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?
The artist does have a choice in that they can play at a live nation venue and work through Ticketmaster, or they can find a new career because live nation has a monopoly on venues as well as ticketing. So in reality the only artists that have a choice are the Taylor Swifts that are essentially market makers, and the nobodies that aren’t selling tickets anywhere but at the door anyway.
That’s the nature of monopolies. Yes, if all artists banded (no pun intended) together and told live nation to fuck off, it would work, but getting everyone to do it won’t ever happen. So unfortunately, you have to play the game or get out. Ideally, existing laws would prevent this from happening, but our law makers and enforcers are a bunch of money hungry, corporate sluts, so we end up with this broken system.
None taken.