Ticketing has long been ripe for re-invention. The big problem is that TicketMaster has anti-competitive contracts with most popular venues.
Louis CK, in trying to do his own thing, is facing largely the same troubles Pearl Jam did in their own effort to end-run Ticketmaster: they're forced to play, in many cases, massively smaller venues. And that winds up excluding more fans than TicketMasters' fees and scalper's artificial price-hikes ever excluded.
As for scalping itself, it can't be "solved". Any feasible system needs to allow tickets to be transferred or gifted in some manner. [1]
And as soon as you do that you've provided the mechanism whereby a secondary sales channel can allow party A to sell party B a promise to transfer the ticket for above-face-value.
[1] To cover people buying X tickets for a giveaway, or one person buying tickets for a group, or people giving tickets as gifts, or people giving tickets away to a show they can no longer attend, etc.
1. Have a fixed price for non-transferrable tickets, which are identified by ID/CC or sent to a specific mobile device with a QR code or something. These tickets will be refundable.
2. Have a variable price for transferrable tickets, and use an auction type system. These tickets can be transferred but the user must go through the auction and there's a sufficiently long auction period to purchase them. These tickets are not refundable.
Louis CK, in trying to do his own thing, is facing largely the same troubles Pearl Jam did in their own effort to end-run Ticketmaster: they're forced to play, in many cases, massively smaller venues. And that winds up excluding more fans than TicketMasters' fees and scalper's artificial price-hikes ever excluded.
As for scalping itself, it can't be "solved". Any feasible system needs to allow tickets to be transferred or gifted in some manner. [1]
And as soon as you do that you've provided the mechanism whereby a secondary sales channel can allow party A to sell party B a promise to transfer the ticket for above-face-value.
[1] To cover people buying X tickets for a giveaway, or one person buying tickets for a group, or people giving tickets as gifts, or people giving tickets away to a show they can no longer attend, etc.