Last Saturday, Kendrick Lamar rocked Georgia State’s annual Pantherpalooza concert series, performing before a sold out show at the Sports Arena in what was probably the university’s best sponsored gig in recent memory.
For students lucky enough to buy a ticket in time, they got to see an up-and-coming artist at rock-bottom prices. But for anyone who waited more than four days to buy tickets or tried to avoid the long lines initially, finding one of the 3,500 tickets to the show proved more than a little daunting, as a quick analysis of Craigslist showed just a few hours before the concert showed.
In fact, soon after the university sold out, tickets popped up all over the online classified site ranging from actual cost to more than 10 times their original value. Based on a further analysis of students on Twitter trying to scalp their tickets, it appears some young “entrepreneurs” overbought and sold their excess tickets online for a profit, quite literally at the expense of their fellow classmates.
While it may be easy to dismiss this as a harmless way for some students to make a quick buck, it’s also a clear abuse of student fees, depriving otherwise willing students the opportunity to attend what’s supposed to be a community-building event in lieu of strangers willing to pay top dollar for admission.
Moving forward, it’s time the university evaluates how it grants access to events like Pantherpalooza.
Currently, Spotlight says it’s looking at different ways to handle ticket administration, including a system that would scan and check how many tickets individual students have bought before selling to them, but such a system doesn’t yet exist anywhere in the university system, according to Phillip Smith, Spotlight advisor and assistant director for programs.
We welcome that change. And we have a few ideas to improve the process, too.
If financial restrictions make it impossible to make events like Pantherpalooza free, maybe the university should shorten the window for when it sales tickets to the week of the show. Or, perhaps it can force people to pay at the door with show student ID with a maximum of 2 to 3 visitor tickets per student.
Ultimately, change rests with the students, though. Hopefully they’ll make the right choice next year.
