Ticketmaster going paperless

Scalpers. Does anyone bear any fondness for this creature of the night, the guy who stands out on corner offering to sell to passers-by admission to an event at ten times the price everyone else had to pay?

Well, if Ticketmaster has its way, this profession will soon become a thing of the past, as the company is attempting to make paper-based tickets obsolete with a new paperless ticketing system.

The system isn't all that high-tech (unlike, say, offering airplane boarding passes on your cell phone). Instead of flashing a paper pass, customers would simply swipe the credit card they used to make the purchase and show their ID to the gatekeeper. Sounds slow, but it would probably eliminate the scalper element -- and at least it means there's no paper ticket to lose.

But what if you end up unable to go to the event after all? Well, Ticketmaster has a plan for that too, with a resale system set up so unneeded tickets can be offloaded to others. Venues can cap the number of tickets a buyer can resell and the maximum price of those tickets. In the case of Penn State, which rolled out the system a few weeks ago, students who buy football tickets can resell a maximum of six tickets for up to double their face value. On the gray market, tickets used to sell for up to six times face value, leading many who didn't have access to the original, cheap tickets to cry foul.

Of course, Ticketmaster makes out pretty well here, too. Not only does it take a service fee on the sale of the original ticket, it now gets a cut on any resales of that ticket also, double-dipping into the pool. Convenient, yes, but Ticketmaster says it has to collect those fees to "recoup our investment in the technology."

Still, with considerably lower prices on most resold tickets, I doubt buyers are likely to complain much. Could it really be win-win?