Well, this thread has become predictable, right down to the implicit "U2 shows should be the centre of your life" attitudes.
At the moment, the current system allows anybody capable of affording a ticket the ability to purchase it. This potential new system, to some extent or another, excludes some of those customers. That is bad business. It excludes various groups whose attendance at each concert would number at least in the hundreds (i.e. not an insignificant minority). This exclusion is in some cases from buying a ticket in the first place, in which case U2 miss out financially, or from attendance, in which case a purchased ticket goes to waste and fans miss out (and I am sure U2, through statements in the past about the importance of a crowd to them, also value each person who actually passes through the door, not just the fact a ticket was sold). These groups include:
1. People who, for whatever reason, do not have a credit card. This idea that people must have a credit card is absurd and conformist. Yes, I have one, almost solely to purchase tickets and order CDs/books online, but numerous friends do not. If you don't, and you don't happen to know somebody with a card who actually wants to go to the show, you are stuffed.
2. People buying tickets with their parents' credit card. Their parents have to go now? Great, let's rule out the young crowd! Oh, wait, I thought that's who U2 want to appeal to?
3. People buying tickets as a gift for others. We should quash generosity now? I've seen multiple U2 concerts not on my own money, but as birthday or Christmas presents from relatives who not only had no intention of going, but were, in some cases, up to 14,000km away from where the show was actually being played!
4. People who want to do one-for-one trades, or any other kind of trade where the original purchaser does not attend the concert. Shitloads of trades, including hundreds conducted on this very forum last tour, would be impossible. Say you miss out on tickets for the first show in your city, but can buy tickets for the second show, even though you can't make it to the second night. Under the current system, you could buy tickets anyway in the expectation that you will have a high likelihood of being able to do a swap with somebody who holds tickets for the first night. Under this potential system? Forget it.
5. People who, for whatever reason, buy a ticket and then cannot attend. U2 concerts have a habit of selling out MONTHS before concerts. Sometimes even over half a year. You can't predict the future with absolute certainty. It is absolutely delusional to expect every purchaser in audiences as large as U2's to not have life intrude in the thousands of ways it possibly can, and to expect every purchaser to not want to give their ticket to somebody else as they themselves can no longer attend. If you're playing to 500 people, then maybe you might get lucky, but 50,000? Let's be serious. Numerous people are going to become unable to attend despite their best intentions to keep the date clear, and they will want somebody else to use their ticket rather than let it go to waste. Why the hell SHOULDN'T you be able to give your ticket to somebody else?
Now, you can go ahead and take issue with people in these five categories for not meeting your criteria of expected behaviour (don't waste your time; you're refuting examples, not the actual argument), but the point stands that they are nonetheless a paying customer excluded from the concert and that is a bad business model.
So why even propose a ticket model that will cause headaches, hassles, and potentially exclusion for hundreds of concertgoers? The "scalpers" justification is absurd, yet nobody has responded to this point I made in the very early stages of the thread:
Who are to blame for scalpers? IDIOTS AND DESPERATE FANS.
Scalpers exist purely because there is a niche in the market for tickets being sold for above face value. If you don't want stupid systems such as what's put forward in this thread, here's the simple solution: don't buy tickets from scalpers. If the market for scalped tickets dries up, scalping dries up. Address the cause, not the symptom. Trying to bar scalpers inevitably leads to genuine fans getting the run-around, while the smarter scalpers quickly figure out how to bypass the system and continue to make a killing.
Of course, people are stupid and the market for scalping will continue to exist. But the next time you find yourself unable to purchase a ticket because a scalper snapped them up or because the system has been changed in a way that excludes you, go get annoyed at the idiots and desperate fans paying massively inflated prices for a simple rock concert. If they hadn't allowed a niche in the market to develop, the scalper wouldn't be buying tickets from under your nose. Simple as that.
