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.

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.

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.)