Weekly Davespeak Will Never Cooperate With Ticket Scalpers
This website is for the DMB community and is supported by the community through a once-a-year donation drive. Weekly Davespeak has never made money, but manages to roughly break even thanks to the generous support from its members.
We don't run contextual advertisements anymore because we're self funded. The predominant amount that pop up for DMB keywords are for ticket brokers. Some of this site's older pages have them, but with little exception you have been getting an advertisement-free experience in our content and our forums since April 2006. For more information, review our donation thread from 2007.
Bucking Industry Trends
Industry trends show that companies like TicketMaster and LiveNation want to get in on the money being made in scalping by using euphemisms like the "secondary ticket market" or "prestige ticketing." There is good reason to believe that independent brokers service those who have written the "bot" software that automatically buys up good tickets before the general public has a fair chance to get at them. Tennessee is looking at legislation to block such activities.
Getting decent seats for a Dave Matthews Band show should not be about who is willing to pay the most money. Enough money is already changing hands in order to give DMB fans the production level and experience they are used to.
Doing the Right Thing
Encouraging scapling drives the cost of attending shows up for everyone. The extra money from third-party ticket brokers largely flows into the pockets of third-party companies that have no long-term interest in Dave Matthews Band, its music or its fans.
In addition, this site will continue to highlight any indicators that either Dave Matthews or DMB is participating events with ticketing practices or prices that are out of line with industry norms. For instance, in the past we've raised awareness of concerns with the Dave and Friends cruise, Dave and Tim tickets that require the use of a particular credit card, or questionable charity events.
A Price to Pay?
There is a price to pay for this. By foregoing the quick money that would show up from a ticket broker partnership, this site must improve itself with contributions from the community. Our moderation and writing staff volunteers their time. All programming and server maintenance, site software, configuration and administration of Weekly Davespeak's many offerings, including our DMB Facebook Application is handled on a volunteer basis.
In his post titled "Perspective from The Almanac" DMB Almanac staff member Matias, states that they too had to forego the potential for hundreds of additional dollars that could be used to pay for site development because a "capitalistic every-man-for-themselves attitude contradicts the socialistic spirit of helping-out-your-fellow-fans that the long-time dmb fan community is known for and that the band members themselves have encouraged since the very beginning."
Fortunately, the staff and community of this website also see the great value in leveraging good old-fashioned grass-roots donations and volunteer work to make improvements without taking dirty money from ticket brokers.
In summary, our ticketing forum guidelines read: "This is not a place to scalp tickets." To expound on this statement: Weekly Davespeak will never cooperate or collude with ticket scalpers or otherwise participate in the "secondary ticket market" by sending leads to ticket broker companies.
