In the vast majority of venues, ID checks are happening anyway to verify eligibility for drinking.

In practice a lot of venues are already 21+ so they are already checking IDs.

>Adding ID checks would make venue entry a slower and more tedious process.

Airports seem to handle them just fine?

Maybe a bit of a dystopian situation but ... I think this was 10 year ago now I went to an Utada Hikaru concert where I had to upload a picture of myself on a dedicated website and when the tickets were scanned I think they had access to that picture

Here’s a wild idea, tie tickets to a drivers license/photo id number, and scan the id.

Edit guess that doesn’t work for kids. Start the tickets at 10k and drop them by a percentage a day. Automatic price discovery. Rich people can just buy them whenever they want.

The price tickets sell for will be higher if scalping exists. Demand increases for 2 reasons:

1 - I’m more likely to buy a ticket or pay a higher price if there’s a chance of turning a profit if I can’t go.

2 - Speculators are more likely to buy unused inventory if they can turn a profit. This increases total tickets sold. (Scalpers get paid for taking risk)

I’m not defending this. I’ve given up on concerts for my favorite larger bands due to sticker shock.

>but if you enter a contract with the intent to violate it, is that legal? My understanding is that it's technically illegal (only civil perhaps, but still illegal), the impracticality of enforcement notwithstanding.

On the first matter, I'm not sure, it might be fraud, which can be civil or criminal if there's a specific law that defines criminal penalties.

Again I guess the proposal could be that a law specifies that the resale of tickets is a so and so crime (misdemeanor?) and carries a penalty of X. We are steelmanning the argument here, and it still sounds quite untenable.

On the civil front, I can see how the intent to breach a term might be relevant, but I can also see how it might be irrelevant, in the sense that the breaching party would be forced to remedy the damages of the breach, no more no less. How would the intent to breach a term increase or reduce the damage caused by the breach if so?

>Also, I have no idea if the contract for a ticket "sale" is really considered a contract for the purposes of such laws.

On the second matter, it really is. The layman perception of a contract is usually a formal document that needs to be signed, whereas in no legal systems that I know of are these actual elements of a contract. In most legal systems a contract is a much broader concept: a private agreement between two parties, with the main defining elements being offer, acceptance and consideration. Most if not all trade transactions are contracts, they include the main elements.

Ticketmaster sure but back in the day I could get tickets for a song on stubhub. That seems to be a relic of the past and the resale ticket marketplace is barely less than face value.

This makes sense, but I'd contend it's all the more reason for outrage: not only are scalpers doing what they're doing anyways, but they're destroying the (totally legitimate and sympathetic!) reason for "artificially" lowering the price to begin with.

I should note that outrage doesn't seem to land on the people who buy from scalpers, which is...probably correct? Seems easier to say "don't break the contract" to scalpers instead of fans who are just able to pay more.

Onion futures act.

This is the reason that businesses don't try to monopolize the food industry. It's not competition as we just saw from the egg industry. The government gets pushed back from the masses pretty quickly on food related issues.

I really doubt you can’t buy the whole harvest of a farmer if you pay for the whole thing. You can probably buy it for less than normal

You are mixing things up. Just pricing your product based on demand does not necessarily make you a scalper. It's the fact that you are not the producer of the good itself that makes you one.

To use the real estate example, there is a difference between a developer selling a house it built, and an investor selling a house that he bought when it was cheaper.

I think that if you poke at the term "rent-seeking" with the definition of "middle men who add no economic value yet inject themselves into transactions", you'll just end up arguing about what "adding economic value" means.

That said...if you can do that, you'll probably find that some additions of economic value are far more defensible than others, so it shouldn't all be flattened in the manner you're suggesting.

I mean, scalpers add economic value, right?! They allow (wealthier) people who didn't stand in line at the right time to have a chance to purchase a ticket!

My (probably mis-)understanding of StubHub/Ticketmaster is that they're serving as sin eaters / reputation shields for the artists:

Phase 1:

   - Artist lists tickets as "$20"
   - SH/TM charges $20 + $15 convenience fee
   - SH/TM pays the artist $30 and keeps $5
   - Artist gets to look like they're kind/generous for pricing so affordably while making some of SH/TM's cut

   - SH/TM hold back some percentage of tickets (possibly most or all of them) to sell on the "resale" market
   - Those "resale" tickets sell near the market-clearing price, either earning higher margins than if they had sold at list price, or ensuring that most of the seats in the venue are filled.
   - SH/TM kick back some percentage of revenue from resale tickets to the artist.

That's also easy to solve. Allocate discounted tickets by lottery and bind to a name (think airline tickets). If for whatever reason they can't make it, the ticket goes back into the lottery pool. Or maybe if they want the tickets to be transferable, you can put in some nominee ticket holders (eg. max 3 people you can transfer it to).

What is it that they don't understand about live music?