>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.