If that’s “ideal”, I hope to hell we manage to avoid the ideal situation. Copying the airline industry is NOT a good thing.

ONLY sell tickets to those IP addresses.

Have the people who bought the scalped tickets turn up for a concert with Louis reading a copy of  The Great Gatsby a lá Andy Kaufman.

Best way to discourage scalping is punish the people who buy the tickets.

Basically the scalpers will have a script that navigates the website as though it’s going to buy the maximum number of tickets, then just hangs indefinitely at the last step, before actually paying.  Just before the session times out, it can go back and try to change seating sections or something, then go forward and hang at the payment stage again.

A few hundred of these processes running in parallel can tie up all the tickets, as the web server thinks it’s waiting for legitimate buyers to find the credit card.  The scalper can buy tickets a few at a time, by closing out transactions only when they have the sales.

It’s the same approach that methamphetamine manufacturers use to purchase pseudoephedrine from drug stores.

To avoid all of the limits placed on individual purchases, they just pay a small cut of their profits to people who purchase the goods themselves.

Louis is setting the terms for his service, and we as customers are deciding whether or not the money saved is worth the extra hassle. As long as government doesn’t step in forcing certain rules on the exchange, the free market is thriving here and actually taking a turn for the better.

As it typically has been of late, the front rows at a lot of shows are filled with douchebag rich people who aren’t actually particularly big fans of the performers but are the only ones who could afford the tickets from the scalpers (who game the system in order to obtain the tickets in the first place – having software buy all the tickets for you within minutes of them going on sale isn’t simply “rewarding scalpers for purchasing early”, it’s unambiguously foul play). They like to go to the big-name shows for the same reason they buy luxury brand stuff – as a status thing, not because they actually care. Performers don’t want those people to make up the bulk of their audience – they want to make their actual fans happy.

That shuts out most of the true fans. There will be a few diehards that will spend way more money than they can actually afford to see their favorite act (none of that money past the actual ticket price going to the actual performers) of course, but while the performers obviously want those people to be able to come to the show, they don’t want the concert to become a negative experience for those die-hard fans because they had to pay hundreds of dollars above face value for the ticket.

Ticketmaster also insists on charging me a parking fee, even though I almost always bicycle to the nearby amphitheater, and take public transportation to the concert halls that are farther away.  Parking at large concerts is a pain, driving out is much slower than walking home, some fraction of the drivers are chemically altered, I’d also like to have that option (:-), and sometimes the nearest parking places are half as far from the stadium as home is.

And that doesn’t even count the subscription to Rolling Stone you get for not noticing the checkbox you have to uncheck to not get it.

Not so much your average TSA guy. 

Is there supposedly something wrong with an artist wanting to keep ticket prices at a level where more people who can’t afford the higher prices that the tickets often go for can instead afford them, and thus see the show?

Bolshevism?

The problem is that live shows are better when you can see the performer with your own eyes. That limits their size, which limits the number of seats. For internet or TV-famous artists, that means there are more fans that want to see a show than can possibly fit. If the price of the tickets is too low, then some people will be tempted to part with their tickets to people who want them more rather than see the show. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, either.

Prices are, among other things, a signal. Only one person at a time can sit in those seats or stand in that part of the moshpit, and the last price for that last spot is a sign of who is most desperate to be there. Perhaps this is bad, perhaps not. We don’t have to go to as far as OtherMichael to see that these are realities of a free society with a fungible currency.

Artists that want to be accessible will have to go through contortions to allow true (but poorer) fans to see them for reasonable rates. These contortions, these hurdles, will alienate some fans as well. They have to weigh the pricing with the other pains to find a balance that allows them to reach the people in the community they want to reach.

I can think of lots of ways to do this: raise prices but give away some tickets on the web through a contest; require real names and IDs to be associated at the gate/door with every N tickets (for N smallish, maybe under 10); use a point-of-sale, non-removable wristband system (SXSW, ACLFest, etc., etc.); etc.; etc. 

All of these techniques have an impact on an artist’s public perception. They will have to weigh those impacts in their choices. I applaud Louis C.K. for his approach, but I wouldn’t slam him for charging market-clearing rates either. I’d probably find it annoying to have to go somewhere to buy a wristband for a one-night show, though.

sheesh — when airlines demand ID, the BB crowd is up in arms, but when a comedian demands ID, we’re lining up to hand him our medical records and PGP-keys.

OTOH, I can certainly see how one is funnier than the other.

Well, if you _want_ to do a charity concert for charity cases, by all means — indicate so up front.

The whole point of market pricing is to allocate scarce resources to those who need them the most — in most cases, “need” being indicated by a willingness to do what it takes (investment of money, time, effort) to obtain a ticket.

What you are proposing is that the artists sequester tickets for those with a LOWER need/willingness. Which is an interesting concept — those rapid fans who are willing to pay $300 to see the artists will be excluded from purchasing tickets, while those who only only willing to pay a much, much lower price are encouraged to buy.

You end up with an audience that has less investment (emotional and otherwise) with the artist. I can’t see how that’s a recipe for a successful audience. Plus, dollars to donuts, there will be more empty seats — when you shell out $300 you’re not going to skip out. Cut the price by 80% and it’s a whole different opportunity cost. Especially when last-minutes scalpers aren’t reselling surrendered tickets.

I can make $45 in one hour of freelance — so what’s the cost of skipping the show? one hour. But if I paid $300 for the ticket — that’s close to 7 hours of freelance. A whole day’s pay. I’m not going to skip out on that without a d–n good reason.

The long and the short of it is, this sounds like awful economics, and a recipe for poorer-quality audience.

I wish him luck, but frankly, it has been tried before most notably by Pearl Jam and at the end of the day, didn’t work.

Is there supposedly something wrong with an artist wanting to keep ticket prices at a level where more people who can’t afford the higher prices that the tickets often go for can instead afford them, and thus see the show? Is the point being made by some here a belief that products should always sell for as much as some people are willing to pay for them? Even if the benefit of higher prices for many of them often ends up going to people who have parasitically inserted themselves into the process merely to make money off of it, instead of going to the producer, or in this case, the artist?