Buying concert tickets is an arduous experience, so much so that it could be one of the most unpleasant things that people willingly put themselves through in modern society. Concert tickets are wildly expensive, and every single website built to sell tickets can only handle—at most—two or three users at a time before servers catch fire and alarm bells start going off. So why is everything about concert tickets so awful? Consequence Of Sound decided to dig into that mystery with a YouTube video called Sold Out!: Inside America’s Ticketing Landscape.
The video starts off by interviewing people who are frustrated by how difficult it is to get concert tickets, with many of them blaming scalpers for gobbling up all of the seats and reselling them for crazy prices. COS then talked to an actual ticket scalper who is making good money scalping tickets, and though it seems to present his point-of-view pretty sympathetically, Sold Out! becomes decidedly anti-scalper when it talks about ticket-buying bots that can snatch up tons of tickets before real humans even have a chance.
One of the most interesting parts of the video, though, is that pretty much nobody in the ticket-buying process—from the fans, to the scalpers, to the professional brokers, to the people who actually work with the bands—seems to trust anyone else involved in the ticket-buying process. Sold Out! touches on some people who are trying to use the law to make things easier for fans, but when the whole thing is this tainted, it seems like nobody will ever really feel good about buying tickets.