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Comment by narsil | Hacker News Reader

Technical solutions are unnecessary. Just make the tickets non-transferrable, and have the ticket holder produce ID confirming the name on the ticket matches the person. Plenty of music festivals, Vegas nightclubs and other places already employ this strategy very effectively.

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It's such an obvious solution that there must be a good reason they're not doing it already. I refuse to accept that they simply have not considered that.

My guess is it's something in the "that's just not the way it's done" family... Perhaps their venue controls ticket sales and doesn't care, or they have an intermediary like Ticketmaster who doesn't care. Or maybe it's more of a logistics concern, like they just think that doing such a thing would necessitate too big a change to entry procedure, likely slowing entry down too much? Or a more general logistics concern of they're not set up in person or online to do it that way, and changing now would be more trouble than it's worth?

DRM the tickets and turn away innocent people who got conned and, refuse them entry to an theatre with empty seats.

Dave Chappelle had a 2-ticket limit, where the purchaser and a guest was allowed. The tickets were purchased via Ticketmaster, and whomever was at the door was checking the tickets against our IDs. As a matter of fact, they went through the line ahead of time to match tickets to IDs to ensure we could get in quickly. Just adding this, so as to point out that it's even possible via TM.

Ticketmaster gets paid when the tickets sell. Ticketmaster has absolutely zero interest in stopping scalpers, because scalpers make sure TM makes money.

They have to pretend to care to keep the public from rioting, but they clearly do not.

This also makes the tickets less valuable to begin with: more risk involved. I'm not going to buy tickets on a whim if I can't resell them if my schedule changes.

Make it easy to get a refund. Or allow them to be resold directly or indirectly via an exchange you host.

Just allow the buyers to return the tickets to the venue for a refund, minus a processing fee. Then the venue can sell any refunded tickets at the box office on the day of the show

Deep down, I think the big ticket sellers will make the return process as difficult as possible...

Not if the "handling charges" is big enough. They could end up making more money if they can sell the ticket multiple times.

The venue (more likely a legitimate third party) could also run its own marketplace for pre-bought tickets, so the venue wouldn't have to just repurchase tickets and risk leaving a seat empty.

The San Francisco Giants were doing this since 2000 for season ticket holders

http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Giants-Web-site-facil...

Could there be something else stopping ticket sellers from doing the same?

edit: a word

Perhaps most venue owners have enough power to ignore performers' desire to prevent scalping.

Why not combine solutions; similar to airline seats - the cheap saver version, non-changeable, non-transferable, and non-refundable also must show original ID and credit card to enter and then the super-flexible scalper-special with two wildly different price-points. You can also have a wait-list on the night for those who bought the non-refundable and are no-shows.

Although I usually hate non transferable tickets this would definitely solve the scalping problem. I'd much rather this than have people throw their money at middlemen who add no additional value.

They provide value if it is sold out and I am willing to pay extra to find a ticket.

Scalpers provide this value from buying up many more tickets than an individual would, and individuals who cannot go will still sell their tickets, which is usually for a more reasonable price since they want to get rid of them.

Sold out because they purchased all the tickets before you could buy one.

Is there some reason a scalper can buy tickets before you? I assume they are camping out to grab the tickets as soon as they are on sale. No reason you couldn't do the same and score a few.

Now, if you don't want to sit in front of your computer at 5am to buy tickets before they sell out, then the scalper is offering to do that for you for a price.

Yes because scalpers buy as many tickets at one time as they can, lowering your chances of getting tickets even if you are up at 5am trying to buy them. “Brokers snatch up at least 50%, if not more, of these tickets,” says Josh Baron from: https://www.buzzfeed.com/perpetua/6-reasons-why-its-so-hard-...

So cut off your nose to spite your face?

I wouldn't be surprised if a significant proportion of their business was executive gifts and company bennies, where the whole point was to hand the ticket to someone else.

That is a technical solution.

This. Such a simple solution and only the performers and companies that really care do this.

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