this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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Well the thing is, she really needs the money.
She personally doesn't, but it is a rather simple case of supply and demand for everyone else involved - there are only so many that fit in the concert, as long you find enough people willing to pay $900 per ticket to sell them all, it doesn't make any financial sense to price them any lower. And if you do lower it while the market is still willing to pay significantly more, you quickly get swamped by scalpers grabbing the profit from you instead.
There is a Finnish saying that goes something like "He who asks is not the stupid one, the one who agrees to pay is".
It's a common justification, but "if I don't do [bad thing], then someone else will do [bad thing] instead, but worse" feels like an excuse we've heard before.
After all, there's systems you could put in place to handle scalpers.
But Ticketmaster et al actually have them baked into the business plan, so have no intention of making change.
It's the same reason there's no politicians trying to bring rents down. They're all bloody landlords.
Similar, not same.
Both are supply/demand equilibrium, and will always reach the price the market is willing to pay.
With Beyonce, the richest 10k (or so) fans are the ones who will buy the tickets, either through direct payment or scalpers. You could do things like name tickets with photo ID required to present, but the wealthiest who were willing to pay the scalper would still buy anyway. Taylor swift tried lowering her prices for actual fans with a point system, and got hauled over the coals for it.
The housing market is different. If you set a price control on rent you remove any incentive to improve your rental property or invest in new builds as you no longer receive the payoff from the risk - resulting in slum lords and large stocks of the cheapest, shittiest technically houses that you can get. Supply never moves, demand naturally increases over time and property never gets invested in.
Ah yes, no scalper is going to want to buy up expensive tickets.
The problem with supply/demand trends for such limited availability is that unless you price astronomically high, theres going to be more than enough people willing to throw their money at it, even if they have to sell a kidney to do it. Its more than just basic market forces, its social trends and hysteria from hype.
At a certain point you have to ask "are they doing it to provide a service, or just making as much money as they can, because that's all they really care about?" Because at a certain level, those two options are no longer compatible.
They will try, but if the prices are already high then they won't be able to sell them nearly as easily or gain as much profit.
And even if we abolished scalping and it would bring the prices down a bit, it wouldn't actually solve the issue - like how nVidia noticed last gen that there were enough people that were willing to pay ridiculous amounts for the scalped GPUs, so now they increased the prices themselves to that level. It just made it happen faster than normal as they could gauge the markets easier.
It sucks but what you wrote is exactly correct.
We saw it with concert tickets before they started raising prices. We saw it with gpus in the last couple years, Nvidia had to raise prices because we were seeing scalpers and we were seeing shortages.
Sucks, but when you have something that there's a limited amount of and an unlimited number of dollars or what have you being printed, this is the final result.
(And I guess if we're being honest, if a lot of people like a certain artist, there's just going to be lots of demand for the thing.)