Posted on 03/12/2009 11:39:51 AM PDT by a fool in paradise
Less than a minute after tickets for last August's Neil Diamond concerts at New York's Madison Square Garden went on sale, more than 100 seats were available for hundreds of dollars more than their normal face value on premium-ticket site TicketExchange.com. The seller? Neil Diamond.
Ticket reselling -- also known as scalping -- is an estimated $3 billion-a-year business in which professional brokers buy seats with the hope of flipping them to the public at a hefty markup.
...the source of the higher-priced tickets was the singer, working with Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc., which owns TicketExchange, and concert promoter AEG Live. Ticketmaster's former and current chief executives, one of whom is Mr. Diamond's personal manager, have acknowledged the arrangement...
Selling premium-priced tickets on TicketExchange, priced and presented as resales by fans, is a practice used by many other top performers, according to people in the industry. Joseph Freeman, Ticketmaster's senior vice president for legal affairs, says that the company's "Marketplace" pages only rarely list tickets offered by fans.
The vast majority of tickets are sold by the artists and their promoters with the cooperation of Ticketmaster. In fact, he says that for any concert to which Ticketmaster carries so-called platinum seats, the Marketplace sells only artist-sanctioned tickets, not those resold by fans...
These platinum seats are sold on Ticketmaster's TicketExchange, which describes itself as a marketplace for "fan-to-fan" transactions, using the slogan "Buy tickets. Sell tickets. It's that simple."
...Tickets that do not sell at the inflated platinum prices can also be moved between TicketExchange and Ticketmaster's lower-priced main inventory, without any signal to consumers that the ticket's status has been reduced.
...Ticketmaster says TicketExchange shouldn't be considered scalping. It says the site's "goal is to give the most passionate fans fair and safe access to the best tickets."
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Selling tickets that are never entered into the computer as “secondary market” tickets is fraud. They were never intially available.
This is bait and switch when you log on when tickets go on sale (or even pre-sale) and a little blub indicates you can get better seating ‘right now’ through a higher priced service.
It’s all a scam. Therefore never attend concerts or live performances, I guess...
There are some general admission events.
Chicago Cubs have doing the same thing for years...
Sorry. I don't know what possessed me to say that.
Because of behavior like this and the outrageous cost of tickets ($75 for a 60 min performance once) is why I quit going to concerts for many years. Now I only go to concerts at churches or “general admission” club dates.
Ticket reselling -- also known as scalping -- is an estimated $3 billion-a-year business in which professional brokers buy seats with the hope of flipping them to the public at a hefty markup.
Will they get a bailout from Timmy Taxcheat if they have to sell the tickets at under face value on concert day?
Sounds like a free market to me. Those with cash, buy.
> Chicago Cubs have doing the same thing for years...
(grin!) Good thing I’m a Sox fan, ay.
Hey - the money for those donations to save the whales, gay rights, WWF, ACLU and The Obama Campaign, etc... has to come from SOMEWHERE!
I can’t remember the last time I went to see a band with assigned seating. I did see The Pogues on Monday though, general admission.
ML/NJ
That makes you only a bit better... (Brewers fan here) ;)
It’s price gouging when they pretend that they are not associated with it.
It’s been a long standing dirty secret that the good seats are only entered in the computer long after tickets have gone on sale (some are used for promotion and some have been shuttled to scalpers).
Pink Floyd was angry in the 1970s when they were playing stadiums and realized promoters were selling thousands of tickets per show that were not accounted for in the money the band saw.
I have never used TicketExchange for concert tickets. Sounds like a bait and switch to me.
I DO sell a lot of my Lakers season tickets on TeamExchange though. I can ask up to 5 times face value and TicketMaster slaps on another 20% + 2 bucks onto my price!!
fans just use stubhub I guess
The Pink Floyd bit is just theft.
But I say “whatever the market will bear.”
Oldest scam in music.
Watch the old Led Zeppelin concert film “The Song Remains the Same” if you wanna watch a manager erupting.
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