Back in 2015 I bought 2 tickets for AC/DC through them and I paid ~£270. When I got the tickets in my hands I saw that the price was ~£75-£80 each and Viagogo added more than £100, just because they could.
Kudos to Rammstein and I hope more bands will follow and help us get rid of these scammers.
It is not ‘just because’, it’s because there are more people who want to go than there are tickets. The reason you paid an extra 100 pounds is because someone else wanted that ticket, too, but would only pay 90 extra. That is the market allocating a scarce resource.
If there are only 10000 tickets and 100000 people would be willing to pay face value for the ticket, how do you suggest the tickets be allocated? A lottery?
If the reseller wasn’t selling them for more, you would have instead only a 1 in 10 chance to get a ticket at all. Would you rather have a ticket and pay 100 pounds more, or pay nothing but get zero tickets? That is your choice anyway.
Why not? If the artist prices their concerts at $100 because they want all of their fans to be able to attend, and if their fans are willing to spend $100 to go see them, why do scalpers get to "ackshually free market dynamics" there? I am quite happy with a ticket lottery as long as there are no sybill attacks possible on the system.
But that means all the fans won't be able to attend, because there aren't enough tickets.
If I have a 1 in 10 chance of going to a concert I want, I would rather save my money and spend more to go to a particular concert I really want to go to rather than just have a 1/10 chance and end up winning the lottery on one I don't really want to go to that much.
Even if we assume that's the only way to make it work, Viagogo shouldn't be the one getting that money. They're a minor facilitator, and in a more open market they would only get a little sliver of profit or have no role at all. Especially when they're buying tickets under false pretenses.
Yes, that’s the fair solution. A lottery with some mechanic for friends to enter as a group.
How about instead you give every music fan 1000 music points a year, and they can use those points to bid on tickets? That way, every fan has an equal opportunity, and can allocate their points to the concerts they most want to go to? Maybe someone allocates all their points for Rammstein because they want to go so bad, and someone else instead would rather go to 10 less in demand concerts.
But wait, that still isn’t fair… some people like music way more than other people. Huge music fans shouldn’t have the same amount of points as people who only kind of like music, but are actually more into sports. The huge music fans should get more music points and the sports fans more sports points.
To solve this, we could just give out generic points to everyone and you could spend it on music OR sports, or whatever… so now the huge music fans spend all their points on music and sports fans spend it on sports…
But then what about people who would be willing to do extra work to be able to do more things, where other people would rather relax more and not go to as many things. Maybe people could trade their points to other people in exchange for goods and services…
Oh wait, we just invented money and the system we already have.
No, it's Viagogo artificially limiting the ticket supply. Then price gouging.
1. That’s viagogo making $100 without directly providing value, and while creating artificial (e.g. non-free) market conditions.
2. The concert sells out anyways because the scalper buys everything. So it’s not like the scalper is improving availability in general.
3. The artist should be getting most of the profit from ticket sales and even resales.
4. The artist should be allowed to forbid resale of tickets if they want them to be affordable.
And finally, the market is not “solving” a problem here. The same number of people attend either way, so the same amount of non-monetary value is being received no matter what. The only difference is “can a rich person get themselves to the front of a line?” Why would that be valuable in general for the market?
Well, no. Different people have different preferences, therefore assigning tickets to ones that prefer them most would create most non-monetary value.
The emphasis is on the last part, i.e. "just because they could". My point is that they should not have been allowed in the first place.
> how do you suggest the tickets be allocated
First come first served. There are usually different price ranges anyway, so the market forces are already at play. I don't understand why we need to have black-market-as-a-service.
In both cases you trade your time for a ticket, either directly or indirectly.
In both cases, having blackmarket as a service is not helping.