Sold out? Reconfiguring consumer demand through the secondary digital ticket market

Market studies research has posited the reciprocity of markets making exchanges and exchanges making markets. In this paper we assess the impact of digitalizing on exchanges and markets. We present a case study on concert ticket resale, in which the object of exchange (the ticket) is at least stable, but the methods of exchange are changing significantly, partly to attach or detach some contested quality to the exchange, and partly in the tussle over the distribution of costs and benefits. Focusing on the secondary market for concert tickets, we find it is enabled, contested and made problematic for individual actors and in public policy by thoroughgoing digitalization, unsettling a prior balance of logics of scale, scarcity and fairness. Digitalization of the market actors and devices shapes and reconfigures this mundane market setting and we show a process of configuration whereby novel social, technological and market agencing takes place.