As soon as you are selling tickets, you no longer have full control over that. If you want to optimize your audience, you need to make allowances, and that may mean a lottery of will-call tickets or something. You don't get to make money on those tickets by selling publicly and also have the the ability to fully craft who goes. That goes out the window once you decide you want to sell publicly, and IMO that's the way it should be. That's how markets work.
The set of all people willing to buy at $50 is at least as big as the set of all people willing to buy at more than $50. Demand curves slope downwards. If you supply enough to meet all demand at $50 and price at $50, then everyone who would buy at $50 does and there's no extra seats.
First, it's still a problem of finite space. It is not going to be practical to scale out until supply reaches demand in many locations. There are only so many Friday nights in a month, which also makes fungible repeat shows finite, and repeat shows cost time that could be better spent increasing global coverage.
Second, price and venue-filling are signals of quality, so there may actually be some people who do not purchase tickets that appear to be too cheap or do not go because they do not feel invested when the ticket price is low. Then this results in empty seats which negatively impact the artists publicity.
Third, the discriminator when you have a low price point but low supply is the willingness to get in line. This can be a valuable metric to select audiences. Removing it makes it harder for artists to select their audiences.
You're more okay with barring people over 25 and allowing scalping than disallowing scalping? Ideally, yes, the venue would resize to meet the needs of the artist, but this has already become a very complicated calculus, one possibly without the same solution space since there are a small number of fixed sized venues. It could simply be impossible to get the same audience by these methods.
> If the price is, say, $50, then there's a certain number of people who would buy at $50. If that number of seats is made available, then the scalper incentive disappears.
Right, but this assumes that there isn't an equivalently sized population of people willing to pay more that will buy them instead. My argument is that audiences aren't interchangable and that real harm is done when you force the artist to select the audience on ability to pay alone, as you are proposing.
Also, nothing says the scalpers get it right. They just go out of buisiness or make a loss if they don't. That doesn't stop them from getting it wrong and hurting the artist and the fans in the process.