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Comment by srmatto | Hacker News Reader

It should also be said that they could do anything at all to prevent these professional scalpers from scooping up all the tickets at once, including even merely closing those APIs entirely but they continue to do nothing about it.

The verified re-sale thing as you have correctly pointed out just allowed them to pretend like something was being done about scalping while it actually just let them make more money on the resale fees.

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It's long been speculated that they clandestinely participate in the resale market. If the goal of a business is to maximize profit and they control the market and technology around it, they have everything they need to push prices to the absolute limit that a customer is willing to pay.

Based on what came out during the course of the trial, it would not surprise me at all if they are double-selling tickets.

it's all an aesthetic experience, no? for the live entertainment business, it is aesthetically important to fans of Bruce Springsteen that his tickets have a number on them that appears on a website that feels good, and that number happens to be "price of ticket," even if hardly anyone is actually paying that number - they are usually paying more.

personally, i don't think any of this legal shit matters. the sherman antitrust act is 1 paragraph long, so it is flexible in terms of how you want this stuff to work, from a, "I would like the world to work as though it were governed by a priesthood" point of view. so it's reductive to talk about, what does the law say? very little of interest.

how should it work? live nation should be able to do whatever the hell it wants. it would make more money for everyone, at the cost of nothing. it would be good for the music industry to make more money. apple should not have lost the antitrust case over books either. nobody forces you to go to concerts! if you have a problem with ticket prices, make tiktoks complaining about it targeted at the artists. stop listening to their music. but IMO, the live performance cultural phenomenon, it doesn't benefit from this kind of regulation.

It's wild that everyone seems to have forgotten that Ticketmaster acquired TradeDesk and actively marketed to scalpers [1] just a couple of years ago. Seems they shut down the platform last year, maybe the "ticket bank" [2] idea worked better... Pretty clear to me that they will use any chance to monetize their monopoly.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/competition-bureau-ticketma...

[2] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/judge-signals-hell-le...

> It should also be said that they could do anything at all to prevent these professional scalpers from scooping up all the tickets at once

Oh they did something about it. The ticket brokers can't scoop up all the tickets because many of the best ones are now only released as "Platinum" tickets at 2-5 times the price.

The only "fair" ways are to have a lottery for non-transferrable tickets, or have something akin to a dutch auction so that the band/venue captures all of the value - meaning tickets would be astronomically priced.

The artists think it is fair that they are now getting some of that money that used to go to scalpers. Very few are opting out of the dynamic pricing and "Platinum" tickets that are driving prices up.

> including even merely closing those APIs entirely but they continue to do nothing about it.

At the same time I've been bit by a ticket vendor's anti-bot block by simply browsing the site and clicking their own "retry" button.

I'm sure if I'd've written a script, it would not have gotten hit by that garbage.

Creating a market by enabling middleman to sell you tickets at a higher price but with a better UX really is something.

Or easiest is to require KYC for all the buyers (tie ticket to person instead of allowing bulk purchases) and limit ability to resale at scale. This would easily allow them to blacklist scalpers. It's not like they don't know who you are from the payment information, and tickets are often verified against driver licenses at entry.

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