Yep. I despise TM and think this needs to change, but the only thing it's going to fix (from the consumer's perspective, not the artists et al) is the abysmal and abusive customer service (that doesn't really exist), not the high prices. The prices are pretty much exactly what the market will bear, and that will be true no matter who the middleman is.
no they arent. the prices are significantly below market value which is why scalping exists. If Taylor Swift actually used market pricing then tickets would be thousands of dollars, but then people would whine that Taylor Swift is greedy, so instead they set some arbitrary "acceptable" ticket value and pawn all the blame on scalpers and Ticketmaster.
Yes that's a fair point, although Taylor Swift is somewhat of an exception/corner case. Some of the huge acts do sell cheaper than market rate for other reasons, but most of the events they sell for are not.
It's also worth noting that sometimes things change after prices have been set. For example, a baseball game in which tickets were sold but now there's a lot of attention/love suddenly and unexpectedly on the team (maybe they just pulled off a big upset or something) so "market rate" for tickets jumps much higher than what it was immediately before that when the tickets were sold. They weren't originally trying to price lower than market rate. Also the pricing they do for market rate is calculated to optimize for maximum revenue which includes some balance of selling max number of seats but only until the delta of additional sales means a net loss of revenue (i.e. you can sell every seat for $1 but that would make a lot less money).
