At the Taylor Swift concert at Levi’s Stadium on Aug. 15, countless fans cheered on the singer and sang along to her songs, buying merchandise and proclaiming it to be one of the best days of their life. Unfortunately, even for a lower-end nosebleed ticket originally going for $50, fans were forced to shell out as much as $200.
Online ticket sellers such as StubHub buy obscene quantities of high-demand tickets when they are at market price, only to resell them to eager concertgoers months later for a grossly large profit. While many see business model as immoral, banning it would violate free enterprise. The government should not intervene in private business; instead, event managers and artists should take steps to make this kind of scalping impossible.
Since ticket scalping’s negative connotation comes from the unfair profit that scalpers enjoy, the only way to put an end to it is to make the system so that scalpers cannot resell tickets for a profit.
Most artists prefer that their fans can attend their shows, and discourage anyone who makes this difficult. To end scalping, artists could sell the tickets themselves, digitally.
For example, in 2012, comedian Louis CK sold tickets to a show in this manner, and the result was a 96 percent decrease in scalping.
CK’s selling method made it so that people could resell their tickets, but software tracked if they tried to increase the price. If someone did attempt to make a profit on the tickets, CK had the right to cancel the ticket and refund their money at the original price.
This way, scalpers had no reason to buy such large quantities of tickets, since they wouldn’t be able to make a profit.
At the end of the day, ticket sales are just business transactions, and in a business transaction, the only decision making should be between the customer and the seller, and it’s OK for one of the sides to cut out the middle man.
Artists must take the measures to prevent ticket scalping and follow examples of those such as set by CK. Artists must show that they care enough to protect their fans and can deal with the problem without asking the government to butt in.
