I can’t claim I’m the first one to think about this, but every time Ticketmaster shows up on HN I keep coming back to this idea:
Sell the tickets with regressive price based on time. Sales starts say 2 months before event, initial price is truly exorbitant, say one million dollars. Price decreases linearly down to zero (or true cost price). At any point, people can see current price and the seats left.
Now every potential spectator is playing a game of chicken: the more you wait, the lower the price, but also lower are the chances that you’ll have a ticket. That would capture precisely the maximum amount of dollars that each person is willing to pay for it.
This idea sounds extremely greedy, because it is, so I can’t fathom that no one ever pitched this in a Ticketmaster board meeting.
My idea, however, was a bit less greedy. Once you sold the last ticket, that would be your actual (and fair) price-per-ticket for the concert, and everyone would be refunded the difference. You’ll never know how low it will go, so you shouldn’t overpay and hope it will lower later. I’m pretty sure Ticketmaster will skip this last part if they decide to implement this.
There are multiple issues with my idea, it’s elitist, promotes financial risks on cohorts poorly capable to bear them, etc etc, but it will definitely fix the scalpers problem. Pick your poison.
The scalper problem is a mispricing problem: Scalpers are just arbitrageurs because ticket prices are artificially very low.
If you want to fix that, you need to ask yourself "why are ticket prices artificially very low?" first. The answer probably isn't "artists/venues like leaving money on the table".
Ticketmaster has it's own resale platform. It's able to double dip. They basically say tickets are relatively cheap and scalpers are the bad guys. They encourage the scalpers. Then they can resell using their own resale platform and they get fees on top of that.
The fees on re-sellers are crazy, and they take fees from both seller and buyer.
Seller Side:
List price: $100
StubHub seller fee (15%): -$15
Seller receives: $85
Buyer Side:
Ticket price: $100
StubHub buyer fee (10-15%, let's use 12%): +$12
Buyer pays: $112
StubHub's Take:
From seller: $15
From buyer: $12
Total StubHub revenue: $27
So they're making an additional ~27% (on the "true" market price) in addition to the ~25% they charge in the primary market. So if the market price was $200, if they just charged that they would make $50. But instead they'll sell it for $100, make $25 on the primary and an additional $50 when sold in the secondary market.
They don't own StubHub but they have their own. In 2017 they opened up TicketExchange which allow the sale and validation of tickets on third-party websites, including StubHub, which they did to capture some of that amount. They get to play like the reasonable party here, the scalpers are taking the heat and they're getting a cut of that.
They do other things that's baffling like selling tickets a year ahead of time, which is kind of weird considering very few people, even big fans, would be really on top of buying tickets a year out. It's obviously designed for scalpers.
You can easily solve this by having the ticket tied to a name and requiring you to show ID, maybe allow others to dump back at face value, but that would likely be gamed as well but not as easily (you dump your tickets and let someone else pick them up at that exact moment). Or make them non-transferrable but that would greatly reduce the value to fans.
I think a significant portion is that artists like leaving money on the table. being perceived as greedy can cause reputational harm significantly greater than the increased ticket revenues that the market will bear.
Ticket sales companies and scalpers are holding the bag for everyone else.
It is extremely convenient for artists, promoters and venues that ticketing sites will tack on a bunch of extra fees, take the blame for pushing up the price of tickets, then share out most of that extra cash to everyone else in the chain.
Scalpers are effectively providing financing for the rest of the industry - it's obviously preferable to get paid for the entire tour on the day it's announced, rather than having to bear the cashflow risks yourself. There is of course absolutely nothing stopping a promoter from reserving some proportion of tickets to be sold directly to secondary resellers at substantially above face value, or on an agreed profit-sharing basis.
It's only mispricing if you take market dynamics, and making the most money possible, as paramount. If your goal is to actually bring fans to your show, you might want a different system.
One music festival issues ID-linked tickets using a lottery 8 months in advance. If only the richest people attended, it would actually destroy the festival. And no, they can't hold it more than once each year so that prices drop.
Are they mispriced? Or is it just hard to price goods where some people are willing to pay a MUCH higher premium than others? That is, if I can sell 5000 tickets at 10$ or 10 tickets at 1000$, the right price may just be 10$. And trying to find a way to convince those 10 people to pay the 1000$ they were willing to, in a way that doesn't affect my reputation too much, may just be too hard.
I agree that reverse auctions would be a simple solution the current scalper problem. If demand outweighs supply, scalpers drive up the prices toward their economic equilibrium anyway, making ticket prices just as "unfair" to the poor, but with additional problems of trust...
Nobody wants to fix the scalpers problem because, to the Ticketmaster monopoly, scalpers aren't a problem. The Ticketmaster monopoly values known, consistent, derisked revenue over possible lottery ticket windfalls with the possibility of complete wipeout. Scalpers do exactly that.
Scalpers are only a problem to fans. And scalpers are only a problem online because they can wipe out the entire ticket base. The "solution" is to introduce offline friction to the problem--anything which requires a person to show up and buy only a limited number of tickets. Unfortunately, that introduces a lot of uncertainty into the system instead of guaranteed cash flow and the business side finds that to be anathema.
However, the real solution is to bust up the Ticketmaster monopoly. If each of the individual actors (ticket sales, venue owner, performers) have to operate independently and have to de-risk at each point, scalpers become an enemy to be neutralized.
I also have a completely unjustified suspicion that scalping is hiding a lot of money laundering so lots of people have vested interest in it continuing.
This is a similar idea to a second price auction, but in reverse.
Everyone puts in their maximum price they're willing to pay, and the lowest price that fills the seats is what people pay.
The advantage to this model is that there is no financial risk to overpaying.
Of course with an open bid continuous auction there are problems with bid shading (manipulating the auction by posting prices mostly meant to influence other bidders), but it's overall economically very close to your idea.
People don't know the maximum price they're willing to pay. There's actually a probability distribution, not a hard cutoff, and certainly not one known in advance. The higher the price is, the less likely I am to buy it. Auctions work for two classses of people: spherical humans in a vacuum, and economists.
Don’t worry, there’s no greedy, rent-seeking rock that hasn’t been overturned. Your idea would cost them way too much money. Since we’ve embraced scalping as a legal business model, Ticketmaster makes money on all sides of most transactions. It’s in their interest to for you to have maximum anxiety and buy as early as possible to increase the odds that you’ll resell.
The bots and scrapers aren’t black hat, Ticketmaster makes some nominal effort to “stop them”, but somehow those pesky hackers manage to figure out how to make Ticketmaster more money. Ticketmaster is adept at making the purchase experience high friction and difficult, so those bots must be really clever. (Lol)
The time at which scalpers buy tickets becomes irrelevant. They can resell tickets at arbitrary-high-price + margin because buyer know they will receive refund for the exceed amount, thus pay only (final price + scalper margin) for the ticket eventually.
Bonus: buy ticket from scalpers after price settled, you will get a determined price, no more guessing and find inner peace.
The problem for scalpers is that if they buy too many tickets, the final price may become too high to be attractive for real buyers.
The option that strikes me as missing, is making users pay a cost before they are randomly entered in a lottery for the ticket.
So, for example, everyone pays $0.01 on their credit card, or does a holding charge on their credit card, or registers their identity. All in a 5 minute (or 1 day!) window. And then after the window, tickets are randomly distributed amongst every card which so registered.
You could check multiple things - phone and card and Government ID if necessary (lowering the privacy).
This also feels fairer and less stressful - instead of a lottery based on your internet access, or ability to run lots of browsers at once.
This feels harder for scalpers to do to me, as they need more fake identities, but I'd be curious about the actual ratios when trying it. What goes wrong?
Another one I predict is that you can't buy digitally. For examples, the Lewes fireworks display you have to buy tickets in person in a bookshop in Lewes. Doesn't help if you make a digital ticketing system though!
Pearl Jam does something similar with annual membership in their fan club. Each concert has some designated seats set aside for members of the club, with the best seats going to the members with the longest consecutive subscriptions. Allowing the membership to lapse resets your priority level if you subscribe again.
(Author here) Yes, every kind of lottery/raffle is a possible solution but only with strong identity verification to avoid double-entry and hence only with sacrificing privacy, as mentioned in the article.
I asked why are school vouchers bad since it’s a single payer system.
The “progressives” told me it would starve public schools of funds and students since private schools would admit only the best and brightest
So I said — don’t let the schools choose. Let the people choose. If the school is filled then you use a lottery for who can actually get in, M of N people. Simple.
Decades ago a local popular public magnet high school near me had a lottery system like that.
Students would apply for the school and M of N applicants would be picked randomly.
It turns out the administrators running the lottery would run the randomization program until it gave them the student distribution they wanted (read: the best and brightest, and since it's the south... somehow whiter than expected).
That has been tried before. What happens is that people choose the school where there is easiest to get good grades. Fast forward a generation or two and there is a race to the bottom, schools take their mission to prepare for standardized testing seriously at the expense of learning. Over time, our outcome will depend on what you measure.
School systems are also special because you don't really want to overprovision school seats, so if there at the end of the day are as many seats as there are pupils in the system as a whole, there can only be selection and never competition in the economic sense.
There will be a concert for 750th anniversary of Amsterdam in June (held on the highway ring around the town which will be closed). Tickets were free, sold out in 5 mins, immediately available from scalpers for 200 euros.
Well yes, the concert is funded by city, and they wanted everyone to have a chance at attending, no matter what their income was. Not everything needs to be sold.
The problem there was not having enough security - it's like store giving out free popcorn, and someone comes and steals the whole cart. In the physical world, there would be someone standing next to the cart watching that people take reasonable amounts. In the digital world, nothing was done, so thieves stole a lot.
Not sure what the best solution was to be there... I like the idea of giving people few days to sign up, then randomly choosing who gets to go. Of course this has its own problems - for example you want to allow groups, but this can be abused. Identity verification helps with that, but this makes ticket checking much slower....
Yeah, not (too) surprising after a few years in the anti-bot industry. Last week I looked into a Binance CAPTCHA solver that didn’t use a browser at all, just a basic HTTP client. The attacker had reverse engineered the entire signal collection and response flow, including how the CAPTCHA was marked as solved. They were able to forge the expected telemetry despite some obfuscation.
https://blog.castle.io/what-a-binance-captcha-solver-tells-u...
This is pretty standard now in bot-heavy spaces like ticketing or sneaker drops. CAPTCHA often just ends up being a protocol to collect signals, and if those aren’t tightly bound to the browser/runtime, they get spoofed.
Also not surprised PoW isn’t holding up. Someone reverse engineered the PerimeterX PoW and converted it to CUDA to accelerate solving:
https://github.com/re-jevi/PerimiterXCudaSolver/blob/main/po...
At some point, it’s hard to make PoW slow enough for bots without also killing UX for humans on low-end devices.
The reality now is the ticket sellers and bands are the main scalpers and everyone else are now secondary scalpers.
Now that tickets are all electronic and the ticket sellers operate secondary markets there is no "face value" anymore and pricing is dynamic. Not all tickets are released at once and many are offered at "platinum" prices at first.
All through the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's and 00's concert tickets were around $40-$50 in 2025 dollars, now that is just the service charge. Just go on eBay and look at some ticket stubs then put the price / date into the CPI calculator.
It turns out that the bands couldn't beat the scalpers so they became the scalpers, charging outrageous prices with the assistance of the ticketing companies.
So stopping bots isn't as important as it was when CAPTCHAs were effective, since there is a lot less money on the table for professional scalpers to capture.
Concert tickets are still that low, you just can't go to stadium shows for supermassive artists at that price. A saturday night at a popular EDM venue with a 2k capacity headlining an artist with ~500k monthly listeners on Spotify will run you about $25 for the floor or $50 for VIP. A "sticky floor" bar venue ticket with a capacity of maybe 300 for an alt-z band with somewhere in the realm of 250k-3M monthly listeners on Spotify will run you about the same.
Being up at the rails at a Girl in Red concert set me back $60 at a 5k person venue. If you want to see supermassive artists for that kind of unit price you have to "buy bulk" and go to festivals.
Most of my concert tickets are still priced around $40 inclusive, after taxes and fees, and from the likes of LiveNation, Etix, DICE, AXS, and so on.
All my friends that complain about the rising cost of concerts tickets don’t realize that they just see the same old bands year over year. These scrappy up and coming bands that they saw as a kid aren’t scrappy anymore. That’s why blink-182 can charge $700 for the pleasure and still sell out — because most of their fans are in their late 20s or 30s, have disposable income, and number in the millions.
Go to a $20 show for a band today and who knows, maybe they will charge you $700 in 20 years. Plus you can tell everyone that you saw them before it was cool. /s
In some cases, but in most cases even well known bands that had been around had tickets that highschoolers could afford. Only a handful of bands were like triple the average and would have been the likes of Rolling Stones Springsteen and such, but aside from them, no, most well known bands were not selling tickets at ludicrous prices.
I am unsympathetic when people insist on selling things for the wrong price and then come up with these elaborate schemes for fixing the problems they themselves caused.
If they would simply sell tickets for the prices people are willing to pay in the first place then they wouldn't need to invade privacy or any of this stuff. I've heard the arguments they use to justify why they don't and they're all hogwash.
This problem with this is that it assumes a supply and demand shaped problem that markets solve.
You can’t just make more Taylor Swift to meet demand. You can’t open more Taylor Swifts in different regions. Acts have a very low very rigid upper supply limit. So if you price up at that demand it puts it out of reach of almost everyone. And that’s a bad outcome for almost everyone.
If you insist on only seeing Taylor Swift, this is what you get. There are way more talented artists than will ever play at these giant stadium shows. She isn't a better musician than all of those other artists, she is just more popular.
Because artists need an at least semi-competent vis-a-vis, AKA audience. This is the main proposition for entering a stage to begin with. And chances are that the most economical potent ticket buyers are not in this group and probably also not the most enthusiastic about the act. So there's a natural incentive to aim not for the highest cap, but for a somewhat realistic medium. I.e., "the prices people are willing to pay" are probably not the prices artists are willing to perform at.
(Edit: there's a reason for opera houses providing cheap standing room for enthusiasts – it keeps the art alive.)
If people paying high prices for tickets makes the event worse, as people seem to believe without evidence, then prices will come down, solving the problem naturally. These arguments make zero sense.
Because the whole business of scalpers is exploiting the difference between the list price and the price people are willing to pay. If this gap didn't exist scalping wouldn't be profitable.
(As far as this article as discussing. They also serve some use for reselling tickets when you meant to go but can't but this doesn't have any more downsides)
> The naive economic solution to the problem would be raising ticket prices step by step until it is no longer attractive for scalpers to resell your ticket
You can also just do like The Cure did and destroy the secondary market entirely: you can sell tickets through the platform and only for what you paid for them.
If all tickets are the same price, then any buyer-seller combination will do. I believe the seller doesn’t get to choose the buyer and both are anonymous. No way to coordinate such an out-of-band payment.
They can demand all they want, but they can't guarantee any way of getting the ticket to the person that send a payment... which makes it a bit of a tall demand.
This is the law in Denmark, and I think Ireland and several other European countries.
Tickets must not be sold for more than the original price. Ticketmaster etc are still happy to take part in the action: their resale system still charges a second set of ticket fees for a resale, though the sale price is limited to the purchase price.
A few months back I built a cryptographic alternative to CAPTCHAs called Ghost Keys[1] that uses a small donation as proof-of-humanity. For donating you get an anonymous keypair that works across services without repeated CAPTCHAs. The economic friction doesn't scale for bot operators, and donations fund our non-profit[2].
Keys embed approximate timestamps, so services can set age limits. The system was designed for Freenet integration where reputation can be attached to keys - repeat abuse would degrade a key's public reputation over time.
In the event ticket situation, how does this change the economics compared to just adding $1 to the ticket price? (or whatever your minimum donation threshold is)
It would add $1 to the ticket price, the goal is more to replace CAPTCHAs (which cost essentially nothing to defeat these days), but you're right that it wouldn't be a silver bullet in the ticket scalping scenario.
Readit News
Sell the tickets with regressive price based on time. Sales starts say 2 months before event, initial price is truly exorbitant, say one million dollars. Price decreases linearly down to zero (or true cost price). At any point, people can see current price and the seats left.
Now every potential spectator is playing a game of chicken: the more you wait, the lower the price, but also lower are the chances that you’ll have a ticket. That would capture precisely the maximum amount of dollars that each person is willing to pay for it.
This idea sounds extremely greedy, because it is, so I can’t fathom that no one ever pitched this in a Ticketmaster board meeting.
My idea, however, was a bit less greedy. Once you sold the last ticket, that would be your actual (and fair) price-per-ticket for the concert, and everyone would be refunded the difference. You’ll never know how low it will go, so you shouldn’t overpay and hope it will lower later. I’m pretty sure Ticketmaster will skip this last part if they decide to implement this.
There are multiple issues with my idea, it’s elitist, promotes financial risks on cohorts poorly capable to bear them, etc etc, but it will definitely fix the scalpers problem. Pick your poison.
If you want to fix that, you need to ask yourself "why are ticket prices artificially very low?" first. The answer probably isn't "artists/venues like leaving money on the table".
The fees on re-sellers are crazy, and they take fees from both seller and buyer.
Seller Side:
List price: $100
StubHub seller fee (15%): -$15
Seller receives: $85
Buyer Side:
Ticket price: $100
StubHub buyer fee (10-15%, let's use 12%): +$12
Buyer pays: $112
StubHub's Take:
From seller: $15
From buyer: $12
Total StubHub revenue: $27
So they're making an additional ~27% (on the "true" market price) in addition to the ~25% they charge in the primary market. So if the market price was $200, if they just charged that they would make $50. But instead they'll sell it for $100, make $25 on the primary and an additional $50 when sold in the secondary market.
They don't own StubHub but they have their own. In 2017 they opened up TicketExchange which allow the sale and validation of tickets on third-party websites, including StubHub, which they did to capture some of that amount. They get to play like the reasonable party here, the scalpers are taking the heat and they're getting a cut of that.
They do other things that's baffling like selling tickets a year ahead of time, which is kind of weird considering very few people, even big fans, would be really on top of buying tickets a year out. It's obviously designed for scalpers.
You can easily solve this by having the ticket tied to a name and requiring you to show ID, maybe allow others to dump back at face value, but that would likely be gamed as well but not as easily (you dump your tickets and let someone else pick them up at that exact moment). Or make them non-transferrable but that would greatly reduce the value to fans.
It is extremely convenient for artists, promoters and venues that ticketing sites will tack on a bunch of extra fees, take the blame for pushing up the price of tickets, then share out most of that extra cash to everyone else in the chain.
Scalpers are effectively providing financing for the rest of the industry - it's obviously preferable to get paid for the entire tour on the day it's announced, rather than having to bear the cashflow risks yourself. There is of course absolutely nothing stopping a promoter from reserving some proportion of tickets to be sold directly to secondary resellers at substantially above face value, or on an agreed profit-sharing basis.
One music festival issues ID-linked tickets using a lottery 8 months in advance. If only the richest people attended, it would actually destroy the festival. And no, they can't hold it more than once each year so that prices drop.
I agree that reverse auctions would be a simple solution the current scalper problem. If demand outweighs supply, scalpers drive up the prices toward their economic equilibrium anyway, making ticket prices just as "unfair" to the poor, but with additional problems of trust...
Nobody wants to fix the scalpers problem because, to the Ticketmaster monopoly, scalpers aren't a problem. The Ticketmaster monopoly values known, consistent, derisked revenue over possible lottery ticket windfalls with the possibility of complete wipeout. Scalpers do exactly that.
Scalpers are only a problem to fans. And scalpers are only a problem online because they can wipe out the entire ticket base. The "solution" is to introduce offline friction to the problem--anything which requires a person to show up and buy only a limited number of tickets. Unfortunately, that introduces a lot of uncertainty into the system instead of guaranteed cash flow and the business side finds that to be anathema.
However, the real solution is to bust up the Ticketmaster monopoly. If each of the individual actors (ticket sales, venue owner, performers) have to operate independently and have to de-risk at each point, scalpers become an enemy to be neutralized.
I also have a completely unjustified suspicion that scalping is hiding a lot of money laundering so lots of people have vested interest in it continuing.
If you want to remove scalpers, just make sure tickets are non-transferrable and run an auction for price discovery.
I built it on the blockchain years ago.
Everyone puts in their maximum price they're willing to pay, and the lowest price that fills the seats is what people pay.
The advantage to this model is that there is no financial risk to overpaying.
Of course with an open bid continuous auction there are problems with bid shading (manipulating the auction by posting prices mostly meant to influence other bidders), but it's overall economically very close to your idea.
The bots and scrapers aren’t black hat, Ticketmaster makes some nominal effort to “stop them”, but somehow those pesky hackers manage to figure out how to make Ticketmaster more money. Ticketmaster is adept at making the purchase experience high friction and difficult, so those bots must be really clever. (Lol)
Bonus: buy ticket from scalpers after price settled, you will get a determined price, no more guessing and find inner peace.
The problem for scalpers is that if they buy too many tickets, the final price may become too high to be attractive for real buyers.
https://community.intercoin.app/t/intercoin-applications-auc...
also:
https://community.intercoin.app/t/applications-of-intercoin-...
Ticketmaster should be destroyed!
So, for example, everyone pays $0.01 on their credit card, or does a holding charge on their credit card, or registers their identity. All in a 5 minute (or 1 day!) window. And then after the window, tickets are randomly distributed amongst every card which so registered.
You could check multiple things - phone and card and Government ID if necessary (lowering the privacy).
This also feels fairer and less stressful - instead of a lottery based on your internet access, or ability to run lots of browsers at once.
This feels harder for scalpers to do to me, as they need more fake identities, but I'd be curious about the actual ratios when trying it. What goes wrong?
Another one I predict is that you can't buy digitally. For examples, the Lewes fireworks display you have to buy tickets in person in a bookshop in Lewes. Doesn't help if you make a digital ticketing system though!
Removes all the uncertainty and risk and puts it on the scalpers.
Why?
Crypto removes middlemen
Then you just have auctions and tickets are not transferable. No middlemen. Simple and honest price discovery.
And if your ID doesn't match the ticket, you don't get in.
It's successful in keeping tickets in the hands of families and fans instead of resale.
The “progressives” told me it would starve public schools of funds and students since private schools would admit only the best and brightest
So I said — don’t let the schools choose. Let the people choose. If the school is filled then you use a lottery for who can actually get in, M of N people. Simple.
Students would apply for the school and M of N applicants would be picked randomly.
It turns out the administrators running the lottery would run the randomization program until it gave them the student distribution they wanted (read: the best and brightest, and since it's the south... somehow whiter than expected).
School systems are also special because you don't really want to overprovision school seats, so if there at the end of the day are as many seats as there are pupils in the system as a whole, there can only be selection and never competition in the economic sense.
https://nos.nl/artikel/2568164-chaos-bij-ticketuitgifte-voor...
The problem there was not having enough security - it's like store giving out free popcorn, and someone comes and steals the whole cart. In the physical world, there would be someone standing next to the cart watching that people take reasonable amounts. In the digital world, nothing was done, so thieves stole a lot.
Not sure what the best solution was to be there... I like the idea of giving people few days to sign up, then randomly choosing who gets to go. Of course this has its own problems - for example you want to allow groups, but this can be abused. Identity verification helps with that, but this makes ticket checking much slower....
This is pretty standard now in bot-heavy spaces like ticketing or sneaker drops. CAPTCHA often just ends up being a protocol to collect signals, and if those aren’t tightly bound to the browser/runtime, they get spoofed.
Also not surprised PoW isn’t holding up. Someone reverse engineered the PerimeterX PoW and converted it to CUDA to accelerate solving: https://github.com/re-jevi/PerimiterXCudaSolver/blob/main/po... At some point, it’s hard to make PoW slow enough for bots without also killing UX for humans on low-end devices.
Now that tickets are all electronic and the ticket sellers operate secondary markets there is no "face value" anymore and pricing is dynamic. Not all tickets are released at once and many are offered at "platinum" prices at first.
All through the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's and 00's concert tickets were around $40-$50 in 2025 dollars, now that is just the service charge. Just go on eBay and look at some ticket stubs then put the price / date into the CPI calculator.
It turns out that the bands couldn't beat the scalpers so they became the scalpers, charging outrageous prices with the assistance of the ticketing companies.
So stopping bots isn't as important as it was when CAPTCHAs were effective, since there is a lot less money on the table for professional scalpers to capture.
Being up at the rails at a Girl in Red concert set me back $60 at a 5k person venue. If you want to see supermassive artists for that kind of unit price you have to "buy bulk" and go to festivals.
All my friends that complain about the rising cost of concerts tickets don’t realize that they just see the same old bands year over year. These scrappy up and coming bands that they saw as a kid aren’t scrappy anymore. That’s why blink-182 can charge $700 for the pleasure and still sell out — because most of their fans are in their late 20s or 30s, have disposable income, and number in the millions.
Go to a $20 show for a band today and who knows, maybe they will charge you $700 in 20 years. Plus you can tell everyone that you saw them before it was cool. /s
If they would simply sell tickets for the prices people are willing to pay in the first place then they wouldn't need to invade privacy or any of this stuff. I've heard the arguments they use to justify why they don't and they're all hogwash.
You can’t just make more Taylor Swift to meet demand. You can’t open more Taylor Swifts in different regions. Acts have a very low very rigid upper supply limit. So if you price up at that demand it puts it out of reach of almost everyone. And that’s a bad outcome for almost everyone.
(Edit: there's a reason for opera houses providing cheap standing room for enthusiasts – it keeps the art alive.)
I've heard the arguments they use to justify why they do and they're all hogwash.
What is wrong with market price?
(As far as this article as discussing. They also serve some use for reselling tickets when you meant to go but can't but this doesn't have any more downsides)
You can also just do like The Cure did and destroy the secondary market entirely: you can sell tickets through the platform and only for what you paid for them.
Most tickets these days are digital.
Dead Comment
Tickets must not be sold for more than the original price. Ticketmaster etc are still happy to take part in the action: their resale system still charges a second set of ticket fees for a resale, though the sale price is limited to the purchase price.
[1] https://freenet.org/ghostkey/
[2] https://freenet.org/
Does the number of keys need to scale? If $1 buys a key for life, and signing can be easily automated why would it stop bots?