Thankfully, my favorite group, the acappella group Home Free is still inexpensive and even cheap - I paid $30 a seat to see them last year. I could have had a $15 seat in the balcony if I had wanted.
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While they most certainly suck, so do most other people. As long as there will be a secondary market online someone will scalp tickets. Whether that's some random asshole or these organized assholes hardly matters in most cases.
Of course with random assholes doing the scalping there is still a chance to get a cheap one by being faster, albeit a very slim one.
The experience could be somewhat tamed by a lottery process.
Accept a token deposit for a week or two, and then draw from people contending for a given seat, then give them another week to pay the balance. Any unclaimed seats are put up at will call night-of-the-show. Limit the number of deposits taken from any given card to prevent "I'll claim 30 seats and only buy 1" gaming of the lottery.
There's probably some more complexity about it (if you want N seats together), but I think that would dramatically cut back on the frustration for "the tickets were only available for 14 seconds and the server was being DDOSed by scalper bots."
Having to put down a deposit with no guarantee of a ticket also makes "buy All The Seats" scalping theoretically impossible and economically riskier. If there's 5/1 contention for a ticket, you'd have to find a way to get 3 lottery slots for a better than even chance of getting it. If the deposit was $10, you're spending $30 for the chance to buy a $50 ticket-- so if you can't resell the ticket for at least $80, you lose. Under current policies, if you can sell that $50 ticket for $51, you're ahead.
Make tickets non-transferable, boom no more scalpers.
I saw Dave Matthews in Austin for 20 bucks fifteen ish years ago. Great show. Tickets can still be affordable if you don't go to arena shows.
i saw phish in the 90's over 30 times for ~$27 a show. i don't go to shows any more.