Kid Rock flooded his tour, ID-locked premium seats, lotteried the best rows (interview)

The live-music business sells tickets that are often too cheap for supply that is too limited — and scalpers are the proof. On NPR's Planet Money (episode 468, aired April 2016), Kid Rock described how he tried to sell cheap tickets to his fans and cut scalpers out of the business at the same time.

He made three moves. He added more shows in some cities, essentially flooding the market with himself, so there was no shortage to arbitrage. He introduced 'platinum seating' at the front of the arena — and made it so that you have to show ID and swipe your credit card to sit there, making the seat impossible to resell. And the best seats of all cannot be bought, no matter how much money you have: they are given away by lottery to the real, die-hard fans.

In the interview he frames the whole arrangement as keeping tickets cheap for fans while removing the profit that draws scalpers in the first place — attacking scarcity, transferability and allocation separately instead of complaining about resellers.

Concerts are deliberately underpriced and undersupplied, so the markup leaks to whoever holds the ticket — usually a scalper; the episode opens with this market's oddity.

Flooding the market with himself attacks scarcity directly: if supply is no longer short, there is no premium left to capture.

ID and credit-card checks make the expensive seats non-transferable; a ticket only one verified person can use has no resale value.

A lottery for the best seats keeps the die-hard fans — the people cheap tickets were meant for — holding them, and keeps those rows out of any resale market entirely.

Scalping is arbitrage on a mismatch: face value set low, supply kept scarce. Close the gap by design — more supply, non-transferable premium seats, lottery allocation — instead of chasing resellers.

The episode aired on April 20, 2016 as a tour description of what worked and what the wider ticketing economics look like, pointing listeners to Josh Baron and Dean Budnick's book 'Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped' and to economist Pascal Courty's papers on the secondary market.