It's much more complicated (and worse) than that.
Ticketmaster reserves some seats during sale to be dynamic pricing, which they start higher than normal and then depending on demand and what they see on the secondary market they re-price those as the initial sale or presale is ongoing, just minutes after it starts.
Also, promoters, artists and venues might get their own allotment of tickets to do with as they want, likely negotiated in contracts. Those seem to find their way onto secondary markets often as well.
> They do other things that's baffling like selling tickets a year ahead of time, which is kind of weird considering very few people, even big fans, would be really on top of buying tickets a year out. It's obviously designed for scalpers.
Yes, I've commented on this here before. In some cases it's because tours go on sale at the same time (to generate buzz), and the early events are relatively soon and the last events are quite far out. They also often do release chunks of ticket inventory at later stages. That said, I'm convinced that often brokers are used as a simple way to provide immediate cash and reduce risk. Why would a promoter want to sell out over months when they can sell out immediately and know that regardless of whether the brokers make money (they don't always) they have sold everything and can say the event is sold out and they have cash in hand now and not months from now.
I used to work in this industry and there's a lot of shady stuff that goes on, and it's not all on the broker/scalper side.
> You can easily solve this by having the ticket tied to a name and requiring you to show ID
That's been done for a long time and you can still get around it if the margin is good enough. You just have to either want to go to the event yourself or be willing to one ticket out of the maximum you can purchase as the cost of doing business. You can't really make every seat have a name initially because not everyone actually knows who they're going to invite for sure at time of purchase, so if you want to really make it effective you have to limit the number of tickets per transaction to 4 or less. Even then, people will be incentivized to buy the max and have people go with them to use the extra tickets at cost or more, it may not be brokers but the regular public will do it too.
The actual solution for this is fairly simple. It's supply and demand. Play more shows at a location and the ticket prices will drop. Kid Rock has done it for decades at this point. Artists don't like having to put the extra work in for less money (tickets will be cheaper) and don't want to take the risk that the demand won't be there if they book the venue early. That risk is pushed out to brokers.