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I just think you'd find an awful lot of John Smith's by that method.

Better... "Your ticket is confirmed, Sir. You just need to swipe the credit card that you booked with to release your tickets at the box office."

In fact, I'm pretty sure that an awful lot of London theatres that I've been to operate on that exact principle, just not for every single ticket. There's no reason you couldn't demand card-only booking in this day and age, though (hell, it's already almost "book online in the first ten minutes" if you want tickets to anything popular anyway). The Olympics basically did that and few complained even if it was only one particular type of card, too! Or even a "member's card" (with photo) that you have to sign up for and which is disabled if it's used for touting.

There're all kinds of ways to stop touting or make it so difficult that you could crush the industry overnight. The fact that they're not used tell me that someone gets a backhander or that it works to the artist's (or their management's) advantage to allow touting even if they can't admit that because it's screwing over their own customers to get more money.

If you compare touting to eBay bidding, that's what I think happens. 10% of the tickets aren't sold until the last minute when those people so desperate to go are willing to pay so much more just for the chance, so the total income rises dramatically just by holding onto 10% of the tickets until later on and selling them via "other" sites (often related, as mentioned above). You still only sell 10,000 tickets, but the last 1000 get you 10 times more money ("because they were sold out, but look what I got!").

I can't believe it's not an industry set-up, rather then thousands of independent people all looking to make a quick buck and hang around outside venues carrying lots of cash.

They don't want a "fair" system - of 10,000 tickets being available for the published ticket-price. They'd make less money, and it would also cost administratively to run. They'd then have to put up the face-price of the ticket to compensate, and fans would revolt.

While it still says £30 (or whatever) on the ticket, the artists etc. aren't the bad guys. And while someone is still willing to pay £3000 for a "rare last minute" £30 ticket, even the touts are the good guys. Win-win and the only person screwed over is the guy who can only afford the £30 ticket but never gets one because he can't book in the first nanosecond. You can make more profit out of a touted ticket than 100 of those people, so who cares?

That said, I haven't been to a live gig in my entire life. Nearest I get is classical music, West End shows, or a stand-up comedian. Biggest piss-take I've had? Russell Howard at Wembley Arena. Someone bought the tickets for me at great expense, we were so far away the guy was a tiny dot even on the big screens, and it was basically his normal TV stand-up, with almost no ad-libbing or interaction with the audience. Paying a fortune to stand in a sweaty pushing crowd for hours to listen to a bad ad-libbed and interrupted rendition of a handful of songs you've heard a thousand times, and a thousand songs nobody would ever choose to listen to? More fool you.