Vitalik Buterin on Farcaster

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Vitalik Buterin

"[X] is underpriced" is a perenially unpopular, but often very correct take. If demand > supply at the current price, you are going to get back to equilibrium _somehow_. Either that happens by people paying more in money, or it happens by people paying more in time (eg. waiting in line, staying up until 3AM to snap up a ticket). The former is more honest and is far less value-destructive. If you want to give non-rich people a chance to participate, then sure, allocate some tickets non-financially, but do it in a way that targets some other goal (eg. proof of volunteering, proof of getting good grades...). Basically, acknowledge that an auction will exist, but create more ways for people to bid that target diverse constituencies. Lotteries and lines are just an awful way to allocate things. https://x.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1971272756302844069

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Icetoad 🍕 🎩 🐈 pfp

Icetoad 🍕 🎩 🐈

As someone that's probably seen 1000 concerts at this point in my life (119 just in 2013 alone), I've watched prices go up and up and people keep paying. Part of the reason is that recorded music doesn't command the premium it once did so musicians have to make money through live concerts and/or physical merchandise. Ticketmaster/Live Nation is essentially a monopoly though. They are the biggest promoter and the biggest ticket seller. Even AEG comes no where near them in terms of promotion. They also owns a good chunk of venues. Ticketmaster should have never been allowed to merge with LN. Luckily most of the musicians I like still plan small to medium sized venues and I only have to deal with TM/LN once in awhile.

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Vitalik Buterin

Yeah I agree ticketmaster and co should be disintermediated, ideally people would just sell tickets as NFTs onchain. Though at the same time I don't think this will cause ticket prices to drop so much that they flip from "unacceptable" to "acceptable" to many people. So I think that we also need a culture that understands that it's okay for some high-demand fixed-size goods to be expensive in order to pay for making everything else affordable. eg. a world where we get rid of ticketmaster and all extra revenue goes to the artist (so prices don't go down) and in exchange music becomes public domain would be better than a world where we get rid of ticketmaster and prices go down (but getting a ticket is inevitably hard in other ways), and music stays under the copyright regime it has today. You want to focus on making the fixed-cost things freely accessible.

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Icetoad 🍕 🎩 🐈

I personally think that people should support small and medium sized musicians/bands more than they do, but I doubt that will ever really happen to a greater extent than currently.

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Icetoad 🍕 🎩 🐈 pfp

Icetoad 🍕 🎩 🐈

Right, removing the middle man would be great in terms of tickets but then I also think they have too much control over the promotion industry, particularly with their 360 deals. NFTs tickets onchain would help with achieving this and would also solve a couple other issues in the industry, but that's besides the point. In the era of Youtube and Spotify, recorded music sort of already is in the public domain as long as you are willing to listen to an ad or two, but I get what you are driving at.

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Daniel pfp

Most of industry is made up of intermediaries. Everyone takes their cut, those with the position to take more (usually not those with the means of production), for the most part they just take more. It would be great if there was a solution to greed but sadly I dont see crypto as being that.

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