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Comment by powera | Hacker News Reader

The service Ticketmaster provides is largely to have people get angry at Ticketmaster, rather than at the musician involved. And there is simply no way to let 5 million Swift fans each buy one of a million tickets while keeping the tickets cheap. It is a recipe for disaster.

People claim it is “evil scalpers”, but if you got lucky and bought a $400 ticket you can flip for $3000, they probably would be doing so as well.

A lot of the Ticketmaster “fees” people hate are actually part of the ticket price, requested by and paid directly to the artist (or the venue), but charged separately to make the tickets seem cheaper. Don’t blame me, blame human psychology.

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Following this whole brouhaha I read that Garth Brooks plays night after night in a city until the shows stop selling out. So there is a way to let all the Swifties buy a ticket.

I don't know how he keeps a venue booked for an indeterminate number of shows. How far ahead does his team plan? But for the road crews and performers it must be easier. They don't have to set up and tear down their gear every 3 days.

On the other hand, Taylor has more fans and more cities she has to visit than Garth. If she did that, it might turn into a perma-tour until her popularity crests.

It would be physically impossible for her to keep doing shows until they stop selling out. Here voice and body would give out way before her popularity did

The ticket should be assigned to a specific name, so that it can not be sold on a secondary market.

The Ticketing service itself should provide a channel to sell a ticket at its original price if someone wants it.

In Italy that's the method since a similar fiasco happened years ago and it works pretty well

Why should people not be able to sell what they own freely?

To avoid the problematic and frequent situation described in the comment I was replying to

Because sometimes that leads to rent-seeking and lack of real usage of the product. Sellers can put restrictions on what they sell and do so all the time.

What property are people selling, exactly?

The problem isn't the existence of the secondary market.

It's the prioritization of the secondary market.

Ticketmaster literally holds back a large number of tickets specifically to sell to scalpers.

This has a vicious cycle effect, making the secondary market more profitable and incentivizing more people to be scalpers. It also takes more tickets out of the hands of people who would otherwise buy them for retail price, meaning they have to buy from the scalpers.

And because Ticketmaster is the only game in town, that takes this from being a problem that could be dealt with by not doing business with them to being a problem that's just unavoidable.

>Ticketmaster literally holds back a large number of tickets specifically to sell to scalpers.

only 5% of taylor swift tickets ended up on the secondary market. This is just false.

Second if scalpers are selling @ cost tickets on secondary markets, TM is not even the biggest. Stubhub is. How does that benefit TM ?

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