Comment by lbreakjai

Why would "only a handful" of rich people show up? If I'm a scalper, and demand is lower than expected, I'm incentivised to resell at any price, even at a 90% discount, because I can't just sit on my stock hoping for demand to pick up later.

If anything, as an artist, I'm incentivised to seek out the whales that can absorb ridiculous prices, because they are the ones that will buy the 25 limited editions of my album.

It's not necessarily a choice between the 1000 genuine fans vs the 10 posers. If the artist is popular enough, it's between the 1000 rich genuine fans, and the 1000 broke genuine fans, so might as well please the rich. It's a selection that already happens when picking the venues. It's always London, NYC, Paris, Tokyo, and never Skopje or Pine Bluff, AK.

I'd also like the news to talk about the show "so popular people are willing to pay a fortune to see" rather than the one with plenty of cheap seats still available.

I was reading an article earlier this week about "blue dot fever". Promoters like ticketmaster show the available seats as blue dots on a plan of the venue. The more blue dots, the more seats available, which seems to lower the demand even more, by signalling that the show is not popular, which drives the status-seekers away.