I love music. Music and I are really good friends. I can play every instrument (meaning I can produce a sound from every instrument I've touched…perhaps not a nice sound, yet a sound nonetheless). I know a fair amount about bands, songs, albums, genres and album artwork. I've gone to quite a few concerts, though I have been restriciting it to three acts per year. Mostly because ticket prices are fuckin bonkers. Cue the UK working to pass this ban. I think it's great that someone, somewhere (lately, it seems to the the UK that's spearheading these initiatives) is lookin out for the consumers.
I'm not 100% on the facts here, though I believe that ticket seller conglomerates (like Ticketmaster) kind of encourage scalping and even engage on their own brand of fuckery in enshittification that raises the ticket price based on demand. I've experienced this with tickets for a Nine Inch Nails show this past summer where the prices jumped quite a bit between viewing a seating plan and clicking add to cart. I'm not even considering the "convenience fees". I'm not aware of any place to buy tickets in person for major shows. Whose convenience is this paying for?
On the other hand, the servers and infrastructure to make purchaing tickets online require a fairly significant investment, as the demand is great. Anyone who's bought tickets in the last few years can attest to this, as the queues are long and refreshing the browser window because the page failed to load is a regular inconvenience we face. I wonder, would ticket prices be lower as people would have to purchase them in person? Is it still possible for the venues to reserve a number of tickets to sell at the booth/doors when the tickets go on sale on the website? I have the thought that ticket prices might be more reasonable if we forgo online purchasing altogether. The scarcity of time to purchase tickets in person would naturally decrease as the venues want to fill the seats. Scalpers could still exist under this framework.
Another thought occurred to me, perhaps online was meant to thwart scalpers? Sometime in the late 2000's I went to see NIN and my then wife bought me tickets using her credit card instead of mine and I was almost denied entry because I could not produce ID saying I was who the ticket said had pruchased it. Maybe that's the way forward.