You refresh Ticketmaster. A Lil Baby ticket shows 5. You wait two hours in the queue and suddenly it's 40. You feel robbed. I've felt that way too. But after actually looking at the economics of it, I think the outrage is aimed at the wrong thing.

The basic supply and demand problem

Arenas hold a fixed number of seats. Lil Baby cannot clone himself and play 50 shows simultaneously. When 500,000 people want 20,000 seats, the price has to rise until the number of buyers willing to pay matches the number of seats available. That's not a scam. That's just how markets work when supply is hard-capped.

Buyers willing to pay at each price point (20,000 seats available)
0 100K 200K 300K 400K 500,000 250,000 80,000 20,000 — equilibrium 8,000 5 50 50 40 50 Ticket price
40 is where 20,000 willing buyers meets 20,000 available seats. That's the equilibrium. Below it there are way more buyers than seats. Above it seats go unsold.

Dynamic pricing isn't new, it's just more visible now

Airlines have done this for decades. Uber surge pricing runs every Friday night. Hotels charge double during festival weekends. Ticketmaster just made the same logic real-time and transparent for concerts. The algorithm watches queue length, time remaining until the show, seat location, and remaining inventory. As seats get scarcer, prices adjust upward automatically.

What actually happens without dynamic pricing

This part gets left out of most complaints. Without dynamic pricing, Ticketmaster sells at 5. Scalpers using bots grab the bulk of those tickets in seconds. Fans end up paying 00 on StubHub anyway. The only difference is the artist gets 5 and the scalper pockets 15. With dynamic pricing the artist gets 40, fans pay market rate, and nobody profits from the chaos in the middle.

I wanted Bad Bunny floor seats last year. They started at 20 and hit 50 after 90 minutes. It felt like getting robbed. But 200,000 people from the DMV wanted 300 floor seats. Someone was paying 50 either way. Better the artist sees that money than a scalper running a bot farm out of a basement somewhere.

What actually deserves the outrage

The price itself isn't the problem. Ticketmaster's service fees are the problem. A 40 ticket showing up as 20 after fees at checkout is a different issue entirely. That's not market pricing. That's opacity. What I'd actually push for: hard caps on service charges, real anti-bot laws so actual fans have a fair shot, and transparency about where the money goes. Fix those things and dynamic pricing becomes a lot easier to accept.

Tobias Velez · Walter Johnson High School · The Margin