StubHub Sues Ticketmaster, Golden State Warriors, in Battle of Scalpers

Ticketmaster is a company designed to be the &quot;evil middleman&quot;. There&#x27;s lots of info around the internet about how most of the money the collect goes to the venue without you knowing it.<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure they are basically sending most of the money back to the Warriors, which is why they are so adamant about people using Ticketmaster.<p>They don&#x27;t want to set up their own marketplace because then they would be the &quot;greedy&quot; sports franchise, so Ticketmaster sets it up and take the heat.

I have Golden State Warriors season tickets, and use both StubHub and Ticketmaster for ticket resales. Most of the secondary market liquidity is still found at Stubhub, but I would actually prefer that more exchanges occur through Ticketmaster.<p>Pricing: From a seller perspective, selling through the official Ticketmaster channel provides significantly better pricing. For example, if a customer spends $10 on a ticket through Ticketmaster, I will net $9.50 from the sale (5% commission). On Stubhub, if a customer spends $10 on the same ticket, with the way their fee structure works, I would only net $6.01 (an effective 40% commission).<p>Security: Tickets sold via Stubhub provide a pdf ticket that shows my actual name. Tickets sold via Ticketmaster reissue the original ticket in the purchaser&#x27;s name.

Out of curiosity, in case someone can explain this to me, I want to ask a question. Tickets for an event went on sale at 10AM from a local venue. You can buy tickets from the venue site, but not pick a location, just a price point. Each time I select a ticket and price point they ask me to enter a captcha. I try again and again to see a no seats message. I go over to StubHub and BigStub only 7 minutes after 10AM and see they have thousands of tickets available for sale at a 50% price increase. They also have better seats than were available to me on the venue&#x27;s site.<p>Is the venue just pre-selling tickets to StubHub or BigStub, or are there scalpers buying that many tickets.

Is there any reason ticket sales happen like this, rather than just selling directly from the venue? Why is scalping a crime, why not just sell at market price to begin with?