Unfortunately, “fair” lotteries for popular tickets don’t have a great track record because the profit motive is too heady. Courty, the University of Victoria economist, calls this the “fair price ticketing curse.” If you don’t want scalpers to take advantage of lotteries, there needs to be follow-through on ensuring they don’t end up grabbing a bunch of tickets. But Courty says that’s complicated. “You have to start to audit all the sales accounts, you have to look at who the buyers were, who the resellers were — and they could often be out of jurisdiction,” he says.
The real reason it costs so much to go to a concert
We can’t just blame Ticketmaster and scalpers.
The secret third option to pour some water on fiery demand is not exactly popular, but it is simple: Make the tickets more expensive on the primary market.
It’s easy to see why artists are reluctant to set their prices to what a ticket would sell for on, say, StubHub. Fans would rightfully complain, and many musicians do want to give all fans the chance to come to their shows. But one surefire way to deter scalpers would be to raise prices and narrow the margin that a reseller could make by flipping a ticket. (Theoretically, there’s a ceiling on what people would pay for concert tickets, and surpassing it would quench demand.) There’s a logic to doing so for artists: If a ticket sells for $100 on the resale market compared to $50 on the primary market, “the scalper’s making more than you are from your art and your labor,” notes Koebler.
One surprising thing
Believe it or not, economists say that one way to stabilize some of the extremely high resale prices for popular concert tickets is to raise the price at which they’re originally sold. You can attack the supply-and-demand problem from two sides: boost the supply (artists could play a bunch more shows at the biggest stadiums in the world) or tamp down demand (charge high prices that turn a lot of consumers away).
Courty’s proposed solution for an actually fair concert lottery is making the experience more like booking flights. The ticket is tied to your name, and if you have to cancel, the ticket is returned to the original issuer, who then offers it to the next person in line. The problem is that, obviously, resellers would likely fight any such measure, and there’s a bigger operational cost for ticket providers and venues since they would have to confirm that the initial buyer’s identity matched the person who shows up at the venue.
As long as there isn’t legislation making scalping impossible, and there remains a huge gulf between what artists are charging and what people are willing to pay, resellers are going to be very motivated to ruin the concert ticket-buying experience.
The race to snag a spot is so cutthroat that some fans advocate for a system based on merit — well, what they consider merit — rather than luck. The most devoted fans, who have streamed the most hours of someone’s music, who have bought the most albums, vinyls, and merch, should be given priority. But it’s not clear that this is more fair. Time is also a luxury, as is having the financial means to buy merch. The discourse points to the level of resentment generated by lopsided supply and demand: Who truly deserves to be front row at a Taylor Swift concert? If you have the most money to spend? The most time to dedicate? If you’re busy with work when a concert sale drops, do you just resign yourself to missing the show?
Huge pop stars are already trying their best to book the highest-capacity stadiums, or adding extra shows to ease some of the demand. But for a select few, like Taylor Swift, fans’ desire to see them feels insatiable, and there’s a physical limit to the number of shows we can expect an artist to perform.
“What we’re talking about is access to a human being, more or less,” says Koebler. “The space is limited. The time is limited.”
Update, May 23, 9:55 am ET: This piece was first published on May 23 and has been updated with news of the DOJ's reported Ticketmaster lawsuit.