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by vova_hn2 6 days ago
A question only tangentially related to the original post, but I always wonder about it when I read such discussions.

To all the people, who complain about "price gouging" or "scalpers" and "lack of regulations": if there are no fair market price, how exactly are you planning to judge who is "worthy" of getting a ticket and who isn't.

Let's say, you somehow forced them to sell tickets at low prices and somehow magically got rid of all the resellers. Now you have a 1000 people venue and 10_000 people willing to buy a ticket for the stated price. What do you do? How do you decide who are the lucky ones?

2 comments

> How do you decide who are the lucky ones?

Lottery. That's how Japan does it, and it works decently well. Usually tied to phone number which requires an ID. That prevents most severe multiple entries

First come first serve, and multiple show dates if you're optimizing for sales.

There are lots of platforms for ticket sales and venue management. That's how they run high school and college events, local theaters, etc. Ticketmaster is doing something completely different.

Guess who wins that, bots. Now you need a whole new system to verify the identity of the buyer (which HN would prob love).

Also is First Come First Serve really fair? Some people have more time at hand to keep refreshing the page until the tickets are available.

Supply md5 hash of first name + last name + seed when buying, computed manually by yourself.

Upon arrival at the venue you show photo id and a sheet of DIN A4 paper containing the hash and seed, and the Ticket Man will verify.

Side joke: One of the German ticket sites, maybe eventim, stated on the PDF that it must be printed on DIN A4 paper.

Not all artists want to do as many shows as the market demands.

Not all artists can do as many shows as the market demands.

People should instead consider the vanity of thinking they absolutely need to see a certain artist perform live on stage.