Silicon Alley Insider: Supply and Demand Applies to Concert Tickets, But Not to iPhones

Peter Kafka, at Silicon Alley Insider, claims the “obvious solution” to Hannah Montana ticket scalping — wherein $67 tickets are being re-sold for upwards of $250 — is to raise the initial selling prices of the tickets, so that the money die-hard fans are willing to pay goes to the artist and concert promoter, rather than to the scalper, and then to reduce the prices after the initial high-priced demand passes.

Good advice, I say. And, of course, it’s exactly what Apple did with the iPhone. Except Silicon Alley Insider didn’t see it that way with the iPhone, writing “To us, this move suggests the phone is not selling as well as Apple had hoped,” and “[The real issue] is Apple’s obvious misjudgment of the market for a flagship product.”

★ Sunday, 7 October 2007