This not to say that Ticketmaster is not scummy (and the article elucidates some of their scumminess). But this seems like partly a consequence of "ticket stabilization". As is commonly cited on HN, rent "stabilization" distorts the market and leads to all kinds of problems, like lack of available apartments and people living where they do not want to live because it's financially infeasible/unattractive to move to where they want to be. Clearly ticket prices are too cheap, or the scalpers could not make any money. As one would expect, selling under market value creates arbitrage traders.

It's totally Ticketmaster scumminess if transfer fees are ridiculous (see pavel_lishin's post). Likewise if Ticketmaster has difference standards for Big Scalp versus retail scalping. But the existence of scalpers (arbitrage traders) is inevitable if a) tickets are underpriced and b) tickets are transferable. You'd have apartment scalpers for rent-stabilized apartments if leases were transferable (which they are not).

When demand (concert-goers) greatly outstrips supply (seats), you have three options: long queues (the historical socialist approach) or lotteries (the egalitarian approach), high prices (the market economy approach), or corruption (the current approach). There is no realistic solution that makes everyone happy, but you can choose the kind of unhappiness you get. There is a strong case to be made that the artists do not want to be seen as greedy merchants, so they underprice their tickets and offload the anger onto Ticketmaster (see kevinsync's post).

I for one find it much, much more fair to have the queue or the lottery systems. If it can be paired with anti-scalper measures such as truly non-transferable tickets or banning resales at a profit, even better.

But of course the problem runs deeper when we consider what you and others have been saying: it’s just too convenient for artists to reap the profits of the current system and have Ticketmaster as their scapegoat.