The secondary ticket market is one of the few markets where the people generating the value — the artists, the venues, the promoters — capture almost none of the upside, while a layer of intermediaries between the buyer and the seller take the difference. That is not a quirk. It is the design of how resale was allowed to develop.
Walk through it. A 12,000 capacity arena tour goes on sale at 9am. The face value is set by the promoter and the artist's team, often after weeks of internal discussion about positioning, demand, and how the run reads on a press release. Within two minutes, around 30 percent of the inventory is sitting in the hands of professional resellers. Within an hour, the same tickets are listed on a secondary site at three to five times face. The promoter sees none of that. The venue sees none of that. The artist sees none of that. The buyer sees a 400 dollar charge for a ticket that was meant to cost 110.
That gap is where modern resale lives. It is also why most fans now assume they will pay the resale price. They have stopped trying to buy at face.
A market problem, not a moral problem
There is a tendency to talk about scalping as a moral problem. It is more useful to talk about it as a market problem. When a ticket is set below the price the market will bear, someone is going to capture the difference. If the platform doesn't capture it, and the artist doesn't capture it, and the venue doesn't capture it, then a third party will. The only question is who, and on what terms.
Why bans don't work
The US BOTS Act passed in 2016. The Federal Trade Commission has brought a handful of enforcement actions in the years since. The volume of resale activity has gone up, not down. The UK introduced statutory caps on resale and prohibited the use of bots in 2018. Resale volumes did not drop. They moved channels and got more sophisticated. Ireland passed similar legislation in 2021. The same pattern. Every country that has tried to legislate this has found that the operators are international, the marketplaces are international, and the buyers are willing.
Outright prohibitions don't work either. Several artists over the years have tried to enforce tickets that cannot be transferred. The result is reliable: anyone whose plans change has no way to recoup their money, secondary listings move to private channels where there are no protections at all, and the artist's fans end up frustrated rather than served.
So the choice is not between resale and no resale. The choice is between unmanaged resale, where the value leaks to a parasitic layer, and managed resale, where the rules of the secondary transaction are set by the same people who set up the primary sale.
What managed resale actually looks like
Managed resale is not a new idea. Some major federations have run versions of it for years. The mechanics are not complicated. Where things tend to fall apart is in the implementation.
A controlled resale model, done properly, has four parts. The ticket is bound to an identity at purchase and remains bound on transfer. Resale only happens through the original platform, with a cap on markup that the organiser sets. Sometimes the cap is face value, sometimes face plus 10 percent, sometimes a sliding scale depending on the event. The organiser receives a share of any resale proceeds, which compensates them for value they would otherwise have lost. And the original buyer gets their money back when their ticket sells on, which means they have a route out of an event they can no longer attend without resorting to a private listing on a different site.
What this does, in practice, is collapse the secondary market into the primary one. There is no incentive to use a parallel platform, because there is no upside in it: the markup is capped, the identity is bound, and the venue won't honour a ticket that hasn't been transferred through the official rails. Fans who can no longer attend get a refund mechanism. Fans who want a ticket get one, at a known price, without bidding against twelve professional resellers.
The economics for the organiser
Under uncontrolled resale, all the spread that gets captured by professional resellers leaves the system entirely. Under managed resale, that spread either disappears — because the cap removes the arbitrage — or it gets shared between the organiser and the original buyer, where it should have been in the first place. Either outcome is better than the current default.
This is the model MINGO Tickets is built around. The ticket is bound to an identity at the point of sale. Resale, where the organiser allows it, runs through the same platform under rules the organiser sets: the cap, the share split, whether resale is enabled at all. Refunds on tickets that sell on are automatic. The organiser can see, in real time, every transfer that has happened on every ticket they have issued. The organiser is not handing the secondary market over to a third party. They are running it themselves, on their own terms.
What changes for the organiser beyond economics
The other thing that changes for organisers, beyond the economics, is what they know about who actually walks through the door. Under unmanaged resale, the original buyer's email and the eventual attendee's email are often two different people, and the organiser has no visibility into either. Under managed resale, the organiser sees the chain of custody. That matters for sponsor reporting. It matters for marketing the next event. It matters for understanding who their actual audience is.
None of this requires banning resale. None of this requires legislation. It requires a primary platform that treats the secondary transaction as part of its job rather than as someone else's problem. The technology to do this has existed for years. The question has never been whether it's possible. The question has been whether anyone would build a primary platform that was willing to take it seriously.