Well, that may be a bit of a stretch, and it certainly won’t happen anytime soon, but a start-up company called qcue is developing software that may help primary ticket sellers (such as Ticketmaster) more effectively price tickets from the start.  This could essentially do away with the arbitrage opportunity that ticket brokers exploit - buy tickets at the onsale at below market prices, and then resell the same tickets at higher prices as determined by market supply/demand.

Qcue’s goal:

Accurately pricing event tickets is difficult due to unknown and fluctuating consumer demand and the risks of overpricing. Scalpers have taken advantage of this arbitrage opportunity to create a multi-billion dollar secondary market While primary sellers fail to capture the mark-ups that result when tickets are under priced, they face the consequences of poor attendance from overpriced tickets. qcue exploits the synergies between the primary and secondary markets by integrating elements of airline pricing and NASDAQ trading into current selling platforms, providing primary sellers the ability to dynamically price-to-market. The qcue team members include Barry Kahn, PhD Economics 2007; Jitendra Dalvi, MBA 2007, and Andrew Mills, PhD Computer Science 2008.

The opportunity for primary ticket sellers, labels, and artists to capture more of the money in the initial onsale is huge.  In turn, the potential downside to the secondary ticket industry from this software is huge.  If Ticketmaster were to implement such software and dynamically price tickets at the time of onsale based on market demand, there’s the potential that most or all of the upside to secondary market ticket brokers could be go away altogether.

Qcue won the University of Texas Moot Corp business plan competition and the last three winners moved forward to receive venture capital funding.  It will be interesting to watch this company develop…