CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

Ticketmaster reserves some seats during sale to be dynamic pricing, which they start higher than normal and then depending on demand and what they see on the secondary market they re-price those as the initial sale or presale is ongoing, just minutes after it starts.

Also, promoters, artists and venues might get their own allotment of tickets to do with as they want, likely negotiated in contracts. Those seem to find their way onto secondary markets often as well.

> 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.

Yes, I've commented on this here before. In some cases it's because tours go on sale at the same time (to generate buzz), and the early events are relatively soon and the last events are quite far out. They also often do release chunks of ticket inventory at later stages. That said, I'm convinced that often brokers are used as a simple way to provide immediate cash and reduce risk. Why would a promoter want to sell out over months when they can sell out immediately and know that regardless of whether the brokers make money (they don't always) they have sold everything and can say the event is sold out and they have cash in hand now and not months from now.

I used to work in this industry and there's a lot of shady stuff that goes on, and it's not all on the broker/scalper side.

> You can easily solve this by having the ticket tied to a name and requiring you to show ID

That's been done for a long time and you can still get around it if the margin is good enough. You just have to either want to go to the event yourself or be willing to one ticket out of the maximum you can purchase as the cost of doing business. You can't really make every seat have a name initially because not everyone actually knows who they're going to invite for sure at time of purchase, so if you want to really make it effective you have to limit the number of tickets per transaction to 4 or less. Even then, people will be incentivized to buy the max and have people go with them to use the extra tickets at cost or more, it may not be brokers but the regular public will do it too.

The actual solution for this is fairly simple. It's supply and demand. Play more shows at a location and the ticket prices will drop. Kid Rock has done it for decades at this point. Artists don't like having to put the extra work in for less money (tickets will be cheaper) and don't want to take the risk that the demand won't be there if they book the venue early. That risk is pushed out to brokers.

> it's only obvious to "private equity" type people.

No, it's obvious. Anyone that has to choose between getting $100 right now or $100 trickled in over months would opt for it right now for many reasons (inflation, the ability it invest it, the ability to use if it needed for unexpected situation, etc).

Wanting events to be populated by people that are primed for an experience and part of that priming bing they don't feel like it was too expensive to go might be another thing the artist or venue wants to encourage.

You can combine these things and make specific trade offs, but that doesn't mean all other things being equal that it's not entirely obvious that you should prefer money now to later.

> So giving up (or even worse, cooperating) to scalpers is like selling your business to private equity - you get some money, they get some money, and your customers/fans are fd.

It depends, probably a whole lot more than you think. Sometimes fans like to know they can go to an event if they care enough. In a world without resale markets that would be entirely dependent on the artist deciding to play more shows, because once tickets are sold they're gone. Secondary markets provide liquidity.

Also, sometimes tickets are available for cheaper* on secondary markets than they were on the initial sale (and this was true even before Ticketmaster started changing prices as the sales went on). That's because brokers take on risk buy buying for an event when it's not entirely sure it will still have demand when it's the event date.

For example, I just went to Stubhub (because I'm not sure Ticketmaster's own exchange will allow you to list for less than sale price) and looked for events starting soon. I found a rock concert in Napa where the Orchestra tickets are cheaper on Stubhub ($94 for two) than on Ticketmaster ($115.40 for two). There are plenty of tickets still on Ticketmaster, and some brokers just want to but their losses.[1][2]

There are plenty of ways to look at reselling to make it seem horrible or to make it seem beneficial. It's neither, it's just a normal function of markets, and the more people try to prevent it the more weird problems we'll have. Want to fix ticket prices? Convince artists to take on risk by playing larger venues (which they might not sell out) or add dates (meanind some days might not sell out). Artists don't want to take on that risk, so we have resellers and higher ticket prices.

1: https://www.stubhub.com/zepparella-napa-tickets-5-31-2025/ev...

2: https://www.ticketmaster.com/zepparella-the-led-zeppelin-pow...

I've heard the arguments they use to justify why they do and they're all hogwash.