Ticketmaster and Live Nation have destroyed the concert experience. But it didn’t use to be this way. Today, Oasis and Taylor Swift tickets might go for thousands of dollars, but back in 1955, you could see Elvis Presley in concert for less than the modern-day equivalent of $20.
While they most certainly suck, so do most other people. As long as there will be a secondary market online someone will scalp tickets. Whether that’s some random asshole or these organized assholes hardly matters in most cases.
Of course with random assholes doing the scalping there is still a chance to get a cheap one by being faster, albeit a very slim one.
The LiveNation app has tickets being resold right in it.
The experience could be somewhat tamed by a lottery process.
Accept a token deposit for a week or two, and then draw from people contending for a given seat, then give them another week to pay the balance. Any unclaimed seats are put up at will call night-of-the-show. Limit the number of deposits taken from any given card to prevent “I’ll claim 30 seats and only buy 1” gaming of the lottery.
There’s probably some more complexity about it (if you want N seats together), but I think that would dramatically cut back on the frustration for “the tickets were only available for 14 seconds and the server was being DDOSed by scalper bots.”
Having to put down a deposit with no guarantee of a ticket also makes “buy All The Seats” scalping theoretically impossible and economically riskier. If there’s 5/1 contention for a ticket, you’d have to find a way to get 3 lottery slots for a better than even chance of getting it. If the deposit was $10, you’re spending $30 for the chance to buy a $50 ticket-- so if you can’t resell the ticket for at least $80, you lose. Under current policies, if you can sell that $50 ticket for $51, you’re ahead.
They need to stop bots and stop people buying over a certain amount of tickets each (I’m sure they do already usually limit tickets per person but people are obviously getting around it somehow). Because if you were only up against other fans who had a genuine interest in actually going to the gig themselves, not selling the tickets on, then you would be up against much much less people and you would get lucky a lot more often. Right now (or at least the last time I tried to buy tickets for something a few years ago) there was just no chance and the tickets were being resold in abundance within minutes, meaning it wasn’t genuine fans getting lucky over me.
Make tickets non-transferable, boom no more scalpers.