Earlier quoted context omitted.
Buying something at a low price and selling it at a high price is arbitrage 101 and is free money. The "true solution" is to sell tickets at their actual market price instead of pretending that the face value of concert tickets isn't increasing due to a larger population and greater demand.
It's interesting how the real problem here is that our economic system has no way to sell a product at what the seller will bear, only what the buyer will bear. I think this is a fascinating feature, a lot of artists would be more than happy to make $X for a show so that their fans can come see them. The problem ends up that a free market has no mechanism for that, the artist can sell the tickets such that they end u…
Our economic system (arbitrage!) increases the price of the apple by $N until only one person is willing to buy that apple at $X+N.
If you make arbitrage illegal and implement a price ceiling at $X, one of two things will happen. If $N is greater than the cost of breaking the rules, people will start a black market to sell at $X+N (like in many communist countries). As mentioned in the article, this is already occurring with Ticketmaster because they take such a large tax on tickets; arbitrageurs are realizing they can avoid Ticketmaster's system by just sending around PDFs.
If $N is less than the cost of breaking the rules (Ticketmaster benefits from $N>$X), there will be shortages of seats because not everyone willing to pay $X for a seat can get one.
The market system works great when people who derive the most value from tickets are the ones who pay the most money. This works even better with arbitrage because people can just pay what they value the ticket at.
The market failure here is caused by wealth inequality, because there are people with unfathomable amounts of money who will pay tens of thousands of dollars to see a musician they sort of like.
Personally, I like how box seats deal with the problem. They have a high level of luxury that costs little to implement compared to price + is very scalable (you can stack boxes directly on top of each other and you're paying more to sit farther away!), and that's helping soak up a lot of demand.