“The simple fact is that ticket companies and their brand just get in the way. Their price is a false price, and an actual impediment to the [artist] selling the ticket. This is a problem for me for so many reasons. I mean, the ticketing companies don’t perform! So why the **** is their name on the ticket? It’s a tax!”

Talk to David Cooper for even a few minutes, and you’ll learn the man has a very clear vision for how he believes the world of ticketing should work.

Unfortunately, that vision doesn’t quite align with the way the world of ticketing actually works.

Cooper, a longtime entertainment industry executive, has a true passion for ticketing — or perhaps more accurately, a truly passionate stance on how to fix ticketing. In the course of his 30-plus year career — a career that has seen him manage ticketing for Pearl Jam, NASCAR and numerous other bands and brands — Cooper has witnessed the complete evolution, and the complete devolution, of the ticketing business.

He’s seen the market grow from what may justifiably be described as a complete afterthought to multi-billion dollar industry — one that inflamed anger and dissension like few others. He’s seen Eddie Vedder and his bandmates battle Ticketmaster in the halls of the United States Congress. He’s seen the Internet turn the industry on its head, he’s seen bands big and small go to war to win back the right to own their ticketing policies, and perhaps most notably, he’s seen most each and every change that has hit the ticketing business mostly negatively impact the very people on which his beloved entertainment industry was built: The fans.

Somewhere along the way, Cooper laments, ticketing (and by extension, entertainment) got hijacked by big business, and as a result, each and every year, millions and millions in profits fall into the hands not of those individuals who provide that entertainment that we all so dearly crave, but rather those who provide access to the entertainment.

Need proof? Well, Cooper has it.

Take a look at most any ticket stub, he says, and you’ll notice something rather peculiar: the branding for the ticketing firm that brokered your ticket will be a lot more prominently placed on that piece of cardboard than that of the team or band or event you paid to see.

Which of course makes no sense at all. And yet … we accept it. Because, well, that’s just the way it’s always been.

It’s maddening for Cooper, yes. But it’s also true to say that it’s maddening, on some level, for pretty much everyone. After all, the reality of this business is a reality that most all of us understand, because it’s a reality we confront almost each and every time we buy a ticket for the events that help shape our lives: we go online, we get directed to some third party, we pick out our seat and our price point and we get our tickets. But we don’t get to do so without paying out a whole lot of money for a whole lot of fees that don’t have much of anything to do with our preferred event at all: A convenience fee. A facilities fee. A resale service fee. A delivery fee.

Taking a step back from it, it all looks, in a word, nonsensical. And if it drives anyone crazy, it certainly drives Cooper crazy.

But if you talk to this ticketing visionary these days, he’ll offer you more than just his outrage at how things got this way. He’ll also offer you the faintest of hopes that, at long last, things may be changing.

And changing for the better, too.

“The ticketing industry has been evolving forever,” Cooper says. “But it’s only now, finally, that it’s evolving in the correct direction.”