Going to a concert to see your favorite band or watching your favorite football team play in person is a great experience that pretty much everyone wants to have. Of course, this requires buying a ticket for the said event. Unfortunately, resale sites and ticket scalpers have made it more challenging to purchase tickets due to their extreme price inflation. Reports by Live Nation and Seat Geek provided information used in this article.

Professional ticketing sites like Ticketmaster and Live Nation offer tickets at face value, which is the initial price a ticket is sold for.

However, these partners are also teamed up with StubHub, an official resale site where ticket buyers can resell their ticket for however much they desire. Sadly, fans either miss out on a chance to go to the event they wanted tickets for, or they have to reach into their saving's account just for some nosebleed seats. Check out this article on how to make sure you're getting the right tickets for the right price.

Ticketmaster resale game

Ticketmaster actually encourages the reselling of tickets. The site charges fees for each purchase made, so the more times a ticket is sold and resold, the more money the company makes. This means someone could purchase a ticket for $60 and pay $20 in fees. That same person could then resell their ticket for $80 to make his or her money back.

However, Ticketmaster will still charge a $20 fee, so that $60 ticket is now costing someone $100.

Typically most tickets are resold for much higher prices than they were purchased, which can ultimately increase the service fee on ticketing sites. You could end up paying three times the face value for a ticket that someone probably bought with the sole purpose of reselling.

If you buy a verified resale ticket on Ticketmaster or Live Nation, that means the site approved the price the seller set. These companies are allowing scalpers to make a profit.

Is ticket resale even legal?

Many states have laws regarding this in order to prevent ticket scalping. The issue is that many United States resale laws are outdated.

In some states, ticket resale is completely legal. There are usually some limitations like you're not allowed to resell boxing match tickets in Hawaii. In San Francisco, it's legal to resell a ticket online, but illegal to do so in person.

Back in 1963, Minnesota created a law that made ticket scalping a crime. However, they repealed the law in 2007, meaning ticket resale is completely legal in the state now. This basically confirms that ticket resale and ticket scalping are on similar wavelengths since the law for scalping was eliminated in order to allow resale. Basically, buying and selling tickets is all a game of supply and demand. If enough people want a ticket, you can overcharge. If you don't have many offers, you're most likely stuck and reselling at face value or even lower.

Ticket sites claim they do what they can to prevent ticket scalping, like including captchas and limiting searches, but it isn't too effective.

How to stop ticket scalping

Singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran is taking a stand against ticket scalpers. According to the BBC, Sheeran has canceled more than 10,000 tickets for his stadium tour that were purchased on non-official resale sites. Fans whose tickets were canceled are able to pay the face value price at the door and are given assistance with collecting refunds. This way, fans are able to still go to the concert for a respectable price without the worry that their resale ticket is invalid. It'll be interesting to see what other artists or companies try this system or a similar one for upcoming sales.
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