One option that I not see discussed in the blog post: Collecting user signals locally and using those access patterns (mouse movement, clicks, IP/site browsing history) to discriminate between "standard" site usage and bots; so like a "reCaptcha lite", not trained across many sites but trained specifically on the target.
For a ticket platform like pretix that can be run self-hosted alongside the main site, this should give you enough signals to discriminate between normal users and bots, unless they are specifically targeting that site, or am I mistaken? Even just pure web server access logs may be sufficient on smaller sites so this might work even without JS?
Doing any kind of access pattern analysis leaves you with the problem of handling false positives, and your proposal doesn't help with the accessibility problems.
IP addresses aren't a panacea here -- this is a high margin business where the attackers can switch to high cost / high quality proxies.
> unless they are specifically targeting that site
In this case the attackers would very specifically be targeting specific sites (ones selling tickets to events with more demand than supply).
>Most organizers, including for-profit organizations, do not want to choose this option due to ethical concerns or concerns about community building.
The alternative is selling the tickets to scalpers which doesn't seem ethically better or better at community building as compared to directly selling it to fans.
Even if you assign tickets to IDs scalpers will sell access to bots instead to capture the delta between market price and the price the ticket is being sold for.
Sell the tickets with a decreasing price - early tickets are very expensive, late tickets are not, and hold back between 10% and 20% until day of sale at the lowest price.
Make the scalping bastards choke on it, and break FOMO all at once.
What about limiting the number of tickets per card?
Or do what airlines do and you need to declare who is using the ticket. Maybe allow exchange for up to 50% of a party.
Then the scalpers can't win but there is still a DOS problem to solve.
Maybe a card auth -> reserve seats -> complete txn flow would help there. The card auth rate limits the amount of unbooked but temporary reserved tickets.
Locking tickets to customers is hard, especially for venues with seats. The venue and artist want people in those seats — it looks better and they spend money on concessions, merch, and often parking. You can resell at the door, maybe, but then you’re turning away paying customers who get stuck in traffic and show up late.
I’m not convinced cards are a significant barrier. People already get tons of credit cards for the signup bonuses and perks, and you can get prepaid cards pretty easily. Temporary card numbers are a thing too. There are logistical challenges in getting a lot of cards in the buying pool but I don’t think they’re insurmountable.
Concerts that are struggling with numbers shouldn't have a scalper problem though. If you want more people through the door, there are presumably base price tickets still for sale.
This problem mostly exists in the Swift concerts that sell out in four minutes before the internet explodes with people complaining the website never loaded for them. I'm sure "might harm sales" really won't be a problem for those concerts.
I'd rather see bot resistance (important for everyone) and privacy (important for everyone) take precedence over accessibility (important for a small minority) and have laws change to reflect that.
Bots are users, but they aren't human users. I think it's fair to say that most web sites/apps value human users over bots (maybe that's wrong though?). But I think an argument can definitely be made the bot resistance is valuable/important to most people on the web.
Objectively a lack of bot-resistance can make the service unusable for everyone. Good examples include twitter, where interesting stuff gets flooded by spam DMs and indian payout farmers, and the mentioned ticketing example, where objectively a lack of resistance leads to rent-seeking middlemen scalping tickets.
Similarly a lack of privacy hurts everyone.
The question is basically "would you rather have an equally-shitty service for everyone in the name of egalitarianism or a good service for most?" This seems a really easy choice for me because I don't see egalitarianism/accessibility as a moral imperative.
How about: each user creates an account with their legal ID. Obviously unique so they can’t create multiple using the same ID. Before the sale, everyone signs up. Once the sale is started, tickets are distributed using a lottery system for the users who signed up (so refreshing like mad doesn’t give any advantage). Can only buy up to 2 tickets per person (their own and an anonymous companion). ID must be shown and would be verified at entrance.
If you wanna be even more strict: You could allow up to X companions, but they must not have signed up with their own account (so they don’t have an advantage for doing so). And they must provide their ID before the event as well and arrive as a single party.
This addresses some of the hassle around buying multiple tickets, but does not address the inherent privacy issues. But there are still some problems.
First of all, this remains a hassle in most countries, since handling a national identity number (if such a number exists at all) is restricted by law. Even in some countries that do not legally restrict collection or storage of identity numbers (AFAIK the US does not restrict private sector usage of SSNs), there is rarely wide acceptance of providing your identity number for any purpose other than official government services and financial institutions. This means that in most cases, the event organizer has to resort to more traditional methods of KYC: Requesting some personal details (e.g. full name and birth date) and requiring to present an identity document that carries the details above. Verifying the identity document adds slows down entrance lines and increases the cost.
The other issue with this method is privacy. You're still not breaking the suggested BAP (Bots-resistance/Accessibility/Privacy) theorem suggested by the article. Additional personal information has to be collected and stored until the time of the event.
But I believe there is a way out of this. You can still create a limited resource that is more restricted than phone numbers or credit card numbers, and can be optionally verified at the venue cheaply. The only problem is that would require cooperation from the government (and a great deal of effort if you want to make it perfect). The government needs to already have an online digital KYC method that is bound to your digital ID or an online government account. Then the government can use that method to provide an anonymous federated login that provides a unique ID that cannot be traced back to any national identity number. This is essentially how Sign in with Apple works with "Hide My Email" selected: No personally identifying claims are included in the Open ID Connect ID Token and "sub" is unique (per Apple user + 3rd party service combination), but not traceable back to the the original Apple identity. Unique identities can also become ad-hoc per-event (instead of per ticket provider), which makes them completely private (ticket providers cannot track users across multiple events).
At described above, this service still only provides a limited resource akin to phone numbers. For events where the profit margin from ticket scalping exceeds $100, you could still get some scalpers who'd convince collaborators to identify in with their government account and buy tickets for the scalper for $20 per ticket. If you can get 5 tickets per ID, that's $100 of easy money for 5 minutes of work. You can add simple and fast verification at the venue by requiring the users to generate a QR code that is tied to their unique ID at the venue in order to enter. The QR code cannot be generated in advance and is based on a challenge QR that is presented at the venue. This requires collaborators would have to physically come to the venue or be available at the time the scalper's agents come to redeem the paper tickets at the venue. With a QR code generation and check directly at the gate, scalping is completely impossible (at the cost of longer lines and less entrance flexibility). With printed tickets the scalper needs to send agents to physically collect the tickets and communicate with the collaborators (who need to be available at the day of the event to generate the QR codes remotely) — which greatly inflates the cost of scalping.
Even when you get governments to cooperate with this approach, there are still some holes with this approach. The first issue is that eKYC needs to become popular enough to avoid a large loss in sales. The second issue is raising awareness with regards to privacy-preserving eKYC vs. regular eKYC. This two services look very similar (you log-in with your government account or ID to prove your identity), but the scope of the information shared couldn't be more different...
If the profit per successful abuse event is $200, the author's suggestion of limits on credit card numbers or phone numbers won't work either. Those are only effective against scaled abuse up to something like $1 / event. Bank accounts would almost certainly be more robust, but that seems quite hard to implement outside of a handful of countries where the online auth ecosystem is built around banks.
With generic abuse background, but not knowing anything about the ticketing abuse ecosystem, is doing the sales on a first-come-first-serve basis an absolute necessity from a business perspective? There would be a lot more tools available if the problem was reframed from "decide instantly whether to sell this buyer a ticket" to "decide which 10k of these 100k intents of purchase received during the first 24h to sell the tickets to". And by more tools, I mean offline analysis and clustering, not just a lottery.
(You'd still want to combine that with strongly personalized tickets though. It'd be how you address for bots-as-a-service, not how you address buying tickets to resell.)
I could see an issue with that since most people are going to be going to events in a group, and won't want to go unless everyone gets their ticket. If I wanted to go with three people, do you lottery us as a group or individually? If I want to go with 5 people and there's a lottery, the best thing to do would be have multiple people buy 5 tickets each, multiply that by every group and you have a lot of people buying tickets who don't actully want them and people who only put one order in get shafted
A lot of concerts in Japan work on a lottery. When you enter the lottery you can select for how many tickets up to a set maximum. If you get selected, you're obligated to pay and can't cancel. So... I imagine if you want to go as a group, one person puts in for the lottery and either everyone gets to go or no one does.
(Author here) Anything else than first-come-first-served requires strong identity to avoid people trying to get better chances with many entries into the pool, thus falling into the "sacrificing privacy" category
Sell at the economic equilibrium price (determined by auction) and whoever actually enters the venue receives the difference between the auction price and the desired price by the organizer in cash or maybe in form of a coupon for their next concert.
Sounds like an interesting situation! But I do see the flaw in my proposal now. It will select for the top-n richest customers, which kind of undermines the point of selling at a fixed price.
The option that strikes me as missing, is making users pay a cost before they are randomly entered in a lottery for the ticket.
So, for example, everyone pays $0.01 on their credit card, or does a holding charge on their credit card, or registers their identity. All in a 5 minute (or 1 day!) window. And then after the window, tickets are randomly distributed amongst every card which so registered.
You could check multiple things - phone and card and Government ID if necessary (lowering the privacy).
This also feels fairer and less stressful - instead of a lottery based on your internet access, or ability to run lots of browsers at once.
This feels harder for scalpers to do to me, as they need more fake identities, but I'd be curious about the actual ratios when trying it. What goes wrong?
Another one I predict is that you can't buy digitally. For examples, the Lewes fireworks display you have to buy tickets in person in a bookshop in Lewes. Doesn't help if you make a digital ticketing system though!
Pearl Jam does something similar with annual membership in their fan club. Each concert has some designated seats set aside for members of the club, with the best seats going to the members with the longest consecutive subscriptions. Allowing the membership to lapse resets your priority level if you subscribe again.
Well at least one possible reason is that for live events, the company that has an effective monopoly is Live Nation. And they also own at least one of the platforms where scalpers sell their tickets; Ticketmaster.
I also imagine that as an event promoter, being able to say some variation of "Another sold out show", or "Tickets sold out within seconds" creates pressure for buying early for all future events.
It also takes active planned work to implement these solutions. And if they have a monopoly, they have no incentive to do that work.
It's more profitable and predictable for scalpers to immediately buy all tickets. The ticket seller doesn't care if the tickets are sold to fans that will attend, just that they're sold quickly and reliably and non-refundably. It's even better if tickets are sold to scalpers because some of those tickets might never be resold, which means the venue gets the ticket sale but pays none of the cost a real guest would incur.
What matters is selling the ticket, getting a guest in the door is just expense.
We should make it their problem, by artists not selling tickets on those websites but instead using their own resources. Essentially vertical integration, so then you have to care about the end-product and user experience. And, cherry on top, you might be able to charge more aggressive prices if you're not paying the profit of the middle-man.
That seems to be confusing gross and net margin. When considering a question like “who cares if a ticket buyer ends up showing up?” that’s a marginal consumption question and the gross margin applies.
This was my theory but there is a problem with it: Unless there is a constant churn of scalpers failing to turn a profit, the scalpers are presumably selling off their tickets at a profit. This means the market demand from individual purchasers exists, and the ticket sellers are just leaving money on the table by not raising their prices.
1. The initial price of the ticket serves as advertisement to get more people interested in the event than if it was advertised at the scalped price. Some fraction of the people will end up paying the higher price anyways, even if it was more than they intended to spend. The chance of "getting lucky" and getting a ticket at the low initial price is a powerful draw, especially if each buyer gets lucky a few times.
2. Are you sure the scalpers and the agency selling the original tickets are independent? Even if they are on paper, in many locations there is evidence of a local cartel.
3. The initial sales provide revenue up front to pay for the costs of the event, vendors, etc. This reduces the amount of cash reserves the seller needs, sometimes very dramatically.
4. Many scalped sales (used to be, not as much anymore) were cash transactions. This used to be used as a pretty significant tax dodge: Sell tickets for $50 face value to your affiliated scalper, pay tax on this sale, scalper sells tickets for $200 and does not pay tax on this secondary sale, or underreports the number of secondary tickets sold. Lots of shenanigans here to make your profitable scalping business look like it's making a small loss on paper.
5. Especially in the context of a local or regional cartel, each ticket sale represents the opportunity to move capital between entities. Physical tickets can be an effective vehicle for small-medium scale money laundering: Dirty money/entity buys the tickets, clean entity resells them.
Basically as soon as you drop the assumption that the ticket sellers and scalpers aren't related in some way, there are a lot more profitable reasons for the ticket sellers to "leave money on the table".
Bidding for tickets would cut out the scalpers and maximize revenue for the performers (and ticket agencies). So, if you want to go, pick your ticket class (rough area) and specify how much you’re willing to pay. The ticket seller orders bids by value, taking the top ones first, and then allocates tickets. Anything unsold is offered as usual on a specified day. People that really want to go get to go and the performers benefit rather than the scalpers.
My understanding is that performers have shied away from this model because it results in less affluent fans being excluded. Lotteries are generally preferred. You could theoretically eliminate lottery scalping by making the tickets non-transferable, but I’m not sure how feasible that would be.
Yep, but that’s not working out for them very well. The only thing that will eliminate the scalpers is reducing the amount of money they can make such that they decide that it isn’t worth it anymore.
It's a hedge. Performers are not in the business of optimizing ROI, they're in the business of performing. Scalpers provide a service: guaranteed income for a fee. There are many analogous examples in other markets where both parties happily take their respective sides of this deal, even though technically one of them is leaving money on the table.
Then there is the slightly more insidious incentive: selling out quickly is in and of itself valuable for a performer: it makes them look popular and exclusive. That alone might just make it worth it altogether.
> Performers are not in the business of optimizing ROI, they're in the business of performing.
I have to disagree; performers are absolutely in the business of optimization. Bo Burnham was singing about metrification destroying art 10 years ago. Every standup comic is using social media as a sales funnel to figure out exactly which cities they have an audience in. Even if the performers themselves are not concerned with gaming these numbers, they almost always have someone working for them who does.
So I still don’t quite understand why the scalpers are the ones getting to eat the free lunch.
> selling out quickly is in and of itself valuable for a performer
This one seems like a more likely explanation, but the pattern with a lot of these ticket sales is that the demand is already there organically without scalpers entering the equation. I don’t really follow the space so I really don’t know, but I’d imagine the shows that get targeted the most are the performers who were going to be playing a sold out show regardless of the scalpers.
hedging is a tried and true financial strategy. Transpose this to any producer of commodities and it becomes the most normal thing in the world to take guaranteed cash at a discount for guaranteed delivery of the product. It’s the exact same thing.
Those may be arguments for why (some) performers and (some people at) ticket agencies don't want scalpers, but empirically, for popular performers, both performers and ticket agencies still set prices lower than the market will bear. They could charge more, but they don't.
Eliminating uncertainty about whether a concert will sell out may be the primary reason.
Net ticket prices might be dictated by the performers and their agents, and the ticket agency might not have the ability to raise prices unilaterally, at least not by enough to stop scalpers.
There's another factor, or side-effect, that might be missed in explaining why an artist or their agent won't set prices higher, even when the artist has a history of having concerts sell out and tickets scalped: scalping is a symptom and sign of scarcity, and scarcity drives interest.
They probably want to set prices as high as possible while still having a high probability that tickets will sell out and make concertgoers panic-buy.
This also eliminates uncertainty about whether something will be filled. The uncertainty is only on the side of fans that someine will outbid them for a sold-out concert ticket, and they’ll then get the money back
I asked why are school vouchers bad since it’s a single payer system.
The “progressives” told me it would starve public schools of funds and students since private schools would admit only the best and brightest
So I said — don’t let the schools choose. Let the people choose. If the school is filled then you use a lottery for who can actually get in, M of N people. Simple.
Decades ago a local popular public magnet high school near me had a lottery system like that.
Students would apply for the school and M of N applicants would be picked randomly.
It turns out the administrators running the lottery would run the randomization program until it gave them the student distribution they wanted (read: the best and brightest, and since it's the south... somehow whiter than expected).
That has been tried before. What happens is that people choose the school where there is easiest to get good grades. Fast forward a generation or two and there is a race to the bottom, schools take their mission to prepare for standardized testing seriously at the expense of learning. Over time, our outcome will depend on what you measure.
School systems are also special because you don't really want to overprovision school seats, so if there at the end of the day are as many seats as there are pupils in the system as a whole, there can only be selection and never competition in the economic sense.
(Author here) Yes, every kind of lottery/raffle is a possible solution but only with strong identity verification to avoid double-entry and hence only with sacrificing privacy, as mentioned in the article.
A few months back I built a cryptographic alternative to CAPTCHAs called Ghost Keys[1] that uses a small donation as proof-of-humanity. For donating you get an anonymous keypair that works across services without repeated CAPTCHAs. The economic friction doesn't scale for bot operators, and donations fund our non-profit[2].
Keys embed approximate timestamps, so services can set age limits. The system was designed for Freenet integration where reputation can be attached to keys - repeat abuse would degrade a key's public reputation over time.
In the event ticket situation, how does this change the economics compared to just adding $1 to the ticket price? (or whatever your minimum donation threshold is)
It would add $1 to the ticket price, the goal is more to replace CAPTCHAs (which cost essentially nothing to defeat these days), but you're right that it wouldn't be a silver bullet in the ticket scalping scenario.
The reality now is the ticket sellers and bands are the main scalpers and everyone else are now secondary scalpers.
Now that tickets are all electronic and the ticket sellers operate secondary markets there is no "face value" anymore and pricing is dynamic. Not all tickets are released at once and many are offered at "platinum" prices at first.
All through the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's and 00's concert tickets were around $40-$50 in 2025 dollars, now that is just the service charge. Just go on eBay and look at some ticket stubs then put the price / date into the CPI calculator.
It turns out that the bands couldn't beat the scalpers so they became the scalpers, charging outrageous prices with the assistance of the ticketing companies.
So stopping bots isn't as important as it was when CAPTCHAs were effective, since there is a lot less money on the table for professional scalpers to capture.
Concert tickets are still that low, you just can't go to stadium shows for supermassive artists at that price. A saturday night at a popular EDM venue with a 2k capacity headlining an artist with ~500k monthly listeners on Spotify will run you about $25 for the floor or $50 for VIP. A "sticky floor" bar venue ticket with a capacity of maybe 300 for an alt-z band with somewhere in the realm of 250k-3M monthly listeners on Spotify will run you about the same.
Being up at the rails at a Girl in Red concert set me back $60 at a 5k person venue. If you want to see supermassive artists for that kind of unit price you have to "buy bulk" and go to festivals.
Most of my concert tickets are still priced around $40 inclusive, after taxes and fees, and from the likes of LiveNation, Etix, DICE, AXS, and so on.
All my friends that complain about the rising cost of concerts tickets don’t realize that they just see the same old bands year over year. These scrappy up and coming bands that they saw as a kid aren’t scrappy anymore. That’s why blink-182 can charge $700 for the pleasure and still sell out — because most of their fans are in their late 20s or 30s, have disposable income, and number in the millions.
Go to a $20 show for a band today and who knows, maybe they will charge you $700 in 20 years. Plus you can tell everyone that you saw them before it was cool. /s
In some cases, but in most cases even well known bands that had been around had tickets that highschoolers could afford. Only a handful of bands were like triple the average and would have been the likes of Rolling Stones Springsteen and such, but aside from them, no, most well known bands were not selling tickets at ludicrous prices.
I might have given blink-182 as an extreme example but $80 for tickets is still selling for a lot more than the $7 cash at the door that I paid when I saw them in a tiny skate shop 10 years ago.
Many bands don’t make it all of course, but I can still pay $7 cash for shows today at that shop and some of them are going to be able to charge $80 in a few years.
In my opinion the web is in dire need of a system of proof of humanity. This, together with a mixed system, could solve this sort of problem.
For example, there could be an API for e-mail providers to tell services that an address belongs to a human. The provider would need to implement methods to verify the user's humanity, so you wouldn't need to give every online service your personal info, only your humanity provider that vouches for you. Something like SSL certificate hierarchies could be used to ensure that smaller providers aren't vouching for bots, i.e. you have a root CA that signs their certificates, and if it's found that they don't actually do what they are supposed to do, the certificate isn't renewed. This added with some actual costs to get those certificates would give them an incentive not to lie.
I know some people complain about this not being "private," but let's be real. If you purchase anything from any online website, they have your home address, your phone number, your real name as printed on your credit card, and there is a non-zero chance that some moron stored your credit card number in plain text in a MySQL database. It's always going to be safer to trust PayPal than some random website with this information. Why not do the same with human identity?
Finally, if you can't sign up with any humanity provider for some reason, just make the process extremely annoying and limited. For example, if you have 100 tickets to sell, reserve 90 for people that can prove they are human and leave only 10 for potential bots, then implement a lengthy process for those users so that's not worth it for the bots. If 90% of the tickets are already purchased by people, it will be less profitable for scrapers already.
most of traffic is from mobile devices anyways. they have biometrics (e.g. Apple FaceID, fingerprint). they also have DeviceCheck (Apple Hardware + Apple servers) integrity checks of device/binary that is making requests. it is also free and private.
why using this technology is not part of conversation? seems like utmost strongest guarantees and perfect fit?
It is not "free" as you must buy such a device, nor is it most of traffic, and its privacy is questionable. A solution to the problem area here needs to cater to people outside the HN echo chamber.
As a developer or website or app, I don't need to buy a device. User has to buy it, as it is theirs device. And chances are, they are on the iphone or other apple device already. And if not, they are on Android, which has comparable biometrics options.
Are you claiming that owners of websites have to purchase laptops for their website visitors?
And are you claiming that Apple has worser privacy than Android? or ... holdon, there is nothing else (Huawei is out of the question, and MSFT/Symbian does not exist anymore)
So how would this work in concrete terms? How will this stop bad-faith actors who will go out of their way to abuse/fake things? How does it solve the "BAP theorem"? You can't just sprinkle a term like "on-device biometrics" and declare that solves it.
A lot of overwrought digital solutions here and not the obvious one:
Stop selling online.
Sell the tickets at a small number of locations near and including the venue, with cashiers empowered to deny suspicious transactions.
Could someone put together a small army of smurfs to buy up all the tickets in major cities? Sure. Could someone have someone on the inside sell them a block of tickets against policy? Sure. We can handle these cases on a locale by locale basis with a convenience trade off that seems appropriate to the place.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good, and even worse, don't let overwrought privacy-invading and non-accessible digital solutions (that create a playing field tilted towards bad actors equipped with AI tools) be the enemy of a dead simple analog real-world one that leverages our best reputation management system: ourselves.
> Sell the tickets at a small number of locations near and including the venue
People frequently travel to major cities for concerts, do you expect them to travel twice to purchase the tickets? Either you join a much wider network of sellers than that, or this would only satisfy people already living not too far from the venue.
> The naive economic solution to the problem would be raising ticket prices step by step until it is no longer attractive for scalpers to resell your ticket
You can also just do like The Cure did and destroy the secondary market entirely: you can sell tickets through the platform and only for what you paid for them.
If all tickets are the same price, then any buyer-seller combination will do. I believe the seller doesn’t get to choose the buyer and both are anonymous. No way to coordinate such an out-of-band payment.
They're not all the same price. They have the same list price, but once the show (or the desirable floor section of the show) sells out, the real price floats.
They don't even have to have the same price if the seller just effectively returns the ticket back to the system.
Then it's up for grabs.
There's no guarantee for the buyer that an out-of-band payment will get them the ticket (someone else can get it), and there's nothing that forces them to send an extra payment once they do get the ticket.
They can demand all they want, but they can't guarantee any way of getting the ticket to the person that send a payment... which makes it a bit of a tall demand.
This is the law in Denmark, and I think Ireland and several other European countries.
Tickets must not be sold for more than the original price. Ticketmaster etc are still happy to take part in the action: their resale system still charges a second set of ticket fees for a resale, though the sale price is limited to the purchase price.
I am unsympathetic when people insist on selling things for the wrong price and then come up with these elaborate schemes for fixing the problems they themselves caused.
If they would simply sell tickets for the prices people are willing to pay in the first place then they wouldn't need to invade privacy or any of this stuff. I've heard the arguments they use to justify why they don't and they're all hogwash.
Because the whole business of scalpers is exploiting the difference between the list price and the price people are willing to pay. If this gap didn't exist scalping wouldn't be profitable.
(As far as this article as discussing. They also serve some use for reselling tickets when you meant to go but can't but this doesn't have any more downsides)
Because there is a perverse incentive for performers to lean into scalping: selling out quickly is a mark of success. NPR's "Planet Money" had an episode a while back that covered exactly this.
Not all artists lean into it of course, and it's usually not the actual artists anyway but labels, producers, etc.
In that same episode they covered how LiveNation owns both TicketMaster and many venues themselves, and leverage access to the venues for power in the ticketing market.
This problem with this is that it assumes a supply and demand shaped problem that markets solve.
You can’t just make more Taylor Swift to meet demand. You can’t open more Taylor Swifts in different regions. Acts have a very low very rigid upper supply limit. So if you price up at that demand it puts it out of reach of almost everyone. And that’s a bad outcome for almost everyone.
If you insist on only seeing Taylor Swift, this is what you get. There are way more talented artists than will ever play at these giant stadium shows. She isn't a better musician than all of those other artists, she is just more popular.
Because artists need an at least semi-competent vis-a-vis, AKA audience. This is the main proposition for entering a stage to begin with. And chances are that the most economical potent ticket buyers are not in this group and probably also not the most enthusiastic about the act. So there's a natural incentive to aim not for the highest cap, but for a somewhat realistic medium. I.e., "the prices people are willing to pay" are probably not the prices artists are willing to perform at.
(Edit: there's a reason for opera houses providing cheap standing room for enthusiasts – it keeps the art alive.)
If people paying high prices for tickets makes the event worse, as people seem to believe without evidence, then prices will come down, solving the problem naturally. These arguments make zero sense.
I think, in terms of art, it's more like a death march: events will become more exhausting and less emotional rewarding for the performers, so there will be less events, which will be even more exhaustive as they are exclusive. So, under these conditions, there may be no performances, at all, as relevant performers just give up. (Art is not a simple product and may scale inversely.)
About 30 years ago there was a computer shop that initially carried a lot of equipment, so it was popular among the enthusiasts. Then they decided to optimise things, drop less popular choices and only sell to the general public.The enthusiasts left. Then left the general public . Turned out that when a layman wanted to buy something they usually seeked advice of a local expert, a computer enthusiast.
that it reduces everything including culture to just one metric, money. Are you a fan of a band? can't go because you got outsold by some rich person that maybe cares or maybe not, it doesn't matter, they just have more money that you.
The space at a concert is limited so some form filtering will have to happen, but if the only metric is market price that's a pretty sad society specially when we're talking about culture IMO
Two big leaps in your answer: 1. that the person paying more is rich and 2. that the person paying more likely doesn't care about the band
The way I see it, it is also highly likely that the person paying more is of average income and just convinced themselves to pay more because they are superfans
ah, I tried to avoid that leap with the "it doesn't matter" but probably didn't come across properly.
The point I'm making is that market value reduces the problem to just money which is being taunted as a magic solution, which might work in some cases but market value doesn't exist in a vacuum and it has side effects. As the topic being discussed is culture it introduces a lot of biases into society that I would find problematic.
Also, if we want to talk in pure capitalist terms, Ticketmaster is already a monopoly of sorts in the music buisiness, there's no "market value" if there's no pressure to lower prices, they can make the experience as bad as possible without repercussions other than people not going to concerts anymore which as a society would suck
Those repercussions are essentially just a form of market feedback through demand contraction, i.e. it is the inevitable result of human action under conditions of scarcity and subjective preference, a natural outcome. The market would correct itself. If no one goes to Ticketmaster, someone else could (and if there is demand (among other things), most likely will) take its place, and they will no longer be a monopoly, simply put.
You don't permit ticket transfers. Instead you sell tickets back to the venue for the price they were bought. Your tennis buddies would better be ready to buy the ticket from the venue 1 second after you sold it back to the venue, else someone else might get it.
I was thinking this, however you "transfer" to the other person, the original buyer gets a refund, and you pay the original ticket price+tx fee, or original buyer pays the fee. Either way.
Many small venues do this where I'm from and it works like a charm. Even just name on ticket without any further transfer option works well. Not sure if you're going? Don't buy a ticket, more tickets for people who are going for sure.
There will be a concert for 750th anniversary of Amsterdam in June (held on the highway ring around the town which will be closed). Tickets were free, sold out in 5 mins, immediately available from scalpers for 200 euros.
Well yes, the concert is funded by city, and they wanted everyone to have a chance at attending, no matter what their income was. Not everything needs to be sold.
The problem there was not having enough security - it's like store giving out free popcorn, and someone comes and steals the whole cart. In the physical world, there would be someone standing next to the cart watching that people take reasonable amounts. In the digital world, nothing was done, so thieves stole a lot.
Not sure what the best solution was to be there... I like the idea of giving people few days to sign up, then randomly choosing who gets to go. Of course this has its own problems - for example you want to allow groups, but this can be abused. Identity verification helps with that, but this makes ticket checking much slower....
It's NL and the everyone has a personal id. There is a national service to validate that, too.
One week accepting of requests - a person can submit multiple id (incl. children). At the end of the period a random lottery with some bias to people registered in the city (in the end the event is paid by them)
You can even limit max tickets sold to one person at two or three, but the trouble, as I understand it, is that it's hard to identify individuals as being... well individuals.
The solution is, as always, simple: regulation. In this case:
- break up Ticketmaster, Live Nation and their European friends. Ban vertical integration. And for good measure (and to placate the public who is out for blood, and I mean that one in the literal sense - ask a random on the street about what they'd do to scalpers and TM, I'd bet good money on at least 50% going for one or another form of violence), place their execs behind bars for a decade.
- mandate that a ticket holder has the right to transfer a personalized ticket for free (plus, in the case of actual paper tickets, a reasonable small service charge for postal fees)
- in conjunction, ban the sale of tickets above face value, including any sort of deals, and place significant fines on violators of both ends. This completely eliminates the "second hand" scalper market. Of course, black markets will still crop up, but when both sides cannot be certain the opposing trade partner is a cop...
Unfortunately, this would also kill a lot of income for the big players - chiefly, the ticket sale platforms that currently make an insane amount of money on bogus charges for name changes on tickets as well as running their own resale markets where they can double or triple dip on fees (depending how often that specific ticket gets sold back for whatever reason). And that is why such a movement will probably never happen during our lifetime.
Why should ticket sales be regulated? Why should the government care about what price event tickets sell for?
Concerts are pure luxury. I like going to concerts, but I don't see a reason why the government should intervene? Scalpers exist because artists underprice tickets on purpose.
> Why should ticket sales be regulated? Why should the government care about what price event tickets sell for?
Simple: because a government should take care about what its citizens want. And on top of that, the economy (aka artists and venues that really REALLY don't want to deal with TM but have no other choice) also wants it.
That's why anti-trust legislation was created. It just fell out of practice to actually use it.
>I'd bet good money on at least 50% going for one or another form of violence), place their execs behind bars for a decade.
Why not send them to the firing squad? Or torturing them?
Some people have sociopathic tendencies. If your problem is scrappers making money the solution could not be creating a bigger problem like sending people to jail for a decade.
Comming recently from visiting Ukraine I can't help thinking how insignificant those pet problems are, while real crimes like kids being killed go impune every day... If the price of something is too high, just don't go there. It is not the end of the world.
> If your problem is scrappers making money the solution could not be creating a bigger problem like sending people to jail for a decade.
My problem is the profiteering, the concentration and subsequent abuse of power by the rich. It used to be the case that rich overlords who abused their power got deposed by their population, driven off with pitchforks if they were lucky, decapitated by guillotine if not. Personally I don't want a return to such grisly times, hence I call for at least punishing abusers by putting them behind bars.
> Comming recently from visiting Ukraine I can't help thinking how insignificant those pet problems are, while real crimes like kids being killed go impune every day...
Now Putin and his command chain, I don't think anyone but rabid tankies would have an issue with their lives being condemned in a repeat of the Nuremberg Trials.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] threadFor a ticket platform like pretix that can be run self-hosted alongside the main site, this should give you enough signals to discriminate between normal users and bots, unless they are specifically targeting that site, or am I mistaken? Even just pure web server access logs may be sufficient on smaller sites so this might work even without JS?
Doing any kind of access pattern analysis leaves you with the problem of handling false positives, and your proposal doesn't help with the accessibility problems.
IP addresses aren't a panacea here -- this is a high margin business where the attackers can switch to high cost / high quality proxies.
> unless they are specifically targeting that site
In this case the attackers would very specifically be targeting specific sites (ones selling tickets to events with more demand than supply).
You don't defend at the web, you defend in the courtroom and bank.
I assume it's too expensive or the ticket sellers don't actually care, they just want to think they care.
The alternative is selling the tickets to scalpers which doesn't seem ethically better or better at community building as compared to directly selling it to fans.
Even if you assign tickets to IDs scalpers will sell access to bots instead to capture the delta between market price and the price the ticket is being sold for.
Make the scalping bastards choke on it, and break FOMO all at once.
Or do what airlines do and you need to declare who is using the ticket. Maybe allow exchange for up to 50% of a party.
Then the scalpers can't win but there is still a DOS problem to solve.
Maybe a card auth -> reserve seats -> complete txn flow would help there. The card auth rate limits the amount of unbooked but temporary reserved tickets.
discussed in TFA
> Or do what airlines do and you need to declare who is using the ticket
ditto
I’m not convinced cards are a significant barrier. People already get tons of credit cards for the signup bonuses and perks, and you can get prepaid cards pretty easily. Temporary card numbers are a thing too. There are logistical challenges in getting a lot of cards in the buying pool but I don’t think they’re insurmountable.
This problem mostly exists in the Swift concerts that sell out in four minutes before the internet explodes with people complaining the website never loaded for them. I'm sure "might harm sales" really won't be a problem for those concerts.
Similarly a lack of privacy hurts everyone.
The question is basically "would you rather have an equally-shitty service for everyone in the name of egalitarianism or a good service for most?" This seems a really easy choice for me because I don't see egalitarianism/accessibility as a moral imperative.
If you wanna be even more strict: You could allow up to X companions, but they must not have signed up with their own account (so they don’t have an advantage for doing so). And they must provide their ID before the event as well and arrive as a single party.
First of all, this remains a hassle in most countries, since handling a national identity number (if such a number exists at all) is restricted by law. Even in some countries that do not legally restrict collection or storage of identity numbers (AFAIK the US does not restrict private sector usage of SSNs), there is rarely wide acceptance of providing your identity number for any purpose other than official government services and financial institutions. This means that in most cases, the event organizer has to resort to more traditional methods of KYC: Requesting some personal details (e.g. full name and birth date) and requiring to present an identity document that carries the details above. Verifying the identity document adds slows down entrance lines and increases the cost.
The other issue with this method is privacy. You're still not breaking the suggested BAP (Bots-resistance/Accessibility/Privacy) theorem suggested by the article. Additional personal information has to be collected and stored until the time of the event.
But I believe there is a way out of this. You can still create a limited resource that is more restricted than phone numbers or credit card numbers, and can be optionally verified at the venue cheaply. The only problem is that would require cooperation from the government (and a great deal of effort if you want to make it perfect). The government needs to already have an online digital KYC method that is bound to your digital ID or an online government account. Then the government can use that method to provide an anonymous federated login that provides a unique ID that cannot be traced back to any national identity number. This is essentially how Sign in with Apple works with "Hide My Email" selected: No personally identifying claims are included in the Open ID Connect ID Token and "sub" is unique (per Apple user + 3rd party service combination), but not traceable back to the the original Apple identity. Unique identities can also become ad-hoc per-event (instead of per ticket provider), which makes them completely private (ticket providers cannot track users across multiple events).
At described above, this service still only provides a limited resource akin to phone numbers. For events where the profit margin from ticket scalping exceeds $100, you could still get some scalpers who'd convince collaborators to identify in with their government account and buy tickets for the scalper for $20 per ticket. If you can get 5 tickets per ID, that's $100 of easy money for 5 minutes of work. You can add simple and fast verification at the venue by requiring the users to generate a QR code that is tied to their unique ID at the venue in order to enter. The QR code cannot be generated in advance and is based on a challenge QR that is presented at the venue. This requires collaborators would have to physically come to the venue or be available at the time the scalper's agents come to redeem the paper tickets at the venue. With a QR code generation and check directly at the gate, scalping is completely impossible (at the cost of longer lines and less entrance flexibility). With printed tickets the scalper needs to send agents to physically collect the tickets and communicate with the collaborators (who need to be available at the day of the event to generate the QR codes remotely) — which greatly inflates the cost of scalping.
Even when you get governments to cooperate with this approach, there are still some holes with this approach. The first issue is that eKYC needs to become popular enough to avoid a large loss in sales. The second issue is raising awareness with regards to privacy-preserving eKYC vs. regular eKYC. This two services look very similar (you log-in with your government account or ID to prove your identity), but the scope of the information shared couldn't be more different...
Just saying ...
If the profit per successful abuse event is $200, the author's suggestion of limits on credit card numbers or phone numbers won't work either. Those are only effective against scaled abuse up to something like $1 / event. Bank accounts would almost certainly be more robust, but that seems quite hard to implement outside of a handful of countries where the online auth ecosystem is built around banks.
With generic abuse background, but not knowing anything about the ticketing abuse ecosystem, is doing the sales on a first-come-first-serve basis an absolute necessity from a business perspective? There would be a lot more tools available if the problem was reframed from "decide instantly whether to sell this buyer a ticket" to "decide which 10k of these 100k intents of purchase received during the first 24h to sell the tickets to". And by more tools, I mean offline analysis and clustering, not just a lottery.
(You'd still want to combine that with strongly personalized tickets though. It'd be how you address for bots-as-a-service, not how you address buying tickets to resell.)
> Of course it also harms real buyers who want to go to a concert with a +1 but do not yet know who they will bring.
So, for example, everyone pays $0.01 on their credit card, or does a holding charge on their credit card, or registers their identity. All in a 5 minute (or 1 day!) window. And then after the window, tickets are randomly distributed amongst every card which so registered.
You could check multiple things - phone and card and Government ID if necessary (lowering the privacy).
This also feels fairer and less stressful - instead of a lottery based on your internet access, or ability to run lots of browsers at once.
This feels harder for scalpers to do to me, as they need more fake identities, but I'd be curious about the actual ratios when trying it. What goes wrong?
Another one I predict is that you can't buy digitally. For examples, the Lewes fireworks display you have to buy tickets in person in a bookshop in Lewes. Doesn't help if you make a digital ticketing system though!
And if your ID doesn't match the ticket, you don't get in.
It's successful in keeping tickets in the hands of families and fans instead of resale.
Why?
I also imagine that as an event promoter, being able to say some variation of "Another sold out show", or "Tickets sold out within seconds" creates pressure for buying early for all future events.
It also takes active planned work to implement these solutions. And if they have a monopoly, they have no incentive to do that work.
What matters is selling the ticket, getting a guest in the door is just expense.
Removes all the uncertainty and risk and puts it on the scalpers.
2. Are you sure the scalpers and the agency selling the original tickets are independent? Even if they are on paper, in many locations there is evidence of a local cartel.
3. The initial sales provide revenue up front to pay for the costs of the event, vendors, etc. This reduces the amount of cash reserves the seller needs, sometimes very dramatically.
4. Many scalped sales (used to be, not as much anymore) were cash transactions. This used to be used as a pretty significant tax dodge: Sell tickets for $50 face value to your affiliated scalper, pay tax on this sale, scalper sells tickets for $200 and does not pay tax on this secondary sale, or underreports the number of secondary tickets sold. Lots of shenanigans here to make your profitable scalping business look like it's making a small loss on paper.
5. Especially in the context of a local or regional cartel, each ticket sale represents the opportunity to move capital between entities. Physical tickets can be an effective vehicle for small-medium scale money laundering: Dirty money/entity buys the tickets, clean entity resells them.
Basically as soon as you drop the assumption that the ticket sellers and scalpers aren't related in some way, there are a lot more profitable reasons for the ticket sellers to "leave money on the table".
Then there is the slightly more insidious incentive: selling out quickly is in and of itself valuable for a performer: it makes them look popular and exclusive. That alone might just make it worth it altogether.
I have to disagree; performers are absolutely in the business of optimization. Bo Burnham was singing about metrification destroying art 10 years ago. Every standup comic is using social media as a sales funnel to figure out exactly which cities they have an audience in. Even if the performers themselves are not concerned with gaming these numbers, they almost always have someone working for them who does.
So I still don’t quite understand why the scalpers are the ones getting to eat the free lunch.
> selling out quickly is in and of itself valuable for a performer
This one seems like a more likely explanation, but the pattern with a lot of these ticket sales is that the demand is already there organically without scalpers entering the equation. I don’t really follow the space so I really don’t know, but I’d imagine the shows that get targeted the most are the performers who were going to be playing a sold out show regardless of the scalpers.
Eliminating uncertainty about whether a concert will sell out may be the primary reason.
Net ticket prices might be dictated by the performers and their agents, and the ticket agency might not have the ability to raise prices unilaterally, at least not by enough to stop scalpers.
There's another factor, or side-effect, that might be missed in explaining why an artist or their agent won't set prices higher, even when the artist has a history of having concerts sell out and tickets scalped: scalping is a symptom and sign of scarcity, and scarcity drives interest.
They probably want to set prices as high as possible while still having a high probability that tickets will sell out and make concertgoers panic-buy.
This also eliminates uncertainty about whether something will be filled. The uncertainty is only on the side of fans that someine will outbid them for a sold-out concert ticket, and they’ll then get the money back
Crypto removes middlemen
Then you just have auctions and tickets are not transferable. No middlemen. Simple and honest price discovery.
The “progressives” told me it would starve public schools of funds and students since private schools would admit only the best and brightest
So I said — don’t let the schools choose. Let the people choose. If the school is filled then you use a lottery for who can actually get in, M of N people. Simple.
Students would apply for the school and M of N applicants would be picked randomly.
It turns out the administrators running the lottery would run the randomization program until it gave them the student distribution they wanted (read: the best and brightest, and since it's the south... somehow whiter than expected).
School systems are also special because you don't really want to overprovision school seats, so if there at the end of the day are as many seats as there are pupils in the system as a whole, there can only be selection and never competition in the economic sense.
which is just such a lack of imagination for what we are capable of, both in terms of progress and irrationality.
[1] https://freenet.org/ghostkey/
[2] https://freenet.org/
Does the number of keys need to scale? If $1 buys a key for life, and signing can be easily automated why would it stop bots?
Now that tickets are all electronic and the ticket sellers operate secondary markets there is no "face value" anymore and pricing is dynamic. Not all tickets are released at once and many are offered at "platinum" prices at first.
All through the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's and 00's concert tickets were around $40-$50 in 2025 dollars, now that is just the service charge. Just go on eBay and look at some ticket stubs then put the price / date into the CPI calculator.
It turns out that the bands couldn't beat the scalpers so they became the scalpers, charging outrageous prices with the assistance of the ticketing companies.
So stopping bots isn't as important as it was when CAPTCHAs were effective, since there is a lot less money on the table for professional scalpers to capture.
Being up at the rails at a Girl in Red concert set me back $60 at a 5k person venue. If you want to see supermassive artists for that kind of unit price you have to "buy bulk" and go to festivals.
All my friends that complain about the rising cost of concerts tickets don’t realize that they just see the same old bands year over year. These scrappy up and coming bands that they saw as a kid aren’t scrappy anymore. That’s why blink-182 can charge $700 for the pleasure and still sell out — because most of their fans are in their late 20s or 30s, have disposable income, and number in the millions.
Go to a $20 show for a band today and who knows, maybe they will charge you $700 in 20 years. Plus you can tell everyone that you saw them before it was cool. /s
Many bands don’t make it all of course, but I can still pay $7 cash for shows today at that shop and some of them are going to be able to charge $80 in a few years.
For example, there could be an API for e-mail providers to tell services that an address belongs to a human. The provider would need to implement methods to verify the user's humanity, so you wouldn't need to give every online service your personal info, only your humanity provider that vouches for you. Something like SSL certificate hierarchies could be used to ensure that smaller providers aren't vouching for bots, i.e. you have a root CA that signs their certificates, and if it's found that they don't actually do what they are supposed to do, the certificate isn't renewed. This added with some actual costs to get those certificates would give them an incentive not to lie.
I know some people complain about this not being "private," but let's be real. If you purchase anything from any online website, they have your home address, your phone number, your real name as printed on your credit card, and there is a non-zero chance that some moron stored your credit card number in plain text in a MySQL database. It's always going to be safer to trust PayPal than some random website with this information. Why not do the same with human identity?
Finally, if you can't sign up with any humanity provider for some reason, just make the process extremely annoying and limited. For example, if you have 100 tickets to sell, reserve 90 for people that can prove they are human and leave only 10 for potential bots, then implement a lengthy process for those users so that's not worth it for the bots. If 90% of the tickets are already purchased by people, it will be less profitable for scrapers already.
This “lengthy process” will be optimised by the bots, who have incentive to do so, so that it’s not worth it for the humans.
most of traffic is from mobile devices anyways. they have biometrics (e.g. Apple FaceID, fingerprint). they also have DeviceCheck (Apple Hardware + Apple servers) integrity checks of device/binary that is making requests. it is also free and private.
why using this technology is not part of conversation? seems like utmost strongest guarantees and perfect fit?
Are you claiming that owners of websites have to purchase laptops for their website visitors?
And are you claiming that Apple has worser privacy than Android? or ... holdon, there is nothing else (Huawei is out of the question, and MSFT/Symbian does not exist anymore)
this is crazy talk. what are you even saying?
Stop selling online.
Sell the tickets at a small number of locations near and including the venue, with cashiers empowered to deny suspicious transactions.
Could someone put together a small army of smurfs to buy up all the tickets in major cities? Sure. Could someone have someone on the inside sell them a block of tickets against policy? Sure. We can handle these cases on a locale by locale basis with a convenience trade off that seems appropriate to the place.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good, and even worse, don't let overwrought privacy-invading and non-accessible digital solutions (that create a playing field tilted towards bad actors equipped with AI tools) be the enemy of a dead simple analog real-world one that leverages our best reputation management system: ourselves.
People frequently travel to major cities for concerts, do you expect them to travel twice to purchase the tickets? Either you join a much wider network of sellers than that, or this would only satisfy people already living not too far from the venue.
Your solution doesn't do anything against scalpers, on the contrary it encourages scalping even more.
You can also just do like The Cure did and destroy the secondary market entirely: you can sell tickets through the platform and only for what you paid for them.
Then it's up for grabs.
There's no guarantee for the buyer that an out-of-band payment will get them the ticket (someone else can get it), and there's nothing that forces them to send an extra payment once they do get the ticket.
Most tickets these days are digital.
Tickets must not be sold for more than the original price. Ticketmaster etc are still happy to take part in the action: their resale system still charges a second set of ticket fees for a resale, though the sale price is limited to the purchase price.
If they would simply sell tickets for the prices people are willing to pay in the first place then they wouldn't need to invade privacy or any of this stuff. I've heard the arguments they use to justify why they don't and they're all hogwash.
(As far as this article as discussing. They also serve some use for reselling tickets when you meant to go but can't but this doesn't have any more downsides)
Not all artists lean into it of course, and it's usually not the actual artists anyway but labels, producers, etc.
In that same episode they covered how LiveNation owns both TicketMaster and many venues themselves, and leverage access to the venues for power in the ticketing market.
It may have been this one but I'm not 100%: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/25/195641030/epis...
You can’t just make more Taylor Swift to meet demand. You can’t open more Taylor Swifts in different regions. Acts have a very low very rigid upper supply limit. So if you price up at that demand it puts it out of reach of almost everyone. And that’s a bad outcome for almost everyone.
(Edit: there's a reason for opera houses providing cheap standing room for enthusiasts – it keeps the art alive.)
I've heard the arguments they use to justify why they do and they're all hogwash.
What is wrong with market price?
The space at a concert is limited so some form filtering will have to happen, but if the only metric is market price that's a pretty sad society specially when we're talking about culture IMO
The way I see it, it is also highly likely that the person paying more is of average income and just convinced themselves to pay more because they are superfans
The point I'm making is that market value reduces the problem to just money which is being taunted as a magic solution, which might work in some cases but market value doesn't exist in a vacuum and it has side effects. As the topic being discussed is culture it introduces a lot of biases into society that I would find problematic.
Also, if we want to talk in pure capitalist terms, Ticketmaster is already a monopoly of sorts in the music buisiness, there's no "market value" if there's no pressure to lower prices, they can make the experience as bad as possible without repercussions other than people not going to concerts anymore which as a society would suck
twitter sells blue checks for $8/mo and it's full of bots
The industry doesn't WANT to solve this. I don't see why anyone believes or entertains the idea they are even trying.
Revert to the current anonymous ticket process for any lower popularity event for simplicity if required.
Situation 1: My co-workers could not get time off work, so I am asking my tennis buddies instead. I am transferring tickets to their names.
Situation 2: I am actually a scalper! I've got paid 10x times the price (via venmo), and I am transferring tickets to those random people.
How do you tell those 2 apart?
Scalpers can't transfer tickets in this system.
https://nos.nl/artikel/2568164-chaos-bij-ticketuitgifte-voor...
The problem there was not having enough security - it's like store giving out free popcorn, and someone comes and steals the whole cart. In the physical world, there would be someone standing next to the cart watching that people take reasonable amounts. In the digital world, nothing was done, so thieves stole a lot.
Not sure what the best solution was to be there... I like the idea of giving people few days to sign up, then randomly choosing who gets to go. Of course this has its own problems - for example you want to allow groups, but this can be abused. Identity verification helps with that, but this makes ticket checking much slower....
It's NL and the everyone has a personal id. There is a national service to validate that, too.
One week accepting of requests - a person can submit multiple id (incl. children). At the end of the period a random lottery with some bias to people registered in the city (in the end the event is paid by them)
The first ticket you buy costs the normal price. The second ticket costs twice the price. The third ticket is four times the price and so on.
Scalpers who buy many tickets at once will go bankrupt before they can buy all the available tickets.
- break up Ticketmaster, Live Nation and their European friends. Ban vertical integration. And for good measure (and to placate the public who is out for blood, and I mean that one in the literal sense - ask a random on the street about what they'd do to scalpers and TM, I'd bet good money on at least 50% going for one or another form of violence), place their execs behind bars for a decade.
- mandate that a ticket holder has the right to transfer a personalized ticket for free (plus, in the case of actual paper tickets, a reasonable small service charge for postal fees)
- in conjunction, ban the sale of tickets above face value, including any sort of deals, and place significant fines on violators of both ends. This completely eliminates the "second hand" scalper market. Of course, black markets will still crop up, but when both sides cannot be certain the opposing trade partner is a cop...
Unfortunately, this would also kill a lot of income for the big players - chiefly, the ticket sale platforms that currently make an insane amount of money on bogus charges for name changes on tickets as well as running their own resale markets where they can double or triple dip on fees (depending how often that specific ticket gets sold back for whatever reason). And that is why such a movement will probably never happen during our lifetime.
Concerts are pure luxury. I like going to concerts, but I don't see a reason why the government should intervene? Scalpers exist because artists underprice tickets on purpose.
Simple: because a government should take care about what its citizens want. And on top of that, the economy (aka artists and venues that really REALLY don't want to deal with TM but have no other choice) also wants it.
That's why anti-trust legislation was created. It just fell out of practice to actually use it.
Speak for yourself (pun intended).
Why not send them to the firing squad? Or torturing them?
Some people have sociopathic tendencies. If your problem is scrappers making money the solution could not be creating a bigger problem like sending people to jail for a decade.
Comming recently from visiting Ukraine I can't help thinking how insignificant those pet problems are, while real crimes like kids being killed go impune every day... If the price of something is too high, just don't go there. It is not the end of the world.
My problem is the profiteering, the concentration and subsequent abuse of power by the rich. It used to be the case that rich overlords who abused their power got deposed by their population, driven off with pitchforks if they were lucky, decapitated by guillotine if not. Personally I don't want a return to such grisly times, hence I call for at least punishing abusers by putting them behind bars.
> Comming recently from visiting Ukraine I can't help thinking how insignificant those pet problems are, while real crimes like kids being killed go impune every day...
Now Putin and his command chain, I don't think anyone but rabid tankies would have an issue with their lives being condemned in a repeat of the Nuremberg Trials.