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Comment by shmatt | Hacker News Reader

An artist can demand no resale of tickets, and ID check at the door (TM tickets have the buyers name printed on them), LCD Soundsystem has done this when their fans got angry at a similar scenario.

Swift hasn't. And probably won't in the future, thats the gist of it.

TM claimed (and I have no reason to not believe them) they got 5 billion requests when tickets went live. So you break up the monopoly and Swift can now sign with a different ticket seller next tour. Which other website will handle the 5 billion requests properly? Without hours of queues or random raffles? Fans are lucky the TM website didn't completely shut down for 2 days because of the traffic

As long as the tickets are sellable, as long as people will pay more for a ticket than a new car, people (even diehard fans) will resell

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>Swift hasn't. And probably won't in the future, thats the gist of it.

She probably made several hundred million on this tour. She could fix all the problems but she doesn't want to.

Its TM's job to take this bad press

She could fix all the problems but she doesn't want to.

No, she can't. At best, she can exchange one set of problems for a different set. When there are X tickets available and Y people want to attend and Y>>X, a lot of people are going to be disappointed and angry no matter what you do.

Thats exactly my point. Should could have but she doesn't want look bad and she maximized her profits.

Thinking of solutions for this, couldn't you stagger when tickets go on sale at each venue? Seattle goes on sale at 10am, Portland on sale at 2pm, and Denver the following day? This spreads the demand over time and you don't have 5 billion requests all at once.

They can but it has to be at the artist request. She wants the headlines. lets not be naive

> TM claimed (and I have no reason to not believe them) they got 5 billion requests when tickets went live.

I absolutely have a reason to not believe them: that is 63% of the world's population. They are claiming that 63% of everyone on Earth was waiting to buy tickets to Taylor Swift's show? How do we not have reason to disbelieve them!?

Unless by "request" they mean individual HTTP requests and their site is such garbage that one person trying to grab some tickets induces thousands upon thousands of HTTP requests, which is still their fault.

This varies by US state. In some states - including New York - it is illegal to prohibit transfer of tickets and therefore illegal to prohibit resale.

Makes sense. What if someone close to you passes away or you get COVID or something and you can't go? That money is just wasted? :/

More fundamentally: once you buy the ticket, it's yours. It should be your decision to resell it if you choose, for any reason. It's a "First sale doctrine" sort of thing in my mind.

The lure of being the competitor who can handle that traffic will bring some competition. In the meantime some entry level competitors who we could use for local scene ticketing and give a better share to the artists would open breathing room in the market for early career artists and smaller venues to put performances on in 3rd and 4th tier cities.

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