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My wife has been a member of the Pearl Jam Ten Club for years. Pearl Jam reserves seats for club members. Members put in requests for tickets to shows, including credit card information. These requests are filled following the process detailed here: https://pearljam.com/news/ten-club-ticket-presale-info. If your ticket request was filled, your credit card is charged, and you now have a valid ticket (or multiple tickets, depending on the request).

You can sell tickets for face value, but not above or they'll be invalid and you might be kicked out of the club.

I'm going to guess that not all artists have the ability to make this happen, but it's helped us avoid the Ticketmaster and scalping craziness.

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It's hard to believe, but maybe, just maybe, scalpers might sign up for artist clubs?

Also Pearl Jam uses Ticketmaster now: https://www.barrons.com/articles/ticketmaster-pearl-jam-good...

> scalpers might sign up for artist clubs?

Sure, but there are probably limits on the number of tickets a member can buy, and club membership isn't free, so that would cut into scalping profits (ok, I guess it's only $20/yr).

> Also Pearl Jam uses Ticketmaster

Sure, but the band probably gets an allocation of tickets specifically for their fan club, so they don't have to fight with non-member fans to get tickets at regular prices.

> scalpers might sign up for artist clubs?

Yes, which is why selling tickets for more than face value can get you kicked out of the club.

Let's just say that scalpers still manage to represent a significant portion of artist clubs.

I don't think we can "let's just say" without some evidence that this is the case.

Right. I wouldn't say that without looking at some evidence (actually quite a bit).

Every artist has the moral ability to do that, but not every artist has the financial ability to do that. Ticketmaster draws a lot of (well-earned) hate for their scuzzy practices, but those same practices make artists a lot of money.

> not every artist has the financial ability to do that

Yes. I went to see a band maybe six to eight years ago. The lead singer asked the crowd to buy some merchandise a few times, and went on to explain that since the shift to streaming happened, they don't make nearly as much from radio play and album sales, so depend on touring income much more than they used to.

At least dynamic pricing gets money to the artist that would have just gone to the scalper before. Ticketmaster also has a "Verified Fan" feature where you can request tickets (https://blog.ticketmaster.com/verifiedfan-faq/), with the goal of preventing bots from buying them in the first few seconds when they are made available. While tickets can be sold/transferred for Verified Fan events, I'm not sure if there's an option to prevent sales over face value.

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