tonight so it'll be even more important than it normally is I kind of stick to an AMA style format since this is my first call we
(01:18) will do some of the basics 101 type stuff um I'm gonna go around and just kind of get a temperature for where everyone is in tickets maybe you've never sold one before maybe you've sold a couple maybe you're a veteran who knows um and then I'll tailor the conversation um based on that um this is s this these things go really well the more questions you ask the more talking and educating I can do um I have no problem filling in the blank space uh but it is a lot better and more uh more beneficial the more questions that we
(01:54) get um if you're not in a position to actually speak or you're shy uh that's cool um just use the actual voice chat chat Channel um and we can uh filter questions through there um and then depending on how things go towards the end something that I like to do which we may or may not do tonight is actually uh go around the horn and just get like a piece of inventory that you actually own um we'll talk about how much you paid for it when you got it uh and just kind of analyze the market are you priced correctly why hasn't it sold yet um
(02:30) should you raise your price lower your price go through that and and even if you don't have uh inventory to that specific event walking you through kind of my thought process surrounding pricing and what you bought it for and all of that stuff those Concepts can be applied to just about any event um so you know I covered this a little bit in my intro but um you know I like to stress and emphasize when I'm doing these things out of the gate brand new that you know I tickets has been my full-time career um the last job I had
(03:04) that was not ticket related I was 16 years old selling CDs in a Circuit City um so it is certainly a career it can be a side hustle it can be a hobby it can be a full-blown career um and there is always money to be made in tickets uh the people that really learn the concepts and learn the nuances kind of the H the why instead of just blindly following someone's call um those are the people that will really really really Excel um and no matter what you flip before this uh Sho sneakers ps5s gpus whatever um tickets is just going
(03:44) to be more complicated because a sneaker is a sneaker A PS5 is a PS5 um when you're talking about a 50,000 uh capacity stadium each one of those 50,000 seats is a unique piece of inventory that is is um you know and resale may vary diff uh greatly from one row to the next one section to the next one seat to the next um and unlike your Retail Arbitrage or what have you sneakers you can't just throw tickets in a closet and wait for them to recover and get more valuable it is literally an expiring product so if you make a
(04:23) mistake or you do not sell your tickets um they become worthless at X o'clock so that also adds a whole layer of fun to the mix but also it really puts emphasis on how important it is to learn the pillar of the foundational concepts of what we're doing um and uh yeah so what I do want to do since we have such a small group here and not to put everyone on the spot but um I do want to just go around the room and just like tell me just kind of what if you have any experience if you're brand new I sold some Taylor Swift tickets I've done this
(05:03) off and on tell me a little bit about kind of what your your um experience level is because if everyone here is brand new then we'll stick to only new Concepts if we have a little bit more of a intermediate situation then I'll tailor it that way too um so yeah whoever wants to start a start but if you can just chime in either in the chat or um just feel free to unmute yourself I don't know if if everyone can talk maybe not we just went through that but um yeah feel free to just chime in let me know kind of where we are so yeah
(05:34) like everybody should be able to talk um just from my experience with all the members here like most of us we are we come from the Amazon space and we are expanding quite greatly into different um okay Avenues I believe most of us are relatively new with tickets we do we do have a guy in the server that is a ticket provider as well the spice but he's very super busy with his own personal business um okay so but I believe most most of us would be considered like brand new to intermediate awesome okay so yeah so
(06:03) let's start off we'll just we we'll assume that everyone is kind of brand new and and we'll go through just kind of basic concepts uh that will kind of get you get you out of the gate so first and foremost as you may have noticed just with my intro um my calls are are very very long and they're detailed um when I write a call I am trying to think of every single Nuance or every single Le um variable of an event going on sale in where you have to make decisions in real time I am trying to answer all those questions for you um so uh my
(06:43) recommendation out of the gate is even though I I know most of you are probably used to skimming calls going straight to the what to buy what not to buy I would urge you not to do that and just especially starting out take some time read my call two or three times because there is a lot information that I put in there on purpose because a lot of times I am buying tickets at the same time as you and so people want to do cart checks and stuff like that and that's just not a reasonable thing that I'm able to do
(07:13) in real time so with that in mind um you know here are kind of the the basic Foundation here is I'm gonna post a call obviously it's going to cover either a specific show or shows or it's going to cover an entire tour and some of those tours might have 30 40 50 different dates so you've essentially got 50 drop let's just say 40 drops happening over the course of four time zone hours so typically tickets go on sale at 10:00 a.m.
(07:50) local time to whatever the venue is so if you're not great with time zones you may want to get like uh you know get some get some kind of world clock on your iPhone or some kind of situation to help you with time zones because tickets are going to go on sale at 10:00 a.m. in the local time zone of where the show is taking place so if you have a whole tour you'll normally get an East Coast uh eastern time Central time Mountain time Pacific time um etc etc so the first thing that you if you're starting out brand new you've never sold a ticket before something that you want to do
(08:24) right out the gate is I would encourage you to go to the ticket calls Channel um last week late last week I posted uh a very lengthy article uh or informational post about a place called listed and that is l y s d uh listed is significant because it is going to help you get paid after you deliver tickets instead of after an event happens for example you may buy tickets for an event that takes place nine months from now if you're on listed you can you can deliver those tickets as soon as you sell them and get paid right away if you're not on
(09:05) listed you're doing it individually you will not get paid until that event happens nine months from now as you might imagine that is pretty crippling for uh cash flow purposes so if you're not signed up to listed the the most important thing of this conversation is you need to go to that post read about listed watch that YouTube playlist don't just skim it it's super important and again remember tickets can't be returned and if you make a mistake you're kind of stuck with them and mistakes are super expensive in tickets so make sure you do
(09:38) your do your your due diligence do your research um do your homework uh get familiar with listed get signed up with listed um listed is pretty much the gold standard for anyone that sells tickets on Discord um listed uh is run uh first of all they're at the Forefront of the industry they did uh $100 million plus last year um uh and and they have been around the industry for 20 plus years uh but they specifically cater to folks that do this new Discord type uh type and a Discord type audience so they what they have tailored their business to do
(10:19) is exactly what most of us most of yall need um so get familiar with listed get signed up with listed you will have to do some tax related paperwork uh there is this is not an industry you can dodge taxes no matter how hard you try every exchange every place you sell tickets is going to send you a $10.
(10:38) 99 so you will have to fill out some paperwork um and stuff like that so there is an onboarding process it takes a little bit of time to get that done maybe 48 72 hours so and it's uh listed as a free service to use uh you are charged a percentage of of a sale um and all that is broken down in that in that YouTube um explanation video but yeah it's a free service to use and they take um you know something like eight 8% 9% uh once something sells similar to like a stock ax or something like that um so with that in mind you definitely you want to
(11:14) get set up with listed so that you have a place to sell the tickets that you plan on buying uh so the general process here um you know pretty self-explanatory you're going to have a bunch of links you will in a call you will choose what shows you want to go for uh we will get to more on how to choose and and what goes into deciding uh what shows to choose and stuff a little bit later but um you'll choose your shows and then uh the waiting room for a Ticket Master event opens about 15 minutes before the event goes live now the complicated
(11:50) thing here is that waiting room opens 15 minutes ahead of time uh you need you cannot enter the waiting room without logging into your ticket master account and order to log in and join that waiting room you have to send an OTP now here's where things get interesting Ticket Master is I promise the smartest opponent you have ever gone up against in resale this is not Target or Best Buy during the pandemic where they you they would just get steamrolled with you know uh bot you know lack of Bot protection and stuff like that Ticket Master is
(12:24) incredibly incredibly smart um and they do a very good job of linking accounts so you can only join a queue uh once per account per device so you cannot just open a bunch of tabs and just uh open as many Ticket Master Windows as you want it does not work like that so eventually when you start scaling this thing obviously you only need one account to start when you start scaling you will need more accounts now all of the information on each of your accounts needs to be unique name address address credit your virtual credit card
(13:01) obviously the tricky part is going to be individual unique phone numbers um when you're first starting out I would recommend going to friends and family route on the accounts here is why uh with Ticket Master you have the option to send an OTP via email or via phone text um you the first time you do an OTP when you create an account you need to do that OTP via text message once you have been verified via text message one time then you will get the option to send it via email obviously when you send it via email it is a lot
(13:44) easier to manage than having a unique phone number right so when you're first starting out if you do want more than one account I would recommend grabbing your just you know an OTP number from friends family Etc uh that one time that will allow you to cre eight four five six accounts and then you can start playing um in the queue and kind of learning the process um The Ticket Master queue is a beast of its own there is a lot of Bro Science that floats around Discord about what the algorithm is how waiting room Q spots are
(14:18) determined and all of that stuff people are convinced they know um as someone who worked at Ticket Master for eight years in the office in the Chicago office where the ticket Master Q algorithm was developed I can confidently say that there are probably four people on planet Earth that know that algorithm and none of them are in any discords that any of us are in um so certainly bounce ideas off each other people will talk about The Ticket Master algorithm like they know but realistically nobody really knows a
(14:49) whole lot um the qpot as far as positioning goes it is claimed to be random quote unquote it is not random it is based on a bunch of factors some of which are known some of which are not but the most important thing that we know is that if Ticket Master links your accounts and recognizes that you're trying to skirt around their restrictions and their system they will essentially just put you at the back of the que line indefinitely which is why it's super important do not cross any of your streams even on two accounts make sure
(15:25) each account has a unique virtual credit card billing a draa uh a phone number most importantly Etc um so that you don't get linked because once you're linked it it kind of becomes a curse so once you get through Q you know your Q's will be anywhere from a couple hundred people to 30 40 50,000 people on a on a very very popular event um obviously part of the game is there's only so many seats available some of these shows we're going to talk about are clubs that will 15 to 2500 people sometimes it's an arena that holds 15 to
(16:03) 20,000 people like where uh you know uh NBA NHL teams play and then often we will talk about stadiums whether it is a football game or something uh you know I will use Taylor Swift as an example but uh you know uh some of these shows will take place in very large venues but regardless obviously most of the time for in demand shows there are far less seats available than people in the queue so once you get through Q then um a seing chart will open up and it is essentially a three-dimensional diagram of the venue
(16:46) with hundreds thousands or tens of thousands of dots representing each seat in the venue and those those dots are what you need to attempt to get in your cart um they will be all different prices some of them will be VIP packages some of them will be non-transferable there are so many types of seats that you could possibly face in an on sale and you won't know until you get in there um and so then your goal immediately becomes trying to cart XYZ which is why it becomes important to read and reread uh my call and and be
(17:27) very familiar with not only what you think you want to buy and what you want to spend but also the lay of the land as far as the seating chart goes um once you start doing this a long time you will start recognizing certain seating charts but every seating chart is different uh it's labeled differently um it's numbered differently and uh so which is why you know while you're in that queue don't just be twiddling your thumbs be uh have a second window open with the seating chart and what that looks like and the call R you know brief
(17:57) yourself on the call a little bit it is a very hurry up and wait type situation uh you will wait in queue for several minutes or dozens of minutes and you will just wait there and then all of a sudden you'll be off to the races and all of this happens in a split second and it is very on the fly in real time where you are making uh split-second decisions which is why it's very helpful to come in prepared um and so um you know that's the that's the long and the short of it I mean that's the that's the elevator pitch um it will
(18:36) realistically take you probably three to four months of consistently joining the Q getting through Q trying to cart stuff before you become really comfortable with the process and the best advice that I give people that are just starting out even if you do not plan to buy anything in a queue join the queue get through the Que you practice carding stuff and putting it in your cart don't check out on it but just get comfortable with the process because that process uh is not going away and you need you really need to master that process and
(19:12) feel very comfortable um in with that process in order to be successful here and there's not you know reading a guide about it listening to me talk about it uh all of that stuff is great but the best practice you can get is physically being in that queue uh playing around in those seaing charts carding looking at Price breaks where the prices differ um what the lay of the land is as far as the venue goes stuff like that that is going to be the best way that you are going to learn is just to participate um and then once you have
(19:45) bought your tickets you will then obviously be signed up for listed and one of the other great things that listed does aside from get you paid right away is listed is going to with the click of a button um first of all it has the ability to automatically connect to your ticket master account and pull in seats that you buy almost immediately so you don't have to list you don't have to to list them or buy them in manually um which opens up room for error so it'll bring your tickets in automatically you price them you
(20:19) broadcast them um and then you have you will have automatic fulfillment set up with listed where once your tickets sell listed will connect to your ticket master account and automatically transfer them to your buyer uh without you know with full automation um and then uh you know you'll check your fulfillment Tab and get paid um that sounds easy the hard part is acquiring the inventory uh the pricing and getting paid is the easy part the the the harder part is actually getting stuff to sell um so with that that's kind kind of the
(20:59) like very very uh very very brief kind of bare minimum process I want to take a break right now uh just for a couple of seconds I want to does everyone like does that make sense to anybody did I use any lingo or terminology that someone didn't understand anyone have any questions that that um that came from that um how are we feeling about that uh just as far as a process is concerned so yeah if anybody has any questions uh let chokey know uh I'll just let everybody else see if they have anything first and then if not I have a couple
(21:36) things I'd like to follow up on everybody's a little bit shy that's okay that's okay so um chokey when you me you mentioned about the listed post that you posted in the server I I don't believe you posted it in our server it may be something that you overlooked and missed uh oh oh my I'm hoping I'm making a habit out of that is that true have I not posted anything I don't think so not yet oh my gosh okay I sincerely apologize holy [ __ ] okay well um I sincerely apologize for that I will let me rephrase that I
(22:13) will post an intro tonight uh as well as a follow-up post that'll be all about listed it will have a link to that playlist that you can watch on YouTube um it'll have a link to where you can kind of learn about listed a little bit but listed is going to be your your best bet for just starting out and if you ask around Discord other discords you're in like I said it is pretty much the gold standard for people that are just starting out once you get you know once you kind of grow like to the high six figureure seven figure range some people
(22:49) grow out of out of listed and they use other Solutions but as far as a turnkey solution that makes things very easy um and you have one of the great things about listed is you have a you have listed to essentially help you navigate problems that might arise when you're just starting out some of those problems might be very overwhelming uh so listed part of that fee that you pay uh on sale is for them to essentially be your liaison uh between uh yourself and whatever exchange you're selling on and when I say exchange I am talking about a
(23:24) place like StubHub or Vivid Seats or tickp um essentially like eBay they don't hold any inventory they just facilitate transactions um so yes apologies there I will get all of the the stuff that I've been ranting about for the last 15 minutes I will get that up as soon as this call is done I would encourage everyone here to go through that um what other questions did you have that we could pivot off of uh to kind of jump to our next segment cool so I know I believe some of your posts they would probably include like your expected face
(23:59) value of the tickets and then kind of you're expecting to profit y do you have any insight on kind of where you're getting the figures on how much expected profit we're kind of expecting to see is that just like from past experience yeah it's going to be mostly from past it's gonna be almost exclusive in past experience two things that are really important to note here um is that one of the really annoying things about tickets and one of the things that to be honest makes my job unnecessarily difficult is we don't get full pricing
(24:30) ahead of time most of the time what we get is we get what the lowest price is and what the highest price is but for something like the Rolling Stones their cheapest ticket is like $50 and it goes all the way up to like $2500 so it's not really sometimes it's a lot more helpful than other times the other caveat there and one something that's really fun that we'll all learn about in real time is there is a really great thing that Ticket Master likes to do it's called Dynamic pricing and what that means if you're not familiar with
(25:02) the term it means that Ticket Master loves to raise the price of tickets in real time based on quote unquote demand much like an airline might raise the price of seats if they're the last you know couple of seats remaining stuff like that um but TI Master loves to do that so what what we know about pricing ahead of time number one it's only kind of a skeleton and number two it may not even matter because Ticket Master can change that at any time Ticket Master can move the goal post as much as they want during a live on sale which is the
(25:35) most infuriating thing that you can think of so um that's so that's thing on pricing I always include the lowest price and the highest price based on the back-end Ticket Master data um if you look at the source code of any Ticket Master event page and like search like price range or something you can always find it that's where I get it from but that is how we do pricing and as far as estimated resale that is kind of me that is um a very educated guest so to speak um I'm normally pretty on in the neighborhood but obviously there are
(26:12) things that are just unforeseen if you're talking about sports if you're buing an Argentina soccer game and Messi gets hurt the next day you know that estimated resale is going to go out the window so because this is live entertainment and not a static product like a PS5 um and a multitude of things if you're buying a baseball game you know and it's going to be raining that that day uh prices May that that will affect prices the week of because people are looking at going and they don't want to sit out in the rain so that estimated resale
(26:47) that I provide that is a very educated guest it's a crystal ball type thing um but there are a million variables that could affect that positively or negatively um which is one of the really fun things about trying to predict something like this okay cool and then with that as well because I've seen like a lot of people and like the the spice uh who is in our server he always recommends about kind of checking on Vivid Seats when you're carding tickets to see if like those are going to be viable for you to purchase yeah so I
(27:16) actually recommend uh so and sometimes it's going to be more helpful than others let me give you an example um so like a a tour um you know who went on sale this week uh Billy ish Billy ish is on sale this week she hasn't had any pre-sales yet so like what you're seeing on StubHub or Vivid Seats before those tickets go on sale is essentially going to be what's called speculative tickets which are people listing tickets trying to get a sale at a price they think they can make money they're essentially it's it's like like shorting options
(27:50) essentially um and uh so that's not going to be as helpful as like um earlier this week like um the Carolina Hurricanes the the hockey team put uh some hockey tickets on sale for their playoff games well all of the people at the at the Hurricanes who have season tickets already their tickets are already on StubHub so you have actual tickets that are forming an actual Market to actually look at um but uh you know it is always a good idea to at least have I recommend using StubHub versus Vivid Seats the reason for that
(28:26) is uh Vivid seat seats recently did this thing where they are basically dropping the customer facing price 20% uh obviously the the person who holds the inventory is setting that price just like on eBay Vivid is showing it customer facing at 20 20% discount and then adding that 20% on the back end um as a fee um and so that is going to be those prices on vivot seats uh for art purposes are going to be a little lower than what the actual Market Market is versus StubHub which is actually dollar for dooll like what the the
(29:03) seller is actually listing for so I do recommend uh having the secondary open while you're searching just to give you an idea of what's going on um that is going to be a lot more useful after an event has had a pre-sale um because there's actual inventory to compare it to but if you're going to do that I would recommend using StubHub because a $100 ticket is going to be listed for $100 whereas on Vivid it'll be listed for like $80 and then the customer will pay that 20% fee on the back end during checkout if that makes sense yeah that's
(29:37) that's really good to know I didn't know that yep um yeah what other questions what other questions do you have just on behalf of everybody uh so I was also wondering so with yourself so how come specifically you chose ticket reselling and like what kind of um turnover do you have like with inventory and how long do you typically expect to sit on inventory and what kind of like returns do you usually expect on average across multiple different shows um the series of questions you just asked I could probably teach like
(30:10) multiple semesters of a college course on um one of the really aggravating thing about tickets when you're first starting out is there are so many nuances and variables that go into like I said a live entertainment situation where real world uh things going on affect live entertainment for better or worse um and so the annoying thing is a lot of questions like that like people ask me every day uh is it better to sell tickets right away or to hold them and sell them like later on and none of those kind of questions fit into a nice
(30:48) neat little box to give an answer um those kind of things are going to vary show to show tour to tour City to City uh genre to genre so there aren't any really great uh there are not really great any great easy black and white answers to give there um you know I I am you know like I said I've been doing this 22 years uh I have a a team of people uh we we we rotate through about 3,000 Ticket Master accounts that we use um On Any Given month so uh yeah we have 3,000 accounts and and unique phone numbers and stuff
(31:28) that that we rotate through and keep data on so you can scale tickets as large as you want like I said the great thing about tickets is it could be a very profitable side project side hustle it can also I mean I have been doing this like recommending on Discord for um about about two years now and there have been dozens of people that have actually quit their their nine-to-five corporate jobs that had nice benefit packages and stuff because um of just the success they've had in tickets now I want to prefer I W to add to that immediately
(32:05) obviously everyone is aware of the Taylor Swift effect of the of what has happened over the last two years I just want to make something very clear and I'm not here to piss on anyone's parade I just want to make it very clear the Taylor Swift tour has never happened before and will never happen again ever um the highest the highest uh secondary ticket price in a stadium that I can remember in 22 years is the 2015 Grateful Dead 50th Anniversary final shows at Soldier Field and I believe those were like a $500 get in
(32:45) and everyone thought that was like insanity because again you're talking about 150,000 tickets across three shows in the stadium that's a lot of tickets to be able to command that kind of price is insane for to command $22,000 Plus on a behind the stage sort of thing it's it's a perfect storm type situation I'm not saying that it will never tickets will never be profitable again I'm just saying if you were coming in here expecting to you know what's the next Taylor Swift my answer is there isn't one uh there will
(33:18) never be a tour that has a $2,000 get in on three or four shows at the stadium ever again it it was it was pandemic fueled thing it was a she were at least five albums since her last tour sort of thing it was it was just a combination of everything so um with that said you know we typically the the typical return that that you can look to be getting from tickets on a regular basis and this is when tickets come back down to planet Earth keep in mind we are still kind of on the tail end of post-pandemic ticketing and why that's significant is
(33:57) is there was a huge backlog every single artist on the planet wanted to play a tour and and come back in the pandemic well there's only so many days on a calendar and there's only so many venues in the country right if you're a stadium band you've got like there are 20 stadiums or 30 stadiums in the country you can play and that's it so we're still we're on the the tail end of getting through that backlog um of of artists that have not played since the pandemic so as we come back down to planet Earth and and we no longer have
(34:28) the pandemic as like a um a variable in all of this the normal returns that I think people can expect that's reasonable on a regular basis is between like 15 and 40% um and and for any kind of investment based business that's any in any investor you you talk to is going to be perfectly happy with a 20% return the problem we have is a lot of people have gotten involved in tickets in the last two years and they are super used to just consistent 200 300 500,000 per returns and it's just it's not sustainable long term and it's not
(35:05) realistic and it would it has never been that way before um all of this is like kind of a a new little patch that we have carved out since the pandemic ended anyway 15 to 40% on average there will certainly be times where we have shows that are an easy 50% 100% return like easy and then there will be shows that we thought were going to be super easy you know I use Travis Scott as an example You Know Travis Scott everybody went to Travis Scott last fall thinking it was gonna be the Taylor Swift tour of rap right everybody bought it people
(35:44) just spent so much money buying that tour and you know I personally lost like uh almost $775,000 on that tour uh people got their ass handed to them uh and and that happened and that again an extreme outlier the opposite direction of Taylor Swift but that stuff does happen there are tours that look that walk the walk talk to talk and look great on paper and they end up just being a bomb and that happens in tickets and uh there are things that make no sense at all and you can't figure it out and it keeps you up at night as to why
(36:20) Boys to Men uh or pit bull sold out uh you know an obscure venue somewhere it's a $300 ticket get to even get in the door that kind of stuff happens too um but typically the thing that's really going to affect people is going to be the delivery delay and a delivery delay is exactly what it sounds like it is a delay uh that the artist imp poses for when you buy your tickets to when they actually get are available for you to interact with obviously you need to interact with them in order to send them to your customer uh because you don't
(36:55) get paid until you send them so a lot of artists some artists will put in delivery delays sometimes it's something reasonable like seven days after the event sometimes it's like the delivery play is in effect until three days before the show um that happens sometimes so you know the lead time on from an on sale to when a show happens is sometimes six months nine months so there are some cash flow issues um that certainly arise uh because everything tickets does not fit into a nice neat little box I strongly recommend do not
(37:34) bite off more than you can chew with tickets do not go out of the gate and try to buy you know set up 50 accounts and buy all these tickets because you are going to get yourself in trouble um scale at a reason start off with one account learn the process sell a couple of tickets first then get two or three more accounts and see manage those it on sale and man and and scale a couple of accounts at a time don't have one successful event and then try to go balls to the wall because that is going to catch up with you very very very
(38:11) quickly and the last thing you want to do is [ __ ] your cash flow to a point where you can't participate in a wildly profitable on sale that pops up out of nowhere because you blew your load on you know 50 cold playay tickets or whatever the situation is so don't get ahead of yourself learn the process learn the foundation learn the pillars of how this thing works and I promise it's a long longer Runway it's a longer lead time to to master than probably some of the other stuff that you have that you have flipped before on Amazon or elsewhere
(38:52) but I promise the people that really put in the time to learn what they're doing and why they're doing it uh it it will yield it will yield success but it takes there is certainly a learning curve um I know that was a long- winded answer but I think there were some pretty important points there that apply to just about everybody just as far as I want to set reasonable expectations because people see success posts and other discords of people making these thousands of dollars on these events and it looks so easy you
(39:27) just click buttons and it's not that easy turns out and it's very easy to uh to get in over your head if you're not careful so start small learn the process and um and then kind of and build on it from there but um yeah it's uh and I'm trying to think we will certainly have I'll post a couple of things tonight we will certainly have a call um not sure about one for tomorrow we will certainly have like a billy eish public sale on Friday uh we may have some NBA NHL playoff stuff happening I will try to uh I I will try to get a
(40:10) couple of like one or two calls up uh for you guys just to play around this week um and then just about me personally um I do have I have notifications turned on for the chat so uh I try to keep up with the chat I try to be a same day DM um so if you have questions like please feel free what I ask is please don't DM me at 10:01 am when something's going on sale I know that's like the most probably the time you have the most questions but I will also be managing my own on sales so I'm happy to help anyone and answer
(40:46) questions and and DM and stuff like that um but yeah those of you that kind of accept that this is not going to be an overnight money printer um I think the ones are patient are are really going to be pleasantly surprised because again with maybe what you're used to as physical inventory and having to deal with shipping and and customers and stuff like that with tickets being 99% electronic and automatic fulfillment like you don't have to deal with any physical inventory and you typically don't have to deal with customers unless
(41:18) you do something wrong so it might be a pleasant surprise for some of you that have been locked in the Amazon world no disrespect to anyone in Amazon I tried it and it's not for me I'm not talented enough so Props to all you guys for that but seriously there is something to be said I mean I did physical inventory doing the pandemic just like everybody else to not have physical inventory not have to go to you you know post office UPS FedEx there was something to be said there um but don't get me wrong I promise there are plenty of headaches
(41:46) for you over here in the ticket world as well they are just waiting for you um with that said I just want to open it up a little bit do we have any questions I've been running my mouth non-stop for 50 minutes we you have any questions anything like that's that questions been triggered by something I've said or something didn't make sense so it looks like L Professor put one in the chat here um had a couple questions about the earliest you recommend to get in the queue for an event in Ticket Master um yeah how you determine if you're buying
(42:14) tickets at the original price from Ticket Master you might have to clarify that all professor and then what are what are your top five top five factors that you check when you want to get in a event okay cool those are actually [ __ ] awesome questions thank you I appreciate that so the first one is easy when do I recommend getting in the queue for an event in Ticket Master before 95959 um when you enter the queue is not relative to what your Q spot will be that is not part of a Ticket Master algorithm the algorithm is more uh they
(42:47) are trying to essentially the algorithm is designed to try to identify People Like Us right because they they would like for real fans to be at the front of the line buying tickets they're actually going to use versus us they they so um it does not matter when you join the queue there's a 15 minute window uh sometimes it's 14 minutes sometimes it's 13 sometimes it's 17 but you you can get to that page whenever you want and then that wind that waiting room will physically open about 15 minutes ahead of time but you do not need like you can
(43:22) it's going to be the same situation whether you join right when it opens or 10 seconds before it goes live um so when you join is not an issue it's more just that you join and that you're only joining it's only going to let you join with one account per device and we will get to I don't think I have time to talk about it tonight but we will get to down maybe our my next month's fall when people have had some time to go through and do a couple of drops we will talk about some some web browsers and stuff that will help you uh there are some
(43:57) ticket based web browsers out there nothing about botting by the way I do want to make that very clear the one topic I do not discuss or interact with is botting in tickets it is very illegal um I don't deal with it I don't do it never have so uh yeah if you have questions about botting they need to go to somebody else but there are ticket based browsers out there where every tab creates a new device and you have proxies loaded in there and it's very useful for once you start scaling up but for right now when you only have a
(44:30) couple of accounts or one account make does not matter when you join that queue just jump in there make sure you're in there and ready to go um how do I determine if I'm buying the tickets at the original price from Ticket Master bad news you can't it is one of the most [ __ ] up things of our industry where Ticket Master can raise the price in real time during an on sale and but they don't even have to disclose that the tickets have been dynamically priced nor do they have to say what the original price was because of this what I tend to
(45:08) do in my calls to make things easy especially for people who are new and it's going to be very overwhelming during a big on sale I try to give price ceilings for a maximum price you should pay for each area of the venue upper level Club level or 200 level if there is one um a the lower level 100 level and then the floor or field if there is one again um and so I try to give price ceilings for each of those areas because we don't again we only know the cheapest price and the most expensive price we don't know anything about what's
(45:44) happening in the middle and uh those prices could change at any time so I try to get price sealings which help people make split-second decisions even if Dynamic pricing has been gone has gone into effect but the shitty answer is Ticket Master can raise that price and you would never know and sometimes they do it like within 60 seconds of the event going live like it's it's you'll see when you start doing some high profile events but what they do in real time is crazy uh you just constantly are trying to learn
(46:15) and digest so you can recognize when those have been dynamically priced and and eventually you will um let's see and then the final question here I lost it um here we go uh yeah there you go so yeah with with Co yeah stuff like Copa America I mean it literally it'll change right in front of your eyes which so again a big ticket drop is very stressful if you haven't done it before it'll be very overwhelming um and then it'll be all over in this in a split second and you'll do it all over again the next day and that's just kind of how
(46:50) you learn so if you have a short fuse or you have you lack patience um just know going in that you are there are going to be days where you want to throw your computer out the window because Ticket Master is not working uh it's broken it's overwhelmed whatever that stuff happens you just kind of roll with the punches and there's always another ticket to buy that is the great thing about tickets uh there are days when thousands of different events will go on sale I obviously cannot cover them all um or even most of them but do not
(47:24) get frustrated about one event if you [ __ ] up and don't buy something that was profitable or buy something that wasn't profitable because there will be another event later on that day or the next day for you to focus on to make up for it um and then what are your top five factors that you check when you want when when when I'm when I'm buying an event I guess is I'm assuming what you mean um you know that's a loaded question we can go sports versus concerts um different types of concerts but here's you know
(47:55) here is here's my general diagnostic there a lot of people say that what we do when we buy tickets we're gambling and I don't really like to look at it that way I I like to think of it as we are trying to predict human behavior so what I mean by that is we are trying to predict whether a live act sports team what have you not only do they have the demand to sell out their venue that they've been assigned at the prices they've been assigned but then do they have enough demand to go beyond that and have people who want to pay
(48:31) above face value hopefully uh beyond the original primary ticket sale uh you will quickly learn that just because a an event is sold out does not mean it's going to be profitable just because an actor an artist can sell out a venue does not mean that tickets automatically you're going to make money and sell them above face value uh that is not the way it works um and so recognizing that and learning that is very very important um here is something that I use for music specifically um the app is called song stats s o n g s a TS song stats it is a
(49:16) free app um you download that app and then there's a search feature and you can search any music artist on the planet and you you can look at that artist you can click audience at the bottom and it will actually break down the Spotify YouTube Tik Tock all of the metrics it will break down how large the listening audience for that specific artist is by City so if you have a huge 40-day tour and you have no idea whether you want to buy Tampa Florida or Upstate you know uh Syracuse New York uh you could go to song stats and it's not you
(49:57) know it's not a fullprof method but it will certainly give you an idea of how many people are listening every month or interacting every month with a specific artist and broken down by city that will certainly help you make some decisions about should I try to buy this city or this city um but that's one resource that I use um you know the other one is kind of common sense like you know if if a big hip-hop tour you know I I know that Atlanta's probably going to be a big city La is probably going to be a big city Chicago just because of Pop
(50:36) Culture items you know that rap is a big thing in Atlanta rap is a bigger thing in Atlanta than it is up in Vermont right and so some of the stuff that you're making decision based off of you're literally predicting human behavior is is someone in Vermont gonna be more stoked to see Jay-Z than someone in Brooklyn New York probably not um so there are like I always encourage people think about what you're buying from your your potential customers point of view um you know a a customer in Brooklyn is probably gonna be willing to pay more to
(51:18) see Jay-Z than somebody in North Dakota right and that's no that's not hatred against North Dakota it's just kind of the lay of the land um so there are some just common sense pop culture human behavior type things um you know a Saturday night show is going to sell better than a Tuesday night show in most instances um stuff like that so there's a lot of there's a collection of things that you will start to ask yourself as you are going through and trying to pick and choose stuff to buy but I encourage you to always be thinking about um
(51:55) variables from the perspective of someone who might spend a lot of money to buy buy a ticket right um you're trying you're trying to predict the human behavior of your hypothetical customer um so that will come a lot easier the more you do this but the kind of questions you should be asking yourself um first of all you can go check obviously their stats you can go check their social to look at what kind of fan engagement they have on Instagram and Twitter and stuff like that that is you know that's not always a foolproof
(52:25) method some of these older bands like the Rolling Stones um you know they they're they have a boomer audience boomers are not really on Twitter interacting with a Rolling Stones tour announcement post right and so you definitely need keep your audience always at the Forefront of your mind Boomers have different buying Behavior than someone who's buying you know um a SoundCloud rapper or what have you so there are always variable uh sound stats is a good one just to have and use um and but yeah after that it it becomes a
(53:05) lot you know obviously a HomeTown if the artist has a HomeTown that's always going to be a big one um you know holidays shows on Halloween always do really well you know shows where people have off work the next day uh you know July 4th so like all of those things you were trying to consider anything that might fect uh someone's interest level in going to see something whether you had control over it or not if that makes sense um again I know that was a long-winded answer but I hope that was helpful a little bit
(53:39) um is Ticket Master the only place for buying verified tickets for an event I know listed and Vivid is there too but what I mean is Ticket Master holds contracts for almost all events in the world Celtics exclusively okay first of all no first and foremost Ticket Master is a primary ticket provider primary means they are the official Outlet or Source they are directly affiliated with whatever artist is playing whatever artist they're selling tickets for they are the official ticket provider that is the primary ticket provider Vivid Seats is a
(54:20) secondary ticket Market where you would buy you would buy resale listed is a tool that pushes all of your tickets to secondary exchanges like StubHub and Vivid so Vivid Seats StubHub they do not sell tickets in an official capacity they are an eBay type atmosphere where they are facilitating secondary ticket sales they have nothing to do so you're never going to do an on sale on vivot seats right you're going to monitor vivit seats to see what the current market looks like for price for what you want to buy now
(54:58) back to your question every venue whatever building the event is happening in has a contract with some ticket provider the most common one about 80% of the time is Ticket Master there are other um the other big one is AXS literally three letters AXS um they also have certain venues where shows there utilize AXS um uh but those are the two big ones there are other smaller ones like event bright and um a couple others most of the time those sites are utilized for your smaller theaters and clubs most of the time your ma your Arena or Stadium
(55:46) size venues are going to either be Ticket Master or AXS as far as the primary ticket provider is concerned um and did I get free tickets when I worked at Ticket Master um everyone in my life thought I did and they would certainly ask as if I did um we had a couple of venues in the city of Chicago um most of the stuff was pretty easy to do but no they did not just hand out tickets for big events we had like an office Lottery where we would enter we would have like a suite with 20 seats in it and 10 people got two tickets or something like
(56:16) that so yeah not as glamorous uh you know I'm not in a I'm not on the on the field for the Super Bowl or anything it's not like that um anyway what other questions do we have um just based on what we've talked about tonight it looks like Millan is typing a question there uh but I also wanted to ask what's your opinion on the recent Billy isas show because most of the venues were restricted from ticket transfer right yes that is correct so that is going to be another that's G to be another kind of nuance that you know
(56:50) so that I will cover in my calls um my calls are essentially they have what to buy and what not to buy section but before that I include like I bold and underline any kind of nuances that you need to be aware of a delivery delay on tickets a non-transfer um you know if something's going be limited view that kind of thing I try to include all that stuff but Billy is a non-transfer tour what and you know those do happen um and what that means is there are three states in the country that have laws in place where
(57:26) you cannot restrict the transfer of a ticket um those states are New York State uh Illinois and Colorado so when you have a tour like Billy ish that is non-transferable the dates the the dates that you're going to focus on would be New York City um you know Madison Square Garden uh United Center in Chicago because of Illinois and then any uh the Denver show for Colorado um those States you're not allowed to restrict transfer but everywhere else um yeah you would have to leave those Alone um I I will say that there there are
(58:10) [Music] ways I think you cut out there chokey maybe having connection issues [Music] is everybody else still here can everybody else still hear me I just want to make sure it's not mine and it's that it's choking and I don't is that do you lose me sorry I I think we're I think we're good now it might have been me okay whose connection it was no it's okay um so what I was saying was for non-transfer tours there are ways to get around that uh when you look on stub you will see tickets for sale on StubHub in states that are
(59:11) non-transfer um those types of things come with significant risk of the tickets not working at the door not scanning properly uh when that happens it becomes a 2 to 400% fee which is again why mistakes are expensive um so I do not talk about that kind of stuff because when I am recommending how other people spend their money I try to stay in the safe Lane I would never want to recommend a hoop to jump through on something like non-transfer and then something goes wrong and someone gets hit with a fat penalty because of
(59:44) something that I recommended so I'm always going to stay in my Lane as far as safety um and above borders concerned um so for a tour like Billy ish I would be recommending that you guys only buy uh and when we do the when we do the call for Friday uh for the public sale um the recommendation will only include states where non-transfer is restricted which would be New York Illinois and Colorado um and and that's the kind of stuff that I do that's why I recommend don't just skim down to the what to buy I know that's the sexiest
(1:00:19) part of the call but I include a lot of other information for that reason uh because every time was a non transfer tour no matter how many times I bold and underline it I get a DM from someone who's like hey I spent $3,000 on these tickets and now I can't transfer them what's the deal I'm like you know yeah did you here's the the huge paragraph I wrote about why you shouldn't do that um so yeah I that's why I recommend don't skim my calls at least to start um read them thoroughly because I do try to include relevant invo there but yes
(1:00:49) non-transfer a thing and uh it is a huge pain in the ass [Music] um uh how long you do this on the side before becoming fulltime um not a really relevant question and again I would encourage yall not to I have done this for 22 years I have done this in a much different time where you know you didn't need unique accounts and stuff there was no waiting room I mean it was a different time I started this when I was like a sophomore in high school so I was like 15 years old so I did it through high school and then I actually got my
(1:01:25) physical office um when I was a freshman in college so I had an office in my my hometown uh so a couple of years but again it was it was a very different time I would say for for y'all for the purpose of why you're asking um I would say six to nine months is a re of doing it pretty consistently before you will feel comfortable enough to like you know scale and and make changes in your work life or whatever um where you can do it on the side before maybe doing it full-time but I would certainly advise six to nine months of
(1:02:00) learning and doing it as a side project hustle uh so you can learn the foundation before you start making any moves like that oh did I disconnect oh [ __ ] no I disconnect no I'm here okay who's lying to me um okay uh do I keep a directory of possible upcoming events we're planning ahead um I wish we could um typically we don't find out about tours announcements until like 48 hours before they go on sale sometimes like a couple weeks ago Megan the stallion put a a tour on sale she announced it at 10 AM Eastern and the tour went on sale at
(1:02:45) noon so you had two hours to get your [ __ ] together um and that's becoming increasingly popular I don't know if it's on purpose or if it's to be a pain in our ass but it's working a lot of these a lot of these tours are being announced like the night before to go on sale the next day because they want to try to give people like us as little time as possible to get our ducks in a row um so yeah typically like a lot of people ask me on like you know Saturday or Sunday what the week looks like and I really won't be able to tell you because
(1:03:17) I don't a lot of the stuff a lot of the on sales don't get announced until the day before or get put in this Ticket Master System so I can see them until the day before so unfortunately there's not a a long lead time on what to expect um like I said it's very hurry up and wait you will be going a million miles an hour and then all of a sudden you'll have a couple days to catch your breath uh and then you'll you'll have three weeks where you buy tickets every day again so tickets go in patterns um but yeah there's not there's not going to be
(1:03:50) a whole lot of lead time or like uh here's what's upcoming we're not going to have a calendar or anything like that uh tickets is kind of flying by the seat of your pants some of the time which is a really great dopamine like adrenaline rush but if you're a planner and that's like your OCD thing it's probably going to drive you insane so just kind of keep that in mind as well yeah um sorry I just want I just wanted to mention like el professor like we also have some channels under the the ticket section that does pull through information uh
(1:04:20) some of it is live some of it will be a little bit later uh but we do have a lot of good information in there as well and and just on that I just want to touch on you know another question I get a lot of the time is why didn't you call this why didn't you call that this is making money uh Etc and like I said there will be days where lit like on Friday I think this upcoming Friday there are like 1,300 events going on public sale there's no way I can cover them all but also I don't have a crystal ball number one I mean I'm very good at
(1:04:50) this and I've been doing it a long time I still get stuff wrong uh occasionally um I'm certainly more right more often than I am wrong by a long shot but I'm still wrong plenty um the other thing is when I'm making a call I am not just thinking about hey is this going to sell out and hey is this going to have Demand on the secondary for to make money I have to remember that I am putting additional eyeballs a lot of additional eyeballs on these events so I have to make sure that whatever I'm recommending can withstand the pressure of an
(1:05:24) additional X number number of tickets being purchased for the sake of resale um I have to make sure that house of cards doesn't collapse because then everybody loses money and it doesn't really you know it becomes a a moot point um of what I call if people lose money on it right so I try to be very strategic with what I call um because I don't think that recommending an event that I don't think can withstand the pressure of additional tickets being bought for resale um if if a show collapses under that weight it doesn't
(1:05:56) do anybody any good so just to give you a little kind of peek behind the curtain um that is what go goes into my decision not every provider follows that they they recommend everything whether it can withstand extra resale or not um I don't believe in that I would rather call less stuff and more of the stuff more percentage of the stuff I call be profitable then I'm definitely a quality over quantity guy in that regard um cool let's see uh chi I I had a couple questions so like I've seen like a lot of people discussing recently that
(1:06:30) they think like verified fan stuff may be kind of dying and so I was wondering what your thoughts are about that and then also for the show that was I believe it was announced today for Ed Sheran for the sign y uh if you had any thoughts on his upcoming show yeah so we will that will actually be my first actual post we will and that is Ed Shar is doing a one-off show it is uh it's a new situation here so it's it's going to be a lottery type situation on a site called seeded um it's the first time that seeded has done a lottery normally
(1:07:02) it's just everybody that signs up gets a code um to give a little background for those of you who up been following along uh since 2018 there's been a program in in on Ticket Master called verified fan and essentially every major tour that went on sale you would uh log into your ticket master account choose the shows that you wanted and then it would be essentially a glorified Lottery with a an algorithm behind it and their goal was to um their goal was to remove the entries they thought were being placed simply for resale and try to give as
(1:07:39) many tickets to actual quote unquote fans as possible it was working pretty well until we got to like Taylor Swift and just like everything else in tickets Taylor Swift broke verified fan um and the other part of that problem with when you talk talk about a tour like that a lot of people got pissed off at just the wording it was called verified fan and people you know younger teens and kids and 20s something they're like well I've been a tayor fan since the very beginning I'm a real fan why am I not getting chosen for a program called
(1:08:14) verified fan and they don't understand the actual uh algorithm and and and actual execution behind what goes into being chosen they just assume they didn't get they didn't get a code they didn't get a chance to buy the pre-sale so they all went to Bots and resellers which is simply not true um so what Ticket Master has done over quietly over the last six months they have essentially phased out the verified fan program Al together if you go searching for anything verified fan on The Ticket Master website it it does not exist they
(1:08:49) even took down the the FAQ on the website so they are scrubbing the internet of the verified fan branding I believe uh what I believe what I have been told from some old friends at Ticket Master is they are essentially going to quietly relaunch um something to replace verified fan that is maybe just named like branded a little different so it's not uh you don't they're not putting all the emphasis on the fan aspect as dumb as that sounds there are plenty of people who felt cheated because they actual fan and
(1:09:26) they're not getting chosen for essentially a lottery um where demand greatly outweighs Supply so verified fan as we know it I believe is dead however they are going to need some kind of system for the the the top you know the the the 1% of Tours the most popular tours they're going to need some kind of Lottery system uh so they will launch something else that is very similar it will just probably not be called ver fan um so yes that is kind of a history on verified fan um and you know there's a lot of people who loaded up on phone (1:10:06) numbers from providers who charg $112 a line and we're buying hundreds of lines so they could do hundreds of entries for Taylor Swift which was very profitable then but that becomes a very expensive phone bill when there are no verified fans for six months when you have1 lines at $10 a piece and nothing to use them on so yes that is the situation with verified fan they are gonna they will launch something else um as far as Ed Sheeran is concerned um Ticket Master is currently kind of trying out other other similar Lottery type situations um and
(1:10:47) one of them is seated uh and and it's a lottery this is the first time they've done it so I don't really know how aggressive they're going to be about filtering entries or I don't know what's going to increase your chances you're going to learn at the same Pace that I learned because this is a brand new thing but I will post info about that tonight and that is something that you should just sign up for because it takes five seconds it costs 0er and sometimes when you do that the code that you get is a unique code and
(1:11:18) it will be worth money there have been codes that have gone for as much as a couple hundred dollars a piece um and and you know for literally doing nothing except doing a simple sign up there are also codes at the same time that will go for5 or $10 because there are just so many of them but the the point is when you when we post about codes and signups and stuff it is always a good idea to to sign up it costs you nothing and you never know uh what could what that could yield whether it's a sale selling that
(1:11:50) code or using that code to buy some tickets um there are several ways to profit around tickets um but my advice when stuff like that gets posted easy stuff the sign up stuff just do it get your friends to do it um if it's a big one and then uh you know worst case scenario you wasted 30 seconds of your life but yeah we'll have that up tonight I don't remember when I don't recall exactly when that closes I want to say it closes either Friday or Saturday it may close tomorrow actually tomorrow night tomorrow night tomorrow
(1:12:21) night okay and then I assume that on sale is either going to be Friday it'll be like early next week um I don't have that in front of me either but yeah we will we'll post with that tonight um and uh that you know definitely take some time sign up for that if you have multiple accounts you can sign up for do it that way um and then that would be a nice intro into kind of uh pre-sale codes and stuff like that and then once the actual on sale for Ed Sheeran's announced we will do a formal call and those of you lucky enough to win codes
(1:12:51) can participate in that or you can buy codes around Discord if available stuff like that very cool and yeah we have a couple people that are full-time ticket resellers in the server that actually buy codes or they used to um like the last Taylor Swift one that was released in Canada they were selling for $2,500 us a code so yep yeah yeah for sure I mean again uh Taylor is uh you know that before that the highest code ever was like $250 maybe 300 for a Dell a couple years ago so like you know Taylor kind of is in her own Universe um I do not
(1:13:24) personally Cash Out codes I used to uh I had several people think they were real smart and and try to run off with about $75,000 of Taylor Swift tickets of mine uh and I had to you know get attorneys involved and hunt them down and stuff so I do not cash out tickets anymore it's just too risky for me personally but I'm really thrilled to hear that we have other guys in the server uh who are willing to do that and and to uh to cash out folks for that because that is the easiest money you will make in tickets
(1:13:53) is when you do sign for a code that ends up being very valuable and it's not always known ahead of time sometimes you'll know like Taylor Swift Adell the big ones but sometimes you know you'll sign up for a code and nobody gets one and all of a sudden it's an easy 150 bucks uh in your pocket so always be paying attention even if you don't plan on buying something for a pre-sale if there's a sign up always do the sign up because you never know it's it's low it's uh the the upside is high and the downside is nothing so it's a best case
(1:14:26) scenario definitely and then uh el professor put in the chat there just if a ticket doesn't sell what happens you just take the loss and move on you eat it for lunch um which is why decision making no being having your ducks in a row going into an on sale and then uh actually learning how to read a ticket Market how to price keeping track of how many tickets are for sale or those number of tickets going up or down um those kind of things are that's where the really the 9mon runway of learn learning curve that I give plays in you know sure
(1:15:07) anybody can learn a queue in a week after doing it four or five times but what happens after that the actual selling um is complicated in its own right and so it does take some time to learn that stuff definitely I have a quick question yeah hi Melanie um is there a way to strategize like a a seating chart per se like which tickets are better more successful for sales whether it be a concert or even like a football game yeah yeah there there is a lot of that is going did we lose them I think you may have disconnected chokey
(1:15:57) they all are did I cut out again I apologize it was just lag you're good yeah I I keep putting it the my phone in my pocket and I think that's what the problem so I'm just gonna hold it um so a lot of that kind of stuff some of that will be that will come from actually attending live event so for to use football for those people that have been to a football game the the concepts of a football stadium are all the same even though every football stadium is OB the same uh playing field no pun intended of like what they look like and
(1:16:36) kind of how they're set up um so you know it's really gonna come down to price price is gonna be the deciding factor because here's the thing a seed can be great as great as you want it to be but if it's too [ __ ] expensive for to make money on it doesn't matter how great the seat is um which is again why I kind of try to put those ceilings in every section of the venue in my you can look at the upper level lower level field and floor Club level and if if if the terms Club level lower level field um floor if those concepts
(1:17:21) are Club level of a venue and you don't know what that means um I would definitely recommend just kind of learning learn start with the seing charts um venu in your hometown m a square garden learn the S chart of bar playay Center uh start there and just learn just where things are located um what I mean when I say behind the stage when I mean uh you know when I say Upper Deck stuff like that there are terminology things that I use in my call that may not be familiar to everybody now if you have not if you not
(1:17:58) frequent live that is going to be something where I would encourage you to um there is a website called a view fromy seat.com aw fromy seat.com that that something you want to bookmark and what that site is is essentially a public database of um photo fan photos from chokey I don't mean to cut you off almost every sorry chokey your voice your Your Voice keeps like kind of like breaking up a bit I think there's this minor connection all right hang on just let's see what we can do here hang on just a second sorry about that
(1:18:48) guys hang yeah right now you're sounding very robotic all right we're gonna stay like this that's better for everybody um so everyone now uh your voice sounds super messed up at the moment yeah not good okay it's just sounds like there's F connection issues robotic something like that awesome you were good before yeah yeah um gotta love technology all right how about now is that better that sounds very clear so far yes okay good good we'll see what happens um so if you did did we catch the part of what I said
(1:19:51) about like attending Live Events and just like knowing kind of from from just being there did we get we get we got all that I I got that I just like you know so I've been to a football game my preference I like to be on the 50 yard line right in the middle but someone who maybe doesn't want to spend as much money would want the end zone seats right so yeah it's like H it's hard to know you know also depending what team is playing who and so on and so forth there's all those variance but absolutely and and that is you're going
(1:20:22) to quickly find out that that is is both like the most exciting and like most aggravating part of tickets is a lot of this is just going to be stuff that you will pick up as you do this you know day in and day out another site that may help you a little bit um both in real time and just like when you're have some downtime and want to learn some stuff there's a site called a view fromy seat.
(1:20:53) com AV view from my seat and what that is is a public public database collection of uh a 10d photos from almost every section of almost every venue in the United States um if that sounds crazy it is you can search any sports team or venue or city and it will bring up a list of venues and you can go through by seating chart and actually look at actual photos that people took from different events um in there some venues have more data than others but if you are trying to learn about seating charts and just what actual views might look like a view from my seat is a great (1:21:32) resource to certainly uh follow along at home and learn as you are going through these calls because it'll give you an actual visual of what your customer may see now granted everybody is going to have their own preferences which is again why I go back to we are predicting human behavior um there are people who love to sit between the baset uh for NBA games there are people who love to sit behind the basket um everybody's got their own personal preferences um and you know that's something that you just kind of figure
(1:22:05) out as you go um but yeah I think a view from my seat and looking at some of those uh maybe for the specific venue you're looking to Target uh looking at some of those fan photos from other events in that venue may give you an idea of uh hey you know it'll help you put a visual and combine it with the price tag of whatever that seat ends up being and those two things will be pretty two and pretty important and useful resources to try to decide is this seat worth X dollars or should I go a couple sections over and try to get a
(1:22:37) cheaper seat um with maybe a little bit less desirable view but it's going to be um cheaper all around out the door stuff like that but I do think that a view for my seat will be very helpful as you're learning do that does that kind of answer what I know it wasn't exactly what you wanted but does that does that help uh you know and again I will try to if there are certain things or nuances about the specific event or the venue that I know of I will try to include that stuff um with concerts obviously closest to the stage is most desirable
(1:23:15) um a lot of people get confused because they think that maybe a straight so if you're picturing like a concert venue like an arena um you've got a stage on side you've got two sideline like straightaways on either side and then it comes around to a horseshoe to to form the opposite end of that of that venue a lot of people think that maybe seats in the Horseshoe would be a better seat because they offer a direct s line sight um uh sight line to the to the stage in in concerts the general rule is closer to the stage is better um and then you
(1:23:54) know despite the fact that it usually does not offer as good of a view uh the floor is usually preferable to lower bowl seats um but again people have preferences I am always a one to sit in the lower bowl rather than the floor because it just offers a better sight line but again we're trying to predict human behavior some of that behavior is out of your control some of it's within your control but uh yeah a lot of it is just picking it up as you go and kind of learning as you go [Music] cool so does that cover what you were
(1:24:31) asking there melany it does it's like trial and error yeah I know I know that's not like the most helpful answer of all time um I think you'll be pleasantly surprised as you start getting into this and doing it on a regular basis you'll be surprised at at how quickly you kind of develop some instincts and and some just knee-jerk reactions to stuff um you'll pick that up very quickly uh so yeah trial and error is a great way to put it but it's not a dinosaur process I promise no no because I I agree with what you said I'd rather not sit on the
(1:25:10) floor I'd rather be back and Center like in the bull cuz I'm 5'2 I can't see over someone in front of me so I'd rather be up on an angle exactly you know right and and some people a lot people that are more experience with going to events a lot of people feel that way but the general consensus you know the human nature is floor is better so typically reserve on the floor will sell better than lower bowl but you know people that have been to events know almost always lower bowl is a better it's it's elevated and it's uh it's like theater
(1:25:46) you know it's the movie theater style so U not movie theater style it's uh it's it's elevated and it's got a better sideline of the St is what I'm trying to say um but yeah again you will pick up those things as you go and with sporting events like you know when the NFL releases its tickets is it a free-for-all like on that day or how does that work sports teams sports are kind of a um they're a different beast and here's why because most concert venues do not offer season tickets some of your theaters and stuff will offer season tickets but for
(1:26:24) the most part they do not offer that versus a sporting team which usually a a solid chunk of the the inventory is season ticket holders or partial season ticket holders so those people are going to eat up most of the inventory they're also going to pay significantly less because they're buying the whole season versus the people that cherry picking the one or two games they want to go to so those individual games are going to be more way more expensive um and your competition is going to be season ticket holders who may have paid half what you
(1:26:55) paid per ticket because they're a season ticket holder but um so yeah that is a team by team thing um typically like you know NFL some teams will put their NFL tickets on sale like the night of the draft uh other team you know most teams will put single game I'm sorry the night of the schedule whenever the schedule comes out which is typically right after draft was just the other day yeah oh I apologize yeah so typically the NFL schedule comes out very shortly after a week or two after the draft some teams like to capitalize on that and put their
(1:27:30) single game tickets on sale the same night the the the calendar comes out all most teams you know uh late June through July is typically like maybe six weeks out from from preseason is is typically when and the NFL will do it but it really goes team by team if you are interested in sports uh and that side of things it's a lot more complicated but there's certainly money to be made of course course if you do your research just like anything else the number one tip I would give you there set up a Gmail and the purpose of that Gmail is
(1:28:04) strictly to sign up for the email lists of every single one of the big four teams hockey basketball baseball football um you know you will you'll obviously get ticket information there but also there are teams such as the Lakers and who else has done the Yankees some teams will send out unique codes for regular season games playoff game the Lakers send out a unique code usually for playoff games for anyone that's signed up for their email list so I do recommend if you are looking to expand or looking to get get constant
(1:28:43) information about that the best way to do it obviously follow those teams on social if you have the capacity and then like and can tolerate that but having a a simple email that maybe forwards you know or you have on your phone to access but set up an email where you do nothing but sign up for all of the sports email lists and that'll give you a good foundation for keeping up with when that stuff goes on sale and how that stuff is progressing ticket was perfect thank you that's a super good tip we do stuff just like that for
(1:29:14) like um retailers for for Amazon and like also yeah just for anybody here um if you do want to monitor like any specific socials or websites like we have like a lot of tools a lot of scrapers we can basically add in like anything like any Instagram uh Reddit uh Twitter post all that kind of stuff into just like a channel then you can set keywords and get dm' about that information so if anybody wants anything set up for any anything like that just let us know when we get that set up for you yep and here's another uh tip that
(1:29:41) is in a similar vein something else you can do that I find very helpful because again you have tens of thousands of music artists you have hundreds and hundreds of sports teams I mean the the number of things things that you can buy tickets for is literally endless right everyone focuses on the Morgan wallins and Taylor Swifts and whatever but there are bands artists that no one's ever heard of that someone out there wants to have a ticket to and those types of things make money too there's just so much there's so many ways to make
(1:30:11) tickets here make money in tickets here um one of the things I recommend you can use um uh Google Alerts use Google Alerts to your advantage set up alerts you can set up a Google alert for any search phrase and it will email you as often as you want with news articles containing that phrase or that topic I have stuff set up for like announces tour pre-sale um I used to have one for verified fan and so anytime an article local or national is published um on Google uh with those phrases or those topics it will email you can get emailed
(1:30:48) every day with a summary of just every article that included that and that is a good way to have the the content come to you instead of you having to go out and find it all the time it's like something like that a lot of people like kind of know of but I don't think really anybody uses so that's a really good tip yeah I mean honestly and I know that's like with scrapers and all the automation we have like I know that's a boomer thing to say like get yourself a new Gmail and like make sure you're signed up for all the email like I I
(1:31:18) know I hear myself but like it really is a good tool because there is so much noise consistently with tickets just all the time tickets is a 247 365 business it never stops there's there's basketball games on Christmas day there's you know there are there's always stuff going on sale there's always events happening around the country and so there's so much noise to sift through to find the the the profitable stuff that anytime you can do something to make that content arrive in your inbox instead of having to go look
(1:31:48) for it I think that's a victory 100% And like a lot of scrapers like they don't pull through everything or like especially like with Discord I find like I've I've tried to forward emails into Discord it doesn't work that well so just like directly in Gmail is probably a better a better way to do it anyway yeah I find um you know I I find it very useful especially broad terms like announces tour announces tour will will give you more search results than you possibly could ever need um and again you can tailor that if it's comes
(1:32:21) too much you can have it sent once a week or every other day but I have it sent every day and it's just something that I sift through first in the morning and then last thing at night um so that's definitely something you can do but you'll pick up tips like that you know you can search Twitter for announce this tour or pre-sale or sold out and you can actually look through people that are talking about soldout tours um and maybe you missed it this time but you can make a mental note the next time that person tours like they can sell out
(1:32:48) stuff like that um you know you're not always going to get it the first time but tickets are like I said non-stop consistent so learn how to do it and then you can recognize it the next time they come through town definitely really good tips um I am we are at the hour 40 minute Mark which no one who is not married to me should ever have to listen to me talk that long so I do want to wrap it up because I I know everyone's time is valuable I want to respect that um do we have any last minute questions and just so everyone knows this will be
(1:33:20) recorded uh so we will we'll have a recording out I don't know that'll be out but I'm sure you'll get pinged about it and then so if you have to dip out early you got here late whatever you want to review it um you know you can do that and then we do do these once a month I love doing these um I I love talking tickets my wife loves that I get to talk to tickets some uh to someone other than her so uh we will do these once a month and as we start doing more and more of them we will start talking about more advanced concepts but I
(1:33:48) wanted to kind of just drop the basics in here tonight so that people had stuff to chew on and think about over the next couple of weeks very cool and yeah like if everybody applies the stuff that was discussed in here today and starts actively joining cues maybe cting tickets maybe purchasing some tickets here and there um I could definitely see that as we do this from month to month like we could have people that are actively involved in this and actively trying to grow their business um with these tips with these calls we could
(1:34:15) probably see everybody just grow together yeah and and and that's what I like to see and and look I I'm aware that the Discord audience is kind of used to um two-dimensional or onedimensional items to flip I don't mean that in disrespectful way I just mean you know if it's in stock you buy it and that's that uh this you know some people get turned off by just how much um how much goes into uh leg work goes into tickets um and so the people that stick with it and really learn it like I said uh it could either be like a
(1:34:49) lifelong side hustle that will always be around to make you money or it could be a career if you want it to be so um I am here to answer questions whenever please tag me in chat um so I see it uh if you deem me I try to be a same day DM responder I do fly twice a week at least uh so I'm constantly in the air uh so I don't always have great reception but I promise I will get back to you within like 48 Hours via DM I try to do same day though um and look I'm here to help you guys make money so you know I'm here
(1:35:19) to help you learn and and bounce ideas off of and stuff so feel free to DM me with talk in chat I want to make sure that people are making money it's a great way to make money and that's what we're all here for so um I'm going to jump off I appreciate everyone's time um I will have a couple of things up tonight we'll have a sign up you need to do for Ed shearan I'll have an introduction to listed um get set up with listed even if you don't plan on buying a ticket for a couple of weeks um but you want to have that set up by the
(1:35:46) time you purchase your first ticket so you're ready to go out the gate with selling it and having a platform to sell it on uh and then I will get at least one call up this week uh formal call we'll probably try to do two one will be Billy ish public sale and then I'll find something else for y'all um I appreciate everyone taking time tonight I hope everyone learned something uh send me a DM if you need to and uh I'm looking forward to making some money with everybody thank you so much for having me and we will talk very soon beautiful
(1:36:13) thanks choky very much appreciated and it was very thank you guys I appreciate it thanks for being present and asking questions um anything that didn't make sense so you think of later send me a DM tag me in chat and uh we will we will reconvene tomorrow sounds good have a good night thank you very much thanks guys