> tickets are currently sold under the wrong terms, which encourages scalping

The incentive to scalp arises from the likelihood that a ticket will be worth more in the future (buy low, sell high) and that future worth is established by scarcity (sold out shows). To help eliminate this likelihood, the original price (face value) needs to decrease over time, ideally in such a way that the final original ticket sale occurs right when doors open, because the sooner that occurs, the bigger the opportunity for scalping. "Dutch auction" [0] is one implementation of this concept, though it's typically to find the most money a single buyer will pay, whereas in this case we have thousands of buyers. Perhaps the rate at which the price declines could be dynamically adjusted to aim for N% sold when N% of the on-sale timeline has elapsed, for any N.

The problem is convincing promoters/etc. that this would be as profitable for them as the status quo. But it might be!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction

This is terrible - right now the random 17 year old middle-class kid at least has a small chance of getting a somewhat reasonably priced ticket to a popular show. In your model, they have zero chance.

Auction models are good for price discovery but this isn’t a price discovery problem, it is a supply problem. Believe it or not, artists don’t always want to maximize revenue from a ticket, they want fans from lower income brackets to be able to attend as well.

Suppose, for simplicity, that you've got 2 types of people: price-sensitive (your 17yo) and price-insensitive (let's call them rich). In reality it's a gradient, complicated by emotional aspects, but I think just 2 cohorts is sufficient for this explanation.

If face value is constant over time (i.e., the current model), scalpers can buy at any time that original tickets remain available. If they predict huge scalping margins, they'll buy up tickets ASAP, competing with the 17yo buying ASAP. And scalpers are more likely to have bots/scripts to help get in the moment tickets go on sale, putting them at an advantage over the 17yo. The 17yo probably ends up finding that the show has sold out to scalpers, so now tickets are too expensive. If the scalpers overbought, they'll eventually let the tickets go at reasonable prices (maybe even below face value) as the event nears, so maybe the 17yo has a chance that way, and many seats will be empty. If the scalpers underbought, great.

If face value decreases over time (i.e., my proposed model) from the original seller, then you've sort of got the exact same thing going on in terms of the rich buying early and the 17yo buying late, except the 17yo has one less middleman to contend with. Less chaos. Authoritative information about how many seats are yet to be filled. Bots that simply react to slow price changes like a human could, instead of bots that rush the release of tickets faster than humans.

In either model, the rich get their way and the 17yo gets whatever is left. But when well-controlled, this gap can be filled through need-based programs, student programs, etc. -- Broadway has some examples. These programs can be layered on top of, as they are orthogonal to, eliminating the incentive to use bad bots for scalping.

I don't have all the answers, but as someone who has been a musician for 30 years, programmer for 24, FoH audio engineer for 21, stock trader for 15, booked several shows, and buys tickets to shows every month or two, this is something I truly think could benefit the ticket-buying experience without excessive downside. The prices don't need to be astronomical (i.e., for the richest of the rich) when they first go on sale. They just need to be set, and reset continuously over time, so as to have N% be sold equal to N% of sale window elapsed, with the window ending at doors; sales would be almost exclusively to genuine show-goers because scalpers would almost exclusively be bag-holders.

Let's make this easy. There's 1000 people who want to go to a concert and there are 100 tickets. Of the 1000 people who want to go, every 100 of them is willing to spend $10 more, starting at $100. So the first 100 will pay $100, the second will pay $110, etc.

If the concert is priced at $120 there are 200 people completely priced out, but there are 800 people who will pay. The tickets are released, they all scramble for the tickets, some from each of the 8 cohorts willing to pay the price are able to attend.

If the concert is priced the way you described it, all 100 tickets would be bought before the price ever goes below $200.

There is simply more demand than supply. The only way to fairly distribute that, if that is what you want to do, is by the lottery-esque system we have now.

If we will have a lottery, then it should be a sensibly managed lottery, not a scramble gamed by bots.

Agreed. So how do we do that? ID verification?

> Let's face it, the real problem with ticket sales is scalping. OP may not like Ticketmaster, and doesn't want to install the app, but the majority of fans don't have a problem with that. The real problem for most fans are the scalpers who push prices out of their budget.

No, the problem is artists wanting to falsely advertise low prices, and using gimmicks like first-come-first-served ticket sales and "scalpers" (usually fake, sometimes hired by the artists themselves) to do it, and the "fans" buying into this whole false narrative. If artists would honestly sell, and fans would honestly buy, at the actual prices, then the whole kabuki play of "evil scalpers" could be avoided.

but how would the artist continue to pretend to be close to The People?

The problem is scalping.

Unfortunately, this "solution" is Ticketmaster cementing their control of the ticket marketplace and spying on their users.

And (and I think you were implying this), Ticketmaster giving themselves complete control over the still existing scalping market which they use to boost their own profits without any benefits over the standard scalping market (arguably also including further downsides).

Yup, they finally outscalped the scalpers. What a windfall the covid push to ban cash and digitize tickets was for them.

Yes, non-transferable tickets would fix the scalping part of it. I'm guessing the face value would go up a lot in that case, and that's fine... at least it's an honest market then and ticketmaster cannot pass the blame on to the scalpers.

> The real problem for most fans are the scalpers who push prices out of their budget.

Isn't that the market sorting itself out? What do you want, planned economy? How is fixing the price on a ticket different than the soviet union stamping prices directly onto manufactured items. I meant this to be sarcastic, but it's only half so, since I find the comparison appropriate, you know free market and all.

> What do you want, planned economy?

Every world economy is a mix of a market system and a planned economy. No economy is a pure market or a pure planned economy.