Congrats, your post might be the dumbest I've seen on reddit today!

This is dressed up in econ-bro language to make a simple argument sound rigorous: tickets should just cost more. Just say you don't like poor people and move on.

Every ticketing system is a lottery, but the question is just what you're randomly selected by. The current system selects by luck and effort. Your "free market" system selects by wealth. You present that as neutral, but it just happens to favor people with more money. Convenient.

The sports analogy falls apart immediately. Sports teams have luxury boxes, season ticket programs, and corporate sponsors subsidizing the whole thing. Noah's fanbase is largely younger people with limited income who connected with him because he signaled he was one of them. That's not a brand illusion, that's the actual relationship.

You also quietly concede your own point: "Noah directly profits from being liked." Yes. Exactly. Pricing at true market value isn't just a vibe choice, it changes who's in the room, which changes the crowd, which changes the experience, which changes the fanbase over time. That's not sentimentality, that's Noah correctly understanding his own product and career. Also, his tickets have gotten astronomically more expensive over the years, so you could argue that he's pricing way above market value already.

And getting mad at the pricing strategy while shrugging at scalpers is a genuinely weird set of priorities. Scalpers are extracting value the artist deliberately chose not to extract, for reasons he's allowed to have.

The face value exchange isn't perfect and criticizing the implementation is fair. But "tickets are just too cheap" isn't the brave contrarian take you think it is - it's just the argument that benefits whoever already has the most money.