Sometimes promoters hold tickets and put them on the secondary market themselves. But they sell tickets to scalpers as a way to gaurantee a certain level of profit. Which lowers their risk of losing money, especially when spread over a large amount of events. The scalper business model is to buy risk from the promoter, and then selling the convenience of not planning ahead to consumers. Said differently, If promoters try to capture maximum value for every ticket, they will risk making less money at a slower rate.
That said, I think it might work if they start every sale of tickets with an initial high price that reduces on a defined schedule. So people with more money to spend can gaurantee a spot for themselves, while everyone else waits for the tickets to get cheaper.
Edit: ha! I obviously didn't rtfa before my comment.
Yes, or could simply be a live market for the tickets where people can put in limit orders etc. Then would converge to fair market value quickly and people would still have the option to bite the bullet and pay the higher prices.
Though volume/liquidity would be at question, but bots/arbitrage would hopefully help there.
If they really want to set artificially low prices and prioritize fans over scalpers then they need a queue and a process by which they verify the queued person is human. Lots of labor involved. Though maybe using SSN (in the US) to limit tickets per buyer?
That said, I think it might work if they start every sale of tickets with an initial high price that reduces on a defined schedule. So people with more money to spend can gaurantee a spot for themselves, while everyone else waits for the tickets to get cheaper.
Edit: ha! I obviously didn't rtfa before my comment.