Comment by saghm
3 days ago
If I bought 100 tickets, sold 20 of them at 10x the value I paid for them, and then ate the rest as a loss, I'm still making a tidy profit, and the artist/venue/etc. still make the same amount of money as if 100 individuals bought them and attended, but there are now 80 fewer people in the audience (edited to add: and potentially 80 people who could have afforded the original price but not the absurd upsell).
I don't have the data to say whether this happens or not (edited to add: and the numbers are obviously made up), but the logic is perfectly sound; nothing would stop it from happening today.
> the artist/venue/etc. still make the same amount of money as if 100 individuals bought them and attended, but there are now 80 fewer people
No they won't. The venue now has 1/5th the people buying booze. They're gonna HATE that night.
Fair enough. Unfortunately, as the trials in the recent lawsuits against Live Nation has shown, the venues are stuck between a rock and a hard place because they risk losing the ability to book some of the top artists if they try to switch to a different ticketing platform. At least the way it works right now, the ones who are being partnered with in this promotion that's supposedly helpful in preventing scalping are the ones who are both least affected by scalping and in the best position to force everyone else involved to have to put up with the negatives.