Ticketing has long been ripe for re-invention. The big problem is that TicketMaster has anti-competitive contracts with most popular venues.
Louis CK, in trying to do his own thing, is facing largely the same troubles Pearl Jam did in their own effort to end-run Ticketmaster: they're forced to play, in many cases, massively smaller venues. And that winds up excluding more fans than TicketMasters' fees and scalper's artificial price-hikes ever excluded.
As for scalping itself, it can't be "solved". Any feasible system needs to allow tickets to be transferred or gifted in some manner. [1]
And as soon as you do that you've provided the mechanism whereby a secondary sales channel can allow party A to sell party B a promise to transfer the ticket for above-face-value.
[1] To cover people buying X tickets for a giveaway, or one person buying tickets for a group, or people giving tickets as gifts, or people giving tickets away to a show they can no longer attend, etc.
1. Have a fixed price for non-transferrable tickets, which are identified by ID/CC or sent to a specific mobile device with a QR code or something. These tickets will be refundable.
2. Have a variable price for transferrable tickets, and use an auction type system. These tickets can be transferred but the user must go through the auction and there's a sufficiently long auction period to purchase them. These tickets are not refundable.
I would be really easy to create the same type of scale-able ticket selling system and in-venue verification scanners.
As a Previous Ticketmaster employee I believe the one thing that help prevent competition in this space is that they work with venues and performers. They subsidize Opex cost for the venues, which I think keeps them happy. For the life of me I can't explain why Ticketmaster would go and "merge" with a competitor who had driven themselves (liveNation) to the verge of bankruptcy (publicly stated within 30 days) just to take some venue market share and select artist. LiveNation now runs this combined company - it was less of a merge and more of a bankrupt company convincing a profitably company that they should "merge". IMO this has everything to do with piss poor management at Ticketmaster and the real value of select venues/artists.
Seriously,...no body even noticed MogoTix ticketing Facebook's f8 event last year? www.mogotix.com my startup. However, I don't believe MogoTix is the disruption this industry needs.
Louis CK, in trying to do his own thing, is facing largely the same troubles Pearl Jam did in their own effort to end-run Ticketmaster: they're forced to play, in many cases, massively smaller venues. And that winds up excluding more fans than TicketMasters' fees and scalper's artificial price-hikes ever excluded.
As for scalping itself, it can't be "solved". Any feasible system needs to allow tickets to be transferred or gifted in some manner. [1]
And as soon as you do that you've provided the mechanism whereby a secondary sales channel can allow party A to sell party B a promise to transfer the ticket for above-face-value.
[1] To cover people buying X tickets for a giveaway, or one person buying tickets for a group, or people giving tickets as gifts, or people giving tickets away to a show they can no longer attend, etc.