The tickets don't lie—Gaga's fading

CNBC posted a video today with Chris Tsakalakis, the president of StubHub. For all those who don't know, StubHub is an online marketplace owned by eBay which provides services for buyers and sellers of tickets for sporting events, concerts, theatre, and other live entertainment. It has grown from the largest secondary-market ticket marketplace in the United States into the world's largest ticket marketplace.

What is a secondary-market ticket marketplace? Essentially people can buy tickets from official sources like Ticketmaster, and then resell them on StubHub. Sometimes people sell their ticket to a show if they can't go, but many others make a business out of it by scooping up as many tickets as possible for an event that is in high demand, and then reselling the tickets at a marked up price and keeping the difference.

When an act is very popular, tickets can sell on StubHub for twice, three times, even four times or more of the face value of the ticket. For example, Lana Del Rey's tour sold out in seconds, and tickets were appearing on StubHub for $700 or more.

As I stated in this article, resellers have been unable to sell Gaga's tickets, even when they are set at ridiculously low prices. The interview with Chris Tsakalakis has confirmed that what I said in that article was true. The demand for tickets is just not there, as tickets for Gaga's current tour have not even broken into the top-10 list of StubHub's most popular events.

He is quoted as saying: "One Direction is still in the top 10 for concerts on StubHub but Lady Gaga is not, and that's a little bit surprising this year. Even though she's touring and generally doing a lot of concerts she's not in our top 10 this year."

It's also worth mentioning that tour executives have denied reports that tickets were not selling well. Live Nation's Arthur Fogel told Billboard in late March that ticket sales were already at 80 percent of capacity at that time, with $26 million in gross revenue to date.

Of course this may be true if they're going by official numbers. But if people are buying out sections of the show for the sole purpose of reselling the tickets secondhand, then it's not really representative of actual demand or audience size. Kind of like when Gaga goads fans into buying multiple copies of her records.