That sounds like rational individual action by the promoters, not a conspiracy. They want to be sure their concerts will sell out and price them accordingly. In so doing, the total takings may be lower than at a price that only just fills the hall, but in return they get a visible sign of success. The difference in takings is what they choose to pay to buy this advertising. Or less than this if they also get part of the takings of official resellers.
This isn't the only possible arrangement -- they could adopt the airlines' method of selling tickets cheap a long way in advance and ramping up the prices as the date approaches. Or sell them by auction, or by lottery, or anything else. I am not seeing much of a problem in underpricing for direct sales and allowing a secondary market. A concert that sells out has, by definition, put tickets into the hands of as many fans as possible.
Where there are both official resellers and laws against private reselling, presumably the laws are to protect the official resellers' monopoly, paid for by the industry and passed under the pretence of yielding to the demands of fans. That would be something in need of reform.
I am not seeing much of a problem in underpricing for direct sales and allowing a secondary market.
It's just occurred to me that this is the way that IPOs work. A company going public wants its offering to sell out promptly, to get the money it went public to raise. A consensus value is established in subsequent trading, and if the people who bought into the initial offering see their holdings immediately bump up in value, they're happy too.
Recent brainstorming sessions at SIAI (with participants including Anna, Carl, Jasen, Divia, Will, Amy Willey, and Andrew Critch) have started to produce lists of rationality skills that we could potentially try to teach (at Rationality Boot Camp, at Less Wrong meetups, or similar venues). We've also been trying to break those skills down to the 5-second level (step 2) and come up with ideas for exercises that might teach them (step 3) although we haven't actually composed those exercises yet (step 4, where the actual work takes place).
The bulk of this post will mainly go into the comments, which I'll try to keep to the following format: A top-level comment is a major or minor skill to teach; upvote this comment if you think this skill should get priority in teaching. Sub-level comments describe 5-second subskills that go into this skill, and then third-level comments are ideas for exercises which could potentially train that 5-second skill. If anyone actually went to the work of composing a specific exercise people could run through, that would go to the fourth-level of commenting, I guess. For some major practicable arts with a known standard learning format like "Improv" or "Acting", I'll put the exercise at the top and guesses at which skills it might teach below. (And any plain old replies can go at any level.)
I probably won't be able to get to all of what we brainstormed today, so here's a PNG of the Freemind map that I generated during our session.