There is no reason that event tickets couldn't be sold similarly to airline seats.
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Scalping has existed since forever.
The thing was it was local promoters + local sales (aka criminals) who would get tickets from management (yes thats the artists management) and kick the money back to the artist if they were lucky (if not the management kept it).
Now TM owns the venue, they are the promotor, they are the manager(to an extent) and have full control of the tickets, and the secondary market. The artist is now 100 percent in on the action making fans buy a fan club membership then get "face value" tickets at presale only with expensive meet and greet packages that range from a few hundred bucks to a 1000. An artist can tack on 50k to several 100k doing this at every date/venue.
As for TM's uncharges, most of that is because the artist either demands they do it (my prices are reasonable) making TM the scape goat, or they want a sum that is the total of the door and TM needs to cover venue costs and make profit so that just gets baked in as a "fee".
Just to put a fine point on this. In the old model promoters, venues all of those entities being separate and charging a markup made sense. When TM consolidated they didnt change the markup they just kept the margin...
I remember finding some story about a contract for Ke$ha or Kathy Perry or some other pop-concoction of the previous decade getting leaked (*) , and one of the ways in which the artist got paid was trough a percentage of the tickets to distribute trough unofficial resale channels.
The issue that spawned Ticketmaster is that as a class artists are greedy, but they want to pretend they aren't. Being hated is a vital part of that company's business model.
(*) I think it must have been Ke$ha, as that one was involved in some financial dispute, but I can't find the story right now.
I wonder how many simple facts of life like that one remain hidden right under my nose.
Charge extra for each armrest. Charge extra for priority entry to the venue. Charge to bring in a purse. Charge to sit next to your family. Charge for adequate leg room. Earn points that become worth less and less as they accumulate.
If Ticketmaster enjoys such market dominance, they become responsible to prevent widespread misuse of their own platform, lest they become negligent. They are owned by livenation which is a public company.
(You can see this in the spoof movie Airplane II: The Sequel from 1982, where our hero boards the Lunar Shuttle buying a ticket from a scalper.)
So this policy is younger than Google.
Its in both parties benefit to find a mutually lucrative deal. More so when the customer is not that bright and motivated by "passion" and "fan culture". That same sort of passion (about music) leads to all parties underpaying a lot of staff (people want to be in the industry for some reason). Tech has its own version of this, see game development for over worked and under paid talent who does the job out of "passion".
"Influencers" selling burgers, backpacks, sports drinks and screw drivers is no different than concert t-shirts, posters, coffins and condoms. An artist is more than just the songs they sing. It's the film / TV that work shows up in. It's the other products artists can sell (a lot of this is other peoples art but...) and the things they can promote. They can exist without TM but the same cant be said in the other direction.
And some times the artist do get screwed. When your management and TM/LN folks have a relationship that dates back to Bill Graham Presents there is likely a back side deal that gives the management an extra kick.