Because sports teams and singers need broad audience interest to maintain their brand’s popularity, which can drive things like merchandise sales, future concerts, music streaming, etc.

If they simply sold to the highest bidders, the populace at large will stop being fans and they will move onto the next entertainer. In the short term, you might make a little extra from richer people, but longer term you will fall out of popular culture, and the rich will move on or not be sufficient in quantity to maintain as profitable of a following.

The scalpers grab most of the tickets at open anyway.

And I doubt that a very large number of fans are concertgoers at all. How many football fans actually go to the superbowl?

I looked it up and it's ~80k, while 100M watch on TV. The cheapest tickets are ~$5000 dollars

There's a difference between "the odds are against you" and "nope, sorry". Even if those odds are extreme.

There is always the option to change the odds for fans. E.g. offer cheap tickets for members of the fan club and last minute tickets to fans who post the most convincing appeals on social media.

The largest NFL stadium seats about 85,000 people. So you can't sell more than that for the single game. Two years ago they actually set the record lowest attendance due to Covid restrictions - only about 21k were allowed in the building. I believe it's the first SB to ever sell below capacity, and you'd have to go back to the second world war to find an NFL championship that did the same.

Also, music is fundamentally better live. Football is not. I say this as an avid fan of both who attends both live.

But for many big artists the tickets are sold out immediately and it is just scalpers trying to get what they can for them. I'd like to know how many people attending a big concert got their tix directly vs got resold ones not at face value.

This argument makes no sense. A stadium excludes the same number of fans regardless of your selection criteria.

Yes, just as a concert does.

Creating hunger games in the ticket buying process doesn’t change that

Because their product is essentially unpriceable. If the concerts were priced by demand their demand would dry up considering that instead of forty people wanting to hear jazz on a saturday night you've got 30 million people screaming their lungs out - the only reasonable market response to this is for the pricing to adjust so that only the most wealthy can attend but then you'll get an issue where the performer will lose mass appeal since they so infrequently perform for "regular people" and it will cheapen their brand. It's a weird catch-22 and the real honest solution is that recordings are the solution to this problem but people still obsess over live performances.

Scalpers provide them the service of absorbing demand risk and having someone to blame for the gap between perceived and market value. (It doesn't have to be scalpers; see also Ticketmaster. The point is that it's valuable to farm this out to third parties that everyone can agree to hate on.)

So the obvious arbitrage is to scalp their own tickets. Capture both the gap and save face, just don't let anyone know. /s

They are. Ticketmaster does dynamic pricing now for big shows. Accurate pricing is basically inaccessible beforehand; there’s no chart like in the past with various sections costing specific $s. For the Taylor Swift show in Seattle they published a range of ticket prices from $49-$199… we paid ~$600 for seats in section 131 that were VIP seats by default (that also added to the price; but the pricing was totally opaque).

$600 per ticket?

Yup; $600 per ticket.

There would probably be some backlash for a Taylor Swift concert where the whole arena was $600 VIP tickets.

Rolling Stones though? Maybe not.

Seats 10+ rows behind us sold for $2,900 today… concert tickets are a crazy business these days.

Can confirm this.

So I got tickets to the Sunday 7/23 show in Seattle and the 5/27 show in New Jersey (and would have had seats for the 4/29 in Atlanta but my dad’s phone was on silent and he missed the 2FA code for his capital one card — I’ll have to get those from scalpers) and what’s interesting is that I got floor seats for a VIP package in New Jersey and “regular” non-VIP floor seats for Seattle. It was $190 difference after fees between shows.

For New Jersey, it was $749 list for floor VIP and then $866 per with fees. For Seattle, it was $539 list and $650 with fees. Getting the LED laminate thing and the other collectible stuff isn’t worthless but it’s not a $200 upcharge.

But as you said, the whole thing was so opaque, I just bought what I could buy. I would’ve paid more if I’d needed to. A friend who is going on 7/22 in Seattle (we were on Zoom doing it together) wound up paying $900 after fees for her floor seats that were in a differently named (but identically featured, perk wise) VIP package, meaning some of them went even higher.

So the whole thing was just totally opaque but there wasn’t even choice for people who were indiscriminate on pricing (buying from scalpers aside). It was madness just trying to get tickets at all. I needed six seats for 5/27 and I’m still not sure how I was able to get six floor seats together, VIP or otherwise. After doing the whole thing in three cities across two days, every ticket they had available sold, regardless of price. If they’d raised prices 50%, I don’t think it would have changed anything. Some of it is demand but some of it is absolutely people buying on speculation to try to flip.

Unless an industry connection comes through, I’ll wind up paying well above list for the Atlanta show I want to take my mom to, I know that. My only issue is that StubHub/Vivid/others charge at least 50% on top of the resale price in fees. So even if I was willing to spend $1500 a ticket for 100 section seats (and to take my mom, I would), I’d wind up paying another $600 or $700 per ticket just in fees. And that’s when I get pissed off and start to try to wait out the people who bought tickets just to speculate until they lower their prices to be more aligned with market forces.

Sometimes promoters hold tickets and put them on the secondary market themselves. But they sell tickets to scalpers as a way to gaurantee a certain level of profit. Which lowers their risk of losing money, especially when spread over a large amount of events. The scalper business model is to buy risk from the promoter, and then selling the convenience of not planning ahead to consumers. Said differently, If promoters try to capture maximum value for every ticket, they will risk making less money at a slower rate.

That said, I think it might work if they start every sale of tickets with an initial high price that reduces on a defined schedule. So people with more money to spend can gaurantee a spot for themselves, while everyone else waits for the tickets to get cheaper.

Edit: ha! I obviously didn't rtfa before my comment.

Yes, or could simply be a live market for the tickets where people can put in limit orders etc. Then would converge to fair market value quickly and people would still have the option to bite the bullet and pay the higher prices.

Though volume/liquidity would be at question, but bots/arbitrage would hopefully help there.

If they really want to set artificially low prices and prioritize fans over scalpers then they need a queue and a process by which they verify the queued person is human. Lots of labor involved. Though maybe using SSN (in the US) to limit tickets per buyer?

Name on ticket. Check photo ID at door.