It would be nice to have competition among sellers within a given venue. Even give the venue the option to sell single seats (rather than large blocks at some bulk rate).
For security reasons the ticket format should probably be the venue's choice, the bulk/block rate would probably include a specific time window for the bulk buyer to have their bonded agent print off the tickets on the venue's hardware.
The venue (more likely a legitimate third party) could also run its own marketplace for pre-bought tickets, so the venue wouldn't have to just repurchase tickets and risk leaving a seat empty.
How would you resell a stadium event ticket with a centralized setup? You'd need the event organiser to run the marketplace, which isn't always desirable.
I think one way to get around this would be to show the venues the money has already been made. This includes the price of tickets. If there are ticketing deals involved, it could be something like a straight cash exchange: We have 100 people who gave money for entry. Here's x amount money for 100 tickets.
Considering how much Ticket Master sucks, it's a good call.
Aside: I'd really like to see blind auctions for seating... You name a price, when the round completes, seats are offered in best-worst order, then another round... After two, remaining seats are priced out at the average to min price paid in the auction rounds.
An NFT solution to ticketing seems like it would be trivial given how NFTs operate already. One ticket could be verifiably owned by one person. If that person wanted to resell the ticket, there could be restrictions on how much they could sell it for. If bots can't make a profit there's no use in buying out all the tickets. It would also decentralize the space. Sure you need a marketplace for the NFT tickets, but that could easily be a open source software suite that the venues themselves host. Gas price will probably be a lot less than ticketmaster fees.
Honestly it seems like the biggest problems here are that Ticketmaster in particular has a huge sway in the current venue and artist market, having contracts that require an artist or venue to exclusively use their ticketing system.
You can do dynamic pricing. Have a reasonably strong identifier ticket app that is tied to a device, ip address, voice print id, and phone number. Have people put in bids for the ticket (with a minimum floor price), weigh each bid by some determination of "fan strength", like willingness to travel larger distance to see a show, then select winners based on a bell curve distribution of bids.
If the goal is to spread tickets evenly over all potential attendees, then lottery style ticket sales make more sense.
Although if they want to control the composition of their audience even more, they can sell some tickets via Dutch auction and use the profit to pay for the costs for attendees are specifically invited.
I still don't understand why Ticketmaster doesn't just sell all tickets as dutch auctions with some minimum price. They'd then easily cut out these brokers in the middle for popular events.
Good point, but you could address that by splitting up the seats into multiple auctions depending on the quality of the seats.
People could even bid "conditionally" for multiple sections, and once bidding closes you resolve the separate auctions in order from best to worst. If a person with multiple bids gets a good seat, their bids in the other sections get cancelled.
Seems to me that this could have very similar results as the dutch auction method, but each ticket is more fairly priced. Your ticket costs the same as the next guy, assuming they have a seat in the same section as you.
Edit: also, as mentioned somewhere else here, you're likely to have a threshold where everyone wants to buy once they see available seats start to disappear, causing a kind of "bank runoff" where everyone rushes to buy tickets all at once, putting us back where we started.
There are a lot of corner cases. What if I want to give some of the tickets to a friend who has to arrive late and meet me inside the venue? What if I want to do legitimate reselling on a website like Stubhub (many events encourage this even, like reselling sports tickets if you can’t make it, so that the seat doesn’t go empty and the stadium can make money on concessions... this happens all the time if you’re a season ticket holder for a particular team; you just frequently can’t make it and need to resell).
Personally I wish tickets were just bearer bonds. If you have the paper ticket in your hand, you get in, all else be damned.
Then to solve scalping or bots, try to invent solutions that offer tickets to verified long-time fans / supporters first, then use a pre-registered (not day-of) lottery system to allow general purchases.
Add a marketplace for resells to same place face value tickets are sold. Would be same site, but could be different pages or w/e. Cap resells at face value, removing incentive to flip.
Then to prevent resells, would need an app with ticket barcode that changes over time, like most 2 factor auth apps. This should help prevent resells via printing and screen shots. I expect that's not foolproof, but could prevent the easiest alternative market. This would work offline too which is a plus since service at big events is generally bad. Could also make transfers as easy as venmo through the app.
The whole idea is to remove incentives from resells and make it easy as possible for people to transfer legitimately.
Why not a blind auction? Have everyone who wants a ticket choose any value above $10 (including $10). The highest 10,000 (presumed seat capacity) priced bids get their tickets. If there is a tie at the end, sort by first come, first serve, excluding excessive bulk orders.
However this could work really well for sporting events. The Leafs usually sell out all of their tickets and a good number to scalpers, having at least a more legit way to buy tickets for a game would be helpful
You could in theory make it decentralized-ish depending on the requirements. For example they could allocate blocks of seats to vendors and if you bought one of those seats you could buy it “offline” to be synced later.
But it’s probably not worth the hassle and once the ticket is sold you can have it be signed by the centralized system so you can verify the signature offline easily.
In addition to linking tickets to the buyer by name, I believe the ticket selling platform should facilitate easily reselling tickets in the case where the buyer cannot use them. If I am unable to attend a concert, I should be able to indicate this to the platform. The platform should then attempt to sell the ticket at the most appropriate price. If the ticket could be sold at full price ahead of the event, I should end up paying nothing except possible transaction costs. If the ticket sells at a lower price, I should only end up paying the difference.
Easy and safe reselling of tickets should be possible, at ideally no cost to the person reselling the ticket. I think this would be a nice feature of a consumer friendly platform, and a necessary mechanism in order to make the "link ticket to name" approach be fair.
For security reasons the ticket format should probably be the venue's choice, the bulk/block rate would probably include a specific time window for the bulk buyer to have their bonded agent print off the tickets on the venue's hardware.
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