Every action directed at making tickets more affordable will have the opposite effect of making scalping more profitable. Im amazed that a reverse auction style approach hasn’t caught on, when you are capacity limited it seems nearly optimal for extracting profit and kills the ticket scalping business model.

>it seems nearly optimal for extracting profit and kills the ticket scalping business model.

Also seems nearly optimal for alienating all but your richest fans. The extra profit you might extract from the concert might not actually put you ahead in the long term when fans stop caring about you because of your profit maximizing business practices.

This is Hacker News. The poors don't matter here; only profit.

What good is that when the scalpers and not your fans are the ones to benefit? All you're doing is screwing your fans even more because now they have to risk getting ripped off by a scam since tickets are only available from shady third party jerks.

If demand is so high that people can't afford tickets and you want to do something for the fans, put the game in a bigger stadium.

Because it is the scalpers charging that price and not the artist so people get angry at the scalpers and not the artist.

So hire some designated middleman to wear a villain mustache and claim to be taking a huge cut on paper while actually giving all of the money back to the artist under NDA.

This has to be what TicketMaster is doing, right?

The theory seems to be that they give the money to the venue instead of the artist, which causes the artist to not have to pay for the venue. Which is totally different, as you can imagine.

Indeed. And don't let the discontent and trouble-makers confuse you with smart-sounding phrases, like "money is fungible".

> It has been long known among industry figures that artists regularly move tickets through backdoor channels to directly profit from resale marketplaces while shunting blame to “scalpers” when fans are unable to get tickets at face value. Ed Sheeran’s management admitted the practice itself just last year, while rumors have swirled about other big names doing the same via their own held-back tickets that fans never have a shot at. The same regularly happens with professional sports teams.

> Barry Kahn, of Texas-based dynamic ticket pricing consultancy Qcue, doesn’t believe artists should be judged for using tactics including scalping their own tickets (or it’s newer twin, “Platinum” and dynamic pricing to demand). “The issue is the transparency,” he told Billboard. “If they get caught doing something they have said is wrong, then they are deceiving their fans.”

> In this specific instance, Billboard says that Metallica’s management moved up to 4,400 tickets per show over 20 concerts on the tour through intermediaries, masking the process by packaging the tickets as if they were held back for a sponsor.

- https://www.ticketnews.com/2019/07/live-nation-admits-artist...

Take it worth a grain of salt, I have no idea how true it is but it's at least a plausible explanation as to why artists may not want scalpers eliminated.

As opposed to alienating fans who don't know how to use bots, or fans who don't have the time to buy tickets the moment they drop, or fans who are unlucky.

Not every action.

Some festivals avoid it by requiring ID to be linked to the ticket and banning resale (though they may allow refund).

It’s funny, but “extracting maximum profit” isn’t the only motivation some people have in life. Especially when it comes to cultural events.

> It’s funny, but “extracting maximum profit” isn’t the only motivation some people have in life.

[citation needed]

More seriously though, it's true that people - arguably most people - have other motivations than purely materialistic ones. But, like every market, cultural events are a dynamic system. It follows a trajectory over time.

Slightly more greedy people have better outcomes than slightly less greedy ones. The least successful get filtered out. Iterate that over time. What results do you expect?

And yes, this is a general argument of why the market first makes things better, then makes them all go to shit. And it is confirmed by real world. Exceptions involve some factors that counteract the dynamics described above. Do you see such factors at play in entertainment event industry? I don't.

> Slightly more greedy people have better outcomes than slightly less greedy ones. The least successful get filtered out. Iterate that over time. What results do you expect?

Define "better outcomes" and "Least successful".

The most coveted and arguable most successful music festival in the UK, Glastonbury, operates in the way I described. A variety of other festivals in the UK do too, often due to the politics of the organisers (see, for example, Beautiful Days)

> Do you see such factors at play in entertainment event industry?

Yep, where people make it happen I see them at play and working well to create systems that both the organisers and the public want, and which lock out the third-party profiteers. It would be nice to see such things become more widespread. Though I agree we are less likely to see that where 'the industry' is in control, rather than artists or passionate individuals.

Triple the ticket price but give half away by lottery. Although, I guess scalpers ruin lotteries as well :(

The article itself mentions how scalpers just register hundreds or thousands of accounts to dramatically increase their odds at winning fan lotteries.

Do fan-club registration in person.

Then they just pay homeless people to register. Whatever clever you can come up with, they will figure out a way around it.

They're going to pay thousands of homeless people to register for the fan clubs of how many artists? Nevermind the logistics of the hiring, the payment alone eats into the margin.

When you're rich, you can do that. Being rich, by definition, means having more options available to you.

That's really what money is - a transferable token to persuade other people to do stuff on your behalf.

If the scalpers pay homeless people 10% of their profits rather than taking 100% then that's still better than the current situation.

This gets more complicated as they may go after gig economy workers first. They're a perfect target: the scalper's deal would have better reward/effort ratio than Uber, DoorDash, Deliveroo, et al.; gig workers look "normal" in ways homeless don't, and are desperate for cash to keep them from becoming homeless.

At that point, would scalper's contribution be net positive? Net better than it was? I'm not sure how to answer that.

Thats ok as long as those homeless will show up with a ticked and ID at the gate to enter the concert.

Run it like an airline, where your name is on the ticket and you don't get in unless it matches your ID. Either that or your ID is the ticket. Just bloop that big barcode on the back of your ID with your phone when you buy the admission, then let the guy bloop it again at the door when you go to the show. That would make some scenarios harder, like the trope about your boss handing you two extra tickets she can't use, but there's probably some way to bloop around that without giving the scalpers unfettered bloops.

The downsides for ID-verified entry are shared with ID-required voting.

Namely, if you are aware of intergroup variability in ID-having rates, is choosing it anyways a conscious discriminatory choice?

1/ attending a concert is not a civil right 2/ can't emphasize enough, but _get an ID_. While ID posession was used to discriminate against groups of people, the real problem here is "why doesn't everyone have an ID"?

Right, but I didn't say that attending a concert is a civil right. I also didn't say what the real problem was.

What I brought up was, knowing this, is still using ID discriminatory?

Is it? In the US, I'm not aware of any way someone can legally drive, be employed, have a bank account, or get a cell phone without having an ID. At the same time, as long as you were registered at birth, getting an ID from scratch is a little bit of legwork and probably less than $100, and that's probably subsidized if you don't have income. The number of people walking around without an ID and no way to get one has to be vanishingly small. I'm sure there's a certain fringe of people who are undocumented, on the run from the law, or otherwise encumbered in their ability to get one, but how far should we bend over to get a ticket fee from those people?

Edit: Dang it, the best answers always come after I close my laptop. "It would be discriminatory if the government didn't provide people a way to get ID. As a business owner, that's beyond the scope of my responsibility. Same as if someone showed up without $5 and wanted to buy a sandwich." ...is another way to look at it.

Who knows, if voting doesn’t motivate them, but concerts do, maybe it will cause more people to get IDs. Isn’t that a good thing?

I don’t think the artist has much say in the matter at that scale

Touring artist’s absolutely have a say in their ticket prices, after all it directly correlates to how much they will be paid. Once tickets are handed over to promoters and distributors then it becomes out of their control.

Festival appearance rates are agreed on in advance of ticket sales, so tickets prices are the responsibility of festival organisers.