'Dump the apologetic secondary market corporate-speak.'
The Godfather opens with the apprehensive undertaker Bonasera asking Don Corleone to commit murder for hire, to which the Don replies “Why did you go to the police? Why didn't you come to me first?” Translation: when the natural order of things fails, thugs like me are happy to step in and make a market serving the needs of mankind. And if Don Corleone were alive today he would be making a market in ticket scalping.
Let’s be honest. It’s called ticket scalping. Dump the apologetic “secondary market” corporate speak. Ticket scalping is as old as ticket selling. I remember experiencing this as a kid outside Madison Square Garden in the 1970’s, watching sketchy characters hondle Knick and Ranger tickets until the price bottomed out minutes after the game started. The only difference between those days and the StubHubs and eBays of today’s digital world is that the transaction now takes place online by credit card rather than on Seventh Avenue for cash. And scalping will continue due to a disconnect in the natural order of things.
That disconnect is a disturbance in the law of supply and demand. In a free market prices move based on the availability of goods and the demand for them. The same is not true for concert tickets where prices are static from the on-sale and artists routinely price tickets lower than the market will bear. Bless them for this but it creates a gap between face price and what fans are willing to pay that cannot be remedied due to static pricing. So the natural order of things fails and the sketchy Corleone-like thugs step in with bots, apps and websites to make a market. But they have no skin in the game and take money out of the artists’ economic ecosystem every night at thousands of venues.