It is possible that you do not have an opinion about the font Taylor Swift employs on the cover of her new album, that you do not care who or what her new single is directed at, and that you are wholly unconcerned by whether she is currently an online heroine or a pariah. Nevertheless, it is worth paying attention to what Swift has done now – or, as she might put it, what the deficiencies of the ticketing industry have made her do.

Swift does not have any tickets for sale for her upcoming tour. She does not even have an upcoming tour, yet. Still, at some point, there will be a tour and lots of people will want to get tickets. Taylor – and this is the official line – wants her most dedicated fans to get those tickets, so she has signed up with the “verified fan” system introduced by the ticket seller Ticketmaster – used for Bruce Springsteen’s forthcoming run of shows on Broadway – whereby people who are assessed by algorithms to be real fans (as opposed to touts or the automated bots touts use to hoover up tickets) are given priority in the online queue to buy tickets. Not guaranteed tickets, just a guaranteed place in a queue.

The issue is how Swift’s fans can prove their devotion. They can preorder the CD of her forthcoming album, Reputation – and to receive it on the day of release costs $48.09 (That’s £37, but the CD itself costs $15, $13.99 for a digital download. And you are allowed to buy the album 13 times to boost your place in the line.) You can buy merchandise from her online shop. If you do not want to spend money, you can get a smaller boost to your position by repeatedly watching her new video, or by posting about her on social media.

To a great many people, this doesn’t look like ensuring real fans get access to tickets. It looks like gouging as much money as possible out of them. It is “nothing more than a transparent cash grab”, said US magazine Alternative Press. “It makes getting tickets for a Taylor Swift concert into a game in which people with the most money get ahead,” suggested Jezebel. The thing is, it might well be those things, as well as what it claims to be. “There is no denying this is an effective way to hugely reduce the secondary ticketing market, but it is also rather forceful,” says James Sandom, who manages bands including Franz Ferdinand, Belle and Sebastian, Kaiser Chiefs and the Vaccines. “From an outside perspective, I admire the brand-driving initiative that sits underneath this. However, it is reliant upon the most dedicated fans. There is a degree of this process proving alienating to normal people.”

The things is, normal people are already alienated from the ticket-buying process. Last year, Nathan Hubbard, a former CEO of Ticketmaster, explained why you can never get a good ticket for the shows you want to see. First, there are presales – tickets sold by sponsors, to fan club members, to those on venue or promoter mailing lists. The touts and bots are already at work here. Then there are the tickets taken by the artist, the record label and other organisations involved in the show for their own use. Then there are bands or promoters giving tickets direct to the ticket resale sites. (They do this because for the biggest shows, the artist may well be asking for more money than can be raised by selling all tickets at face price. The money has to be made up somewhere.) By the time tickets go on general sale, Hubbard wrote, 90% may already be sold.

What tends to get brushed over is the complicity of artists in the process. Fans buying tickets want to believe the artist is on their side, and so there is an acceptance in the industry – a conspiracy might be another word – that when it all goes pear-shaped and fans realise they are being milked dry, the artist does not carry the can. Last year, one major promoter told me they knew of only one stadium-filling act they were certain did not play the resale market, either themselves or by granting promoters permission to resell at inflated prices. We know this happens, but we prefer to blame promoters, ticket agencies, managers – anyone but the artist.

The real issue here – and you probably don’t want to hear this – is that the most popular artists do not charge enough for their tickets. The resale sites have proved that the market will support much higher pricing, but the artists don’t want to be the ones who look like greedy moneygrabbers by asking for those prices. So other people do the dirty work, and the artist still gets the guaranteed fee they asked for – from the sponsors who presold tickets, from revenues from resale sites, or – in Swift’s case – from the purchases her fans made to get in the ticket queue. If artists hiked the price of tickets, people would moan at them, but far fewer tickets would go to touts, because the margins would discourage them.

Ticketing will change. “I expect in the future to see further growth of the tiered pricing systems we have in place in many sports, or other retail,” Sandom says, although it should be noted that where unofficial “dynamic pricing” – slashing the price to shift unsold seats – has occurred, fans who coughed up full price at the earliest opportunity have tended to complain. There is also the problem that venues, ticket sale sites and ticket resale sites are caught in a web of their own commercial relationships, which means dynamic pricing would be harder to operate, because ticket sales are controlled by those who have an interest in maintaining the current system.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bruce Springsteen, who used Ticketmaster’s ‘verified fan’ system for his one-man Broadway show. Photograph: Greg Allen/Invision/AP

So if you want to see Star A playing at Arena B, you may well find Arena B sells tickets only through Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster, in turn, owns the resale sites GetMeIn! and Seatwave. Arena B has an interest in Ticketmaster making the most money possible from the show, because it helps it with its contract. Ticketmaster has an interest in getting tickets on to GetMeIn! and Seatwave, because it takes a cut of those sales. The only one who loses out is you.

In the meantime, the brightest brains of the music industry – insert your own gag, thanks – ponder how to keep tickets out of the hands of touts and bots, and ensure revenue goes to the artists rather than the scammers. You can try paperless tickets, and tickets that demand the production of ID on the door. Well, here is another suggestion. It is crazy, but it would eliminate the bots, at least. Sell tickets in advance from venue box offices. People can either walk up and buy them in person, or they can send in a cheque and stamped, self-addressed envelope. And that’s it. Make those the only ways to buy tickets. What? Yes, you are right. It is how we used to buy tickets before the internet. And, yes, it worked far better for us.

• This article was amended on 1 September 2017. An earlier version said it would cost $63.03 (£48) to receive Taylor Swift’s album on CD on the day of its release. This has been corrected to say it costs $48.09 (£37), and to explain that the CD itself costs $15.