Secondary-market observation limits

Status and interpretation

Live Index Performance Estimate — not reported box office. This version 1.0.0 protocol defines what Live Index will accept before publishing an estimate; it is not a claim that observations have already been collected or that the protocol has been validated against actual settlements. No estimate rows are released with this document. A method can establish a reproducible decision rule without establishing any particular show’s attendance, gross, sellout status or promoter profit.

Offers are not transactions

A resale page displays tickets offered under a marketplace’s rules at an observation time. A listing price does not establish a completed sale, a seller’s net receipt, an artist payment or the price on the primary market. Record marketplace, timestamp, event identity, currency, displayed charges and ticket category. Availability on a resale marketplace cannot establish whether the primary allocation has sold out.

Observation boundaries

• Use publicly permitted observation without bypassing access controls or collecting buyer or seller identities. Preserve the page’s access and terms limitations.
• Separate listed quantity from unique tickets. The same ticket may be offered on multiple platforms or through speculative or broker inventory; deduplication is not possible without a reliable ticket identity.
• A listing disappearing may reflect sale, withdrawal, repricing, transfer or a marketplace update. Do not classify disappearance as a transaction.
• A quoted resale premium requires a comparable primary price, seat category and fee scope. Comparing the highest resale offer with the lowest primary from-price does not measure a typical markup.

Price interpretation

Treat asking-price ranges as offers with explicit selection rules. A cheapest listing may have restricted transfer, obstructed view or package exclusions; record those qualifiers when observed. A modal or median offer requires a declared population and weighting, not a handpicked set of dramatic listings. Do not treat a checkout total as the seller’s net proceeds. Mandatory fees, taxes and optional services must retain their original display scope.

Relationship to performance estimates

Secondary observations are contextual only and do not satisfy the mandatory primary inventory or price-band requirements. A busy resale page can coexist with unsold primary inventory. High asking prices can coexist with low transaction volume. A later reported box-office return measures a different market and does not validate resale asks. Publish a limitation when primary comparisons are unavailable instead of creating a combined average. Preserve source and date when quoting the marketplace; no resale observation establishes venue ownership, promoter exclusivity or final artist income.

Release gate

Publication requires a dated primary ticket-inventory observation, a venue configuration source, primary price-band evidence, promoter and ticketing evidence, a confidence classification and a record-specific limitations statement. A later reading is a new observation, not an overwrite of the previous state. The pilot remains withheld from search and the sitemap until ten observations individually pass these requirements. Downloads are offered only for real released rows, never for an empty demonstration or synthetic sample. Inventory protocol, capacity protocol and price-band protocol describe different inputs; none substitutes for the others.