Yeah… kind of my point. They BENEFIT from scalpers, hence they are not victims of scalpers… 
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Even Mike Damone wouldn’t have worked with them.
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Competition. Just because people are willing to pay more, doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t like to pay less. Say one show has huge fees and another has moderate fees. Maybe you choose the second one.
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You’ve heard about the automated bots which get the lion’s share of those instantly sold-out tickets, I assume?
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I’m not pretending they’re victims. I agree with you and @gracchus and @anothernewbbaccount. They’re also obviously very much benefitting from having monopoly power, which I don’t want them to have. The fact that they’re also in on the scalping is part of the reason I said what I said: they unilaterally set the sale price, but then they’re also one of the main buyers. Then they turn around and sell the same ticket at a higher price. That makes the nominal price a lot less important to their actual revenue. It is also a way to scam artists, since they won’t get a percentage of the higher scalped price, or a percentage of the fees (two rounds of fees for scalped tickets, which I could also imagine helping them avoid paying taxes by pretending their costs of selling are higher).
In a world of more competition, this wouldn’t happen. Instead, each venue or market selling tickets would only get to sell them once, and they’d be competing with each other on both list price and fees. But, they’d also be trying to maximize revenue, so they’d want to sell at a market-clearing price. For them, unlike for Ticketmaster, whenever a scalper resells a ticket for more than they sold it at, that looks like lost revenue. So even though this situation would be better for artists, venues, and fans compared to what we have now, it might not look like the list prices of tickets going down for the most popular bands/artists.
It’s in this sense that, yes, I’m saying Taylor Swift is being underpaid, and Eras tour tickets are underpriced, and if we fixed that situation it would be better for everyone but Ticketmaster, including fans who would end up paying less on average.
So, middlemen suck?
I went to a tiny concert last Friday, maybe 80 people, the system had a pretty simple way of ticketing, you bought entry, it was in the app, you could refund it, but not sell it (you could gift or transfer to another account it I guess this is where grift might ensue), and the QR code for entry would unlock X amount of minutes (60 in our case) before doors opened, leaving scalpers very little time to unload tickets.
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Agreed, and I think that kind of app is a much better system. Technically the ability to transfer opens the door to scalping in advance, but with more risk (no simultaneous payment + transfer), and enough friction to make it unlikely.
I think this gets a lot more murky for the big-name events I specified I was talking about. In those cases, the difference between what fans would consider a fair price, and what the tickets would sell for at auction, is measured in hundreds or thousands of dollars. For that much money someone, somewhere would find a way to become middlemen again.
Yes, and I did not mean to come off as being cynical of the DOJ/Biden move. A righteous ethical decision can bring on a solemn nodding of the head… then, with the nod, a slowly developing smile when pleasant leverage is ‘discovered’.
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This is my only reply:
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