A scalper who used bots to buy millions of tickets, now wants to stop them

It would still work today. For fans with money, it would be less convenient than buying through a scalper. It would be more convenient than TicketMaster since ordinary fans cannot buy tickets through it anyway. It would raise costs for scalping businesses and somewhat level the playing field (it is impossible to completely level a playing field between individuals and well capitalized businesses).

Anyway, TicketMaster's business has changed less than the music industry and get off my lawn.

[1]: The price was an outrageous $16 each. But it was also the days of festival seating and the best seat in the house was a matter of will. Down on the stadium field, over the course of the day we had worked our way to within ten feet of the stage by the time the Stones opened with their new hit single, "Start Me Up." No really, get off my lawn.

You're more okay with barring people over 25 and allowing scalping than disallowing scalping? Ideally, yes, the venue would resize to meet the needs of the artist, but this has already become a very complicated calculus, one possibly without the same solution space since there are a small number of fixed sized venues. It could simply be impossible to get the same audience by these methods.

> If the price is, say, $50, then there's a certain number of people who would buy at $50. If that number of seats is made available, then the scalper incentive disappears.

Right, but this assumes that there isn't an equivalently sized population of people willing to pay more that will buy them instead. My argument is that audiences aren't interchangable and that real harm is done when you force the artist to select the audience on ability to pay alone, as you are proposing.

Also, nothing says the scalpers get it right. They just go out of buisiness or make a loss if they don't. That doesn't stop them from getting it wrong and hurting the artist and the fans in the process.

http://www.thembj.org/2013/10/ticketmaster-and-the-business-...

The other question I have is: decades ago, concert tickets didn't cost this much, even after adjusting for inflation, and that's when rock bands were in their prime. What happened? I'm pretty sure it didn't cost the equivalent of $500 to see Led Zeppelin in concert in the early/mid 70s, so why does it cost so much to see U2 (an old band now) in 2017?

Ticketmaster makes money on every sale (fees, as well as 7%-12% of the sale amount) so it's not like they are really losing anything this way. In fact, they may make more money, since even if the tickets sell at a premium on resale, if they don't sell for more than the cut the exchange takes, the broker still loses money (which ends up in the hands of the exchange).

It is true that some artists and venues are more amenable to this than others though. Some allow the ticketmaster sanctioned secondary market (TM+), and some don't.