I think some artists want to appeal to the poorer people so pricing their tickets higher or letting the free market work out the price would damage their reputation. So it doesn't seem to be a real problem we need to solve. It's a problem some artists feel they have. Let them figure it out.
If I was an artist and I expected a full venue with tickets that cost 10, I'd start selling them at 1000, then at 500, 200, 100, 50, 20 and finally 10. If someone buys all of them at 1000 and only that person shows up - awesome! Maybe there will be less drug sales because 1 person bought all tickets but that 100x per ticket could be used to pay the vendors.
As a side note, this notion that a phenomenon being the result of market forces means it is fair and has no issues seems to be a blinkered view of the world. Surely enjoying high quality art should be possible for a broad section of society?
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.
To me it seems it IS an economics problem - the artist needs to make money and they need to decide whether they want to optimize for the profit from ticket sales or for the profit from merch or from a broader fan base. But it's an economic problem for the artist, it's not really a societal problem or anything more major.
As a disclaimer, I'm not rich and I don't care for concerts anyway. It just doesn't make sense to single out tickets for concerts as some special thing. As an example, I'm OK with not being able to buy some fancy ethically sourced gourmet food yet I still support the company that makes it. Or maybe I won't buy it often, but I'll save up and buy it once in a while. Many parallels to be made, but of course not perfect. Still, it's not a necessity, so it's strictly an economic problem (not a moral one), mainly for the artist. Whether they want to solve it and how they want to solve it is their issue. Whether it's non-transferable tickets or ID-bound tickets with a strict policy on how they're transferred or an auction or a lottery or whatever.
Geez. It is really not that hard to imagine a better outcome here.
A reasonable distribution distribution could be whatever is the result of the following: (a) each seat is priced by the artist/venue/whatever however they wish, and (b) everyone who genuinely intends to attend the concert themselves and/or is purchasing on behalf of another known person whom they believe would genuinely attend the concert themselves gets an equal opportunity to purchase the tickets at the time of release.
How you achieve such an outcome is an interesting question with lots of possible approaches, but what outcome would be adequate to achieve than the status quo really isn't some sort of unanswerable question.
Harry Styles is giving more than 20 concerts in Europe, but only in Wembley or Amsterdam.
I don't know why this is being made to look like an insurmountable problem. We're talking about multi-billion dollar companies, organising billion dollar tours.
> If she sells all tickets at $10k each then maybe she'd clear the market, but she'd piss off a lot of fans
If I was conspiracy-minded, I'd say blaming "the scalpers" would be a very convenient way of dodging responsibilities while taking a cut.
This allows scalping.
And then, since scalping is not prevented, all that these measures really accomplish is to theatrically increase the burden for everyone else.
It should be obvious we want a system that is optimally beneficial to artists and fans rather than middlemen.
