My impractical solution: no resale of tickets, and check of ID at the door. It’ll slow things down for check in, and people sick will miss out, but it will collectively bring prices down and increase seat availability.
Ticketmaster simply won't take the measures, as they have absolutely no financial problem with the way it is now or throughout the history of them existing. Their only problem is trying to figure out how to get scalper prices themselves, which they've already tried and gotten backlash for.
You could in some circumstances return tickets to the theatre for a full refund, but couldn't resell them.
The buying credit card had to be shown at entry to make sure they hadn't been resold.
Afaik, they're still doing this.
Airlines arguably have the same type of selling situation and no one is scalping coach seats to Cleveland.
In France, a famous youtuber has partnered with the major platform to forbid any ticket resell for their show, and it worked pretty well. But still it was only one time.
The sale is set up so that ticket resale is forbidden, except that scalpers can resell them via ticketmaster. Ticketmaster gets to charge a second transaction fee when the scalper resells it.
Artists don’t have enough market leverage to bypass this. (Pearl Jam famously tried and failed at the top of their career.)
So, it’s a combination of auction fraud (building a platform for scalpers while pretending to enforce anti-scalper policies) and monopoly power (colluding with venues and probably agents to depress first-sale ticket prices).
I tried to figure out if ticketmaster also owns and operates the scalping companies (allowing two-sided auction fraud). I came up with a firm “maybe”.
That is, even if you sell the account, the ticket is tied to the person.