A lawsuit filed in California by concert giant AXS has revealed a legal and technological battle between ticket scalpers and platforms like Ticketmaster and AXS, in which scalpers have figured out how to extract “untransferable” tickets from their accounts by generating entry barcodes on parallel infrastructure that the scalpers control and which can then be sold and transferred to customers.
By reverse-engineering how Ticketmaster and AXS actually make their electronic tickets, scalpers have essentially figured out how to regenerate specific, genuine tickets that they have legally purchased from scratch onto infrastructure that they control. In doing so, they are removing the anti-scalping restrictions put on the tickets by Ticketmaster and AXS.
So Ticketmaster and AXS are suing to maintain their monopoly on scalping?
Artists don’t have enough money in the bank to enact what would basically be a strike. If they stopped playing Ticketmaster venues, they’d basically stop playing actual venues entirely. They’d have to play tiny independent venues, where they’d end up losing money, because they physically can’t sell enough tickets to cover the cost of time, travel, paying roadies, etc. Or, the ticket prices would be inaccessibly high.
The problem with live shows is directly attributable to the effective monopoly that Ticketmaster has, allowing them to fuck over artists and venues equally.
The very few artists who do, and have the creative freedom to so do are probably the only ones who could get away with this. Convention Centers don’t seem to have the same density of existing Ticketmaster relationships, and while they’d have to pay to bring in seating at some, I bet they could do it for something similar to Ticketmaster’s middleman fees.
I’m not sure the difference between costs for concert venues and convention centers, but if it’s anywhere near comparable, it could be feasible.