This issue isn't as cut and dry as simply banning scalping. I spend most of my discretionary income on music... merchandise, vinyl, concert tickets. At any given point in time I have tickets to about 7-8 performances in the future. Sometimes life gets in the way, and I simply cannot attend an event. In those situations, I have a very legitimate reason to want to sell concert tickets, and I do. Sometimes I will end up selling for under what I paid, other times I will make a small profit, more rarely I will say fuck it and just give the tickets away on social media to friends or coworkers. In the long term, this generally nets me out at zero in terms of gaining/losing money on ticket purchases.
My point, I guess, is that there's a legitimate, healthy reason for a resale market. Throwing the ticketing resale market out with the scalper bathwater is a myopic solution.
Buying a bunch of different tickets to different shows you intend to go to, and selling some of them because things come up or you change your mind, is one thing.
Buying 20 tickets to the same event that you couldn't care less about and selling them for cash outside the venue is something else entirely.
Yeah, scalping provides very little value to society except profit to the scalpers. It's parasitic. Unfortunately the methods to combat it, like ticket lotteries, better identity verification and per-id quotas for purchase and transfer, aren't in the interest of ticket vendors. Artists generally can't wield much power either.
You wrote an entire sentence that has literally nothing to do with the ticket resale market and how scalping is related.
A secondary ticketing market enables scalping. There are legitimate reasons for the resale market to exist. If you think that the existence and dynamics of a resale market are unrelated to scalping... I would encourage you to look into critical reasoning courses which are perhaps available at your local community college at a low cost.
How do you propose we eliminate scalping, while preserving the secondary market? Go ahead, I'm waiting. Literally all ticketing companies are waiting for your profound insight.
> How do you propose we eliminate scalping, while preserving the secondary market? Go ahead, I'm waiting. Literally all ticketing companies are waiting for your profound insight.
Mark the ticket (physical or digital) with the price paid for it, and make it illegal to resell over this price. You may still have smaller scalping rings, but you would be enabled to go after the bigger scalpers.
My point, I guess, is that there's a legitimate, healthy reason for a resale market. Throwing the ticketing resale market out with the scalper bathwater is a myopic solution.