[lupin_sansei]

"Ticketmaster says that it is merely bending to the will of the marketplace--because some people are willing to pay more for good seats--and that it is trying to usurp the role of the scalpers and ticket brokers. But the company is really just angling to be the biggest and baddest scalper of them all."

I don't see what the problem with scalping is. The scalper pays for the ticket, and then provides the very useful service of making the ticket available at the last minute. The scalper also takes on a risk that no one will want the ticket,

I can see that the band/venue/ticketing agency wouldn't like it as they don't get a piece of the action. But that doesn't make it immoral.

If tickets are auctioned online by the ticket seller then presumably the band and venue will make more money which will lead to more tours/albums/better venues etc.

Auctioning would probably work both ways too in that worse seats would be available for less than they currently are now.

[plusbryan]

It's not just the venues that hate scalping, it seems that most people do too.

For me at least, scalping seems "evil" because it's charging a lot for something of little inherent value -- if I had just logged in 10 minutes earlier than you, I could have had your ticket for 1/10 the price.

A better system in my mind (one that ticketmaster had the leverage to implement) would be a point system - if I purchase a ticket for a sold-out concert, and it turns out that I can't go, I should be able to get my money back AND nab a spot in the pre-sale queue for the next popular concert coming to town.

That way, I still get my great ticket, but I'm not setting an arbitrary value based on demand.

[lupin_sansei]

There's no inherent value for tickets (or anything). Their value subjective - what people will pay for them. There's nothing more "right" about the price the ticketing office charges than the price the scalper charges.

It's not only a 10 minute difference, a scalper will allow you to buy a ticket 1 minute before the show starts - that's worth something.

[weel]

There is, indeed, no such thing as inherent value, but people nonetheless tend to think in terms of inherent value. This is important to realize when you decide on marketing and pricing schemes. For instance, restaurants are more likely to offer a discount on quiet days than charge a surcharge on busy days, and they make those sorts of decisions for a reason (restaurants can be a very competitive business, after all.)

David Friedman wrote a neat paper about the psychology of inherent prices and some related topics:

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/econ_and_evol_psych/economics_and_evol_psych.html