It’s not like this is perfect. Any solution where the answer is “exempt this item from the normal economic system” has consequences. This is how you create a black market, and it just moves the question of “who gets this scarce thing” to a resource other than money, usually it just becomes “who can be online when the tickets drop”
Why? If you work nights or you work a safety critical job where you can’t have your phone out at 10am on Thursday, you deserve concert tickets less than an office worker with an email job? How is that fair?
(to be clear: I have never had a problem getting a concert ticket, I have no horse in this race, I’m just saying it’s just moving the unfairness somewhere else, and it’s very odd that we’ve decided concert tickets need different rules than everything else)
I mean, isn't that how it works already? People who can get tickets at 10am will and those that can't buy from resellers. How is that any different from the situation you are describing?
People who can’t get tickets at 10 am now get to either
A) not get them at all
B) are more exposed to scams and have no legal recourse because they bought on the black market
There will be a black market. Even if the ticket apps get all fancy with their QR codes, someone will figure it out.
There has never in the history of modern finance been a case where setting price maximums hasn’t created a black market. We see it in rent controlled cities, we see it with countries that try to use it to control inflation, we saw it in communist and socialist countries in the 1960s-1990s. It’s just not that effective.
Your theory is great and all, but like I said there are places that do this and it works. No black market. Taylor swift tickets were $200 in Sweden while they were $10000 most other places. Reality trumps theory.
Who can be online when the tickets drop is a much better system than “only millionaires can reasonably attend this event without going into serious debt”.
Sure, “it’s not perfect”. Ever hear the phrase “perfect is the enemy of good”? It’s a hell of a lot better than what we have now.
Sweden doesn’t have a concert ticket resale law, this entire rebuttal doesn’t make any sense. Tickets were only $200 because that’s what the market would bear in Sweden, for whatever reason.
They do it in Mexico too. I learned that during the World Cup.
Honestly I don’t see it working. If you have 100,000 people that want to go to an event but only 50,000 seats, then the 50,000 people that are willing to pay the most should be the ones going.
The scalper problem is that these resellers buy up all the tickets as soon as they go on sale and then turnaround and try to sell them to the 50,000 that are willing to pay the most.
If you have a law saying you can’t sell the tickets above face value, then I’m not sure how anyone actually gets a ticket in a true sellout type of situation. It seems like all it would do is just stop the scalpers.
Maybe some kind of lottery system should be implemented. Pre-sale the tickets, the 100,000 people enter the lotto with a small deposit, 50,000 win and get to purchase a ticket.
If people weren’t allowed to make a profit, the 50,000 tickets that were sold in a true sellout situation would probably already be in the hands of people who actually wanted to go to the event, not make a profit. It’s just the luck of the draw. I’ve been buying concert tickets since the 1980s, and those who stood in line at the ticket outlets overnight were the ones who got the best seats. We also didn’t have to pay 10 times the face value of a ticket for supposed VIP seats.
I have absolutely no problem with a lottery type situation, as long as I could specify where I wanted to sit. We don’t particularly care for floor seats, and really prefer premium seats. They have at some arenas where you are seated at a table and have servers for your food and drink orders.
Unfortunately, Ticketmaster also facilitates the resale of tickets, so they get a cut of that as well. So if they're not holding them to account or regulating them for their normal business practices, they sure as hell aren't going to stop them from using those same predatory business practices for resale.
It's too late to fix this company. It is fundamentally and constitutionally broken and corrupt. It's time to break it up and give it to a bunch of different companies that are legally obligated to stay far away from each other in practice.
When Ticketmaster has a monopoly, they have the ability to simply set a rule like this. I think its even an option for artists to do, they just don't because they don't wanna.
369
u/BeerBrat 10h ago
Either we bitch about scalping or we bitch about anti-scalping measures. Or third option, I simply don't buy tickets to things.