When demand substantially exceeds supply and the seller won’t set a market-clearing price, chaos follows.
China
In China, ticket scalpers are called 黄牛 (HuangNiu). As one Red Note user put it — speaking for all of us — Why are HuangNiu so powerful in China? — “The moment tickets go on sale they vanish, and then HuangNiu list them on secondhand platforms at a markup.”
The reality is more nuanced. For pop concerts and sporting events, tickets are sold to real-ID users and admission is strictly real-ID verified. But event organizers sometimes collude with HuangNiu, reserving PR allocations and profiting from their resale. So when fans feel like tickets sell out instantly, it’s mostly a story of overwhelming demand rather than scalper wizardry.
That said, real-ID verification genuinely works where it’s enforced. China’s train ticketing during 春运 (Spring Festival travel rush) used to be notoriously chaotic — HuangNiu extracted enormous rents and fueled widespread fraud. That problem has been largely solved by 12306, now arguably one of the most robust ticketing systems in the world, thanks to excellent IT and mandatory real-ID matching for every ticket.
But wherever prices don’t clear the market, HuangNiu persist — classical music concerts, free museum admissions, and other events where demand far outstrips supply but real-ID enforcement is operationally impractical. The battle never ends.
US
Here in Chicago, I tried to buy tickets on Ticketmaster for the 2027 Eternal Sunshine tour. I didn’t get one. The artist doesn’t want to price tickets at market-clearing levels — it’s a reputational risk. And it seems too costly for the organizers (the artist, their agencies, the venues) to implement robust anti-scalping measures or design a fairer allocation process. So the problem gets passed down to the platform.
Ticketmaster’s solution: build a transparent resale marketplace, effectively institutionalizing the secondary market with credibility and liquidity.
But as the FTC’s antitrust suit against Live Nation and Ticketmaster alleges — charging them with illegal ticket resale tactics and deceiving artists and consumers about pricing and ticket limits — this arrangement is far from benign:
(36) According to internal Ticketmaster documents, the average percentage of fees charged on tickets ranges from 24% to 44% of the total price.
(77) Growing revenue from the secondary ticket market is one of [Live Nation]’s principal business objectives. If [Live Nation] sells a secondary market ticket that was purchased on their primary market, they collect three sets of fees on the same ticket: (1) the fees on the original purchase; (2) the fees charged to the person or broker listing the ticket for sale, which range from 13-15% of the resale price for consumers and 5-8% for brokers; and (3) the fees charged to the secondary market purchaser, which range from 17-23% of the resale price. [Live Nation] have significantly increased their sale of secondary market concert tickets, from 3.8 million tickets in 2019 to over 20 million in 2024.
(78) In the aggregate, brokers list far more tickets for resale on Ticketmaster than consumers do. According to one Ticketmaster document, at one point in 2018, 55% of the tickets offered for resale by Ticketmaster were listed by brokers. Brokers make up an even higher share of Defendants’ resale concert ticket sales. In the first quarter of 2022, 63% of the money consumers spent on Defendants’ resale concert. tickets was on tickets listed by brokers. In the first quarter of 2023, it was 78%. Over those two quarters alone, consumers spent $504 million on resale concert tickets from Ticketmaster that were listed by brokers. By contrast, when a consumer who purchases a ticket on the primary market attends the event using that ticket, Defendants’ revenue from that ticket is substantially less because Defendants cannot collect additional resale fees or markup the resale price.
FTC