Will RA's Ticket Resale Service Prevent Scalpers or Create Them?

Resident Advisor just unveiled a new service to complement it's existing ticketing system. This one allows ticketholders to resell their tix when the event they no longer want to attend is sold out.

Before we get to the big questions, let's explain how it works. When you decide you don't want or need one or more of the tickets you've purchased, you can add it to a resale pool that only becomes active when the event sells out of original tickets. The unwanted ballots are then sold at whatever price the last original ticket went for. According to RA, if the tickets were originally sold for $10, but the last one went for $20, your resold ticket will go for $20. Your $10 will be refunded, and the additional $10 will go to the promoter rather than a scalper.

RA probably gets some profit from both transactions but to their credit, it's just a totalizing ticket-selling-and-buying system that never leaves their site. Those kinds of things always make us a bit suspicious (can't customers do with their tickets what they want?), but it seems like their hearts are in the right place, as this service seems to circumvent scalpers.

Still, the resale pool could provide opportunities for some wiley promoters to buy up tickets to their own events and then hawk them for the jacked-up rate, but they wouldn't make any profit—they'd just get their money back. The promoters would get that extra cash instead. Perhaps our suspicion is paranoia.

Next, we'll need someone to come up with a service that prevents people from scalping hyped, limited-edition records on Discogs.

This reminds us of the time Kaskade confronted a scalper in a hotel lobby:

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