Big-name stars like Justin Bieber and Adele want their event tickets to be available to their fans. They hate it when scalpers suck up blocks of tickets at the list price and then re-sell them for thousands of dollars. That not only prices the event out of reach of almost all of the real fans but it also drains hundreds of thousands of dollars away from the people who really deserve it, the artists.
Luckily, this problem is easily solved without any new laws.
The key thing you need to understand is that when you price a ticket that people will pay $1,000 for at $125, human nature and market forces are going to guarantee that someone’s going to try to grab that ticket and resell it.
Instead of working against you, you need to make the market work for you.
An example of how an artist can stop ticket scalpers
Suppose in three months Lady Gaga is going to perform at a venue that seats 1,000 people. She puts the seating chart on her website and lets people buy as many tickets as they want for $10,000 each. Yes, $10,000 each.
Don’t freak out. Stick with me here. The buyers can pick any seats they like and as tickets are sold the selected seats are marked off the seating chart.
Maybe she’ll sell 20 tickets at that price and put $200,000 in her pocket. Pretty good for Lady Gaga, right! But here’s the KEY THING: they’re only priced at $10,000 for three days. It says right there on the website that three days from now the price will go down to $9,000, and three days after that it will be $8,000, then $7,000 and so on so that after 30 days the price will be down to $1,000 for whatever seats are left.
Three days later the $1,000 tickets will be reduced to $900, then $800 and so forth until the show is sold out. This way, the vultures have no chance to make any real money because the price of the tickets is constantly decreasing. If some guy wants to buy 100 tickets at $3,000 each, well good luck to him reselling them at a profit because everyone knows that tomorrow they’ll be reduced to $2,000.
The great thing about this technique is that Lady Gaga will get all the money that the scammers used to pocket when they bought tickets for $150 and re-sold them for $1,500. In fact she can make so much more money that she can afford to put 800 of the 1000 tickets up for sale and donate the remaining 200 tickets to her fans via a free lottery.
When the fans sign up for the free-ticket lottery they submit their picture. If the lottery winner who shows up at the gate doesn’t match the photo they submitted when they registered, then they don’t get in, which means that the lottery winners won’t be able to resell their free tickets.
So, no cops. No new laws. No more scalpers. And lots and lots of extra money for Lady Gaga. That’s all pretty good, isn’t it? So, Ringo Starr and Taylor Swift, are you listening?
