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The Sports and Concert Ticket Industry - A First Cut
What's ticket scalping? What's a ticket exchange? What are ticket scams? How can you avoid ticket scams? What's the difference between a ticket broker and a ticket scalper? Click here to learn more.
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The Ticket Market 101
If you're confused about the entire matter of buying tickets online or offline, or from a broker or ticket scalper, and want to learn more before you buy anything, you've come to the
right place. Let's get started.
The common way to buy tickets is to go to the ticket seller associated with the sports team or concert you're interested in attending. But for some events there's more audience demand than supply
of tickets available. So some patron, hungry to purchase tickets for an event that's sold out, will offer a price over what the original holder of the ticket paid. That's the basis of buying a ticket over
"face value." But it's become more complicated in the 21st Century. In ths section, we'll help you steer through the minefield.
First, the basic difference between a ticket scalper and a ticket broker is that a scalper is someone selling a ticket above face value. A ticket broker is someone who is in the business of purchasing large blocs
of tickets to events for resale at a higher price. If one thinks about it, there's a fine line between the ticket scalper and ticket broker.
What Does A Ticket Broker Do?
According to the National Association of Ticket Brokers, ticket services (also called) ticket brokers have been in
existence since the turn of the 20th century. Ticket services then took the place of today's
computerized ticket centers serving as remote outlets for the theaters and ballparks.
Using a ticket service in the early 1900's meant for as little as a twenty five to fifty cent service fee, a patron no longer
had to get across town to buy seats in advance. Tickets were provided by the venues and ticket services served the public as a primary market seller. Any unsold tickets would simply be returned to the box
office and payment rendered to the venue for tickets sold. Since there were no costs above face value to obtain tickets they were sold with very small service charges.
Today, with the age of computers, ticket services were replaced as primary ticket sellers by companies with Internet websites. At that time the business industry evolved into the secondary ticket market.
No longer do ticket services get provided with tickets on consignment from venues. Now, with the greatest demand for many sporting events, concerts, and theater events, ticket services now serve the
public in three ways. First they provide tickets to events that are sold out through the primary market. Second, they provide premium upfront seats which are the most desirable. Third, they provide ticket
holders a place to sell their unwanted, or unneeded or extra tickets.
There are a wide variety of opinions and facts on the operation of the event ticket industry and the secondary ticket market
Some of them are presented below. After reading them, you will come away with a better understanding of the industry and
what you should be aware of. (As a note, the views expressed below are not necessarily those of Sports Business Simulations.)
The "Ticket Scam Resource Center" View
The TSRC reports that an industry white paper estimates the primary ticketing industry to be a $15 billion annual industry in North America,
with twice that amount changing hands on the secondary market.
Artists and teams need a place to perform and/or play. Communities and private interests therefore build facilities
in which the artists and teams can play. Fans are willing to pay for these performances and games, so the artists, teams,
and venues need to collect entrance fees and distribute the revenue. Particularly with respect to large, high-demand events,
it's unrealistic to charge fans at the gate. So, we have seen the rise of a ticketing industry that can provide for advance sales
, reserved seating, etc.
Ticketing Services
The ticket purchase transactions, printing, mailing, tracking of seats, tracking of reports of lost or stolen tickets, etc.,
combine for a pretty complicated process, especially for large venues that sell thousands of tickets per day. This process
can be outsourced to ticketing agencies, such as TicketMaster.
A few words specifically about TicketMaster. TicketMaster has exclusive contracts with a large percentage of the large and
otherwise important venues in North America. Artists and teams are, to some extent, forced to deal with TicketMaster in order
to perform in these venues.
Some people call it a monopoly, and lawsuits have been filed, and the US Supreme Court has issued rulings. In general, TicketMaster has not been found to be in violation of US laws concerning monopolistic practices.
Many venues, especially the smaller ones, either do their own ticket processing or use a ticketing service other than TicketMaster.
TicketMaster gets all the press because they are involved with the major events. But consider what your most recent ticket purchase
was for; was it for a major sporting event or concert, or was it for your child's school musical? TicketMaster does not sell all the
tickets on the continent, no matter what your Yahoo group says. This site is concerned with scams, though, and there isn't a lot of fraud at the small events. So what happens once a venue schedules an event and contracts with a service to sell tickets?
Who Gets the Tickets?
The ticketing service provides tickets to individual consumers and certain commercial interests, such as ticket
brokers, the artist's girlfriend, media outlets, etc. Most tickets to most events are sold to individual consumers. This
isn't always totally true, and we'll get to that later. For most events, some tickets are withheld from the general public
for use by the artists or teams, promoters, media outlets, and other contracted organizations.
For example, a show in
Las Vegas may allocate tickets to various casinos for distribution to gamblers. This sort of contract may have been written
to get the cooperation of the casinos when building the arena and marketing shows. It's not illegal, and in most cases, good
seats are still available to individuals at face value.
There are some documented, and probably lots of undocumented instances of holding back large numbers of tickets. This site
is concerned with scams that cause individuals to lose money, so this site is not especially concerned with a consumer who
wasn't able to buy a ticket at all.
However, fraud exists in the ticketing market. There are instances of bribes paid by brokers to venue insiders in
return for access to prime tickets.
Ticket Brokers
A ticket broker is licensed by a state or province to resell tickets. Traditionally, most of these tickets originate with individuals, such as season ticket holders who want buyers for unused tickets. However, as the size of the ticketing industry has grown, brokers have found that they can increase their profit by increasing their inventory. So, the modern broker typically buys some tickets directly from the primary sources (TicketMaster and the venue box office). The primary sources may limit individual transactions, so the brokers hire people to buy tickets. The employees sell the tickets to the brokers who again resell the tickets.
Brokers sell to individual fans and to corporations. Typically, brokers charge seemingly exorbitant rates for prime tickets, or for
any tickets to sold-out events. If they can sell just a third of their tickets for three times their cost, they'll break even.
For big events, some corporation will need tickets for a big client, and will pay a big charge.
Brokers can afford the up front cost of tracking events across the continent, hiring employees, and buying up dozens of tickets.
If they have to eat a few lousy tickets, it's no big deal (to the broker). There are reputable brokers; look for membership in the
National Association of Ticket Brokers. But when there are only a few hundred tickets available to a high-demand event,
most will go to corporations and rich people who weren't going to stand in line in the first place, so it can be difficult to get
a good price, and there is little hope of eliminating brokers.
Note that many online ticket brokers are really just e-commerce store fronts.
The brokers need as many outlets as
possible, so you'll sometimes see the same seats to an event for sale by multiple online dealers. When dealing with a
broker, ask if that broker actually has possession of the tickets, or if they're someplace else. While there are dozens
of these minor dealers, and small brokers in each local market, there are probably just a handful of national-scope brokers.
Scalpers
Scalpers ("touts" in Britain) are essentially unlicensed brokers. They are individuals who attempt to make a profit on
tickets by selling, usually face to face, to individual consumers, on the streets outside venues. Tickets are also scalped at
online auctions such as eBay. Brokers may hire scalpers to sell off remaining inventory on the street, which is why you'll
sometimes see a scalper with handfuls of tickets. Some scalpers with handfuls of tickets may also be selling counterfeits.
The Internet in general, and eBay in particular, have changed the dynamics of brokering and scalping across the continent.
It is now cost effective to buy four tickets to a high-demand event when only two are desired, because the extras can be sold on
eBay for a profit, from the comfort of a living room. The secondary ticket market has exploded, incidents of fraud have exploded,
and the artists, venues, and primary ticketing agencies are unhappy about all the revenue that is going "somewhere else".
And the government isn't collecting tax revenue on those gray market transactions.
It seems unethical for a broker to skirt TicketMaster's rules in order to buy tickets on the primary market for the
purpose of reselling the tickets on their secondary market. It doesn't really change the number of patrons attending
an event, it just changes the way the money is redistributed. But it's usually not illegal, and if you don't like it,
the best way to fight it is to avoid buying from brokers and scalpers. (As an SBS note, StubHub transactions are 100% guaranteed.)
Fraud
Individuals can be defrauded in many ways, as described in this link (click here). Part of the price of valid tickets is
the cost to venues and ticketing services in fighting fraud. The innocent consumer is paying the price. If you see an illegal
scalp occurring, tell a cop. It is in the interests of the ticketing industry, including TicketMaster, to satisfy consumers.
exposing scams, the idea is not to shut down the ticketing industry. The idea is to make the legitimate market safer for everyone.
The Future
In all likelihood, we will soon be seeing artists, teams, and TicketMaster auctioning off their own tickets. Currently,
a top artist is paid for an arena full of seats that were sold at face value, even though some of those seats were resold at
many times their face value. Why doesn't the artist just buy the whole ticket inventory from TicketMaster and auction off
the tickets on eBay? TicketMaster can't be eliminated because they have contracts with the venues. Then again, why doesn't
TicketMaster auction the tickets without selling them to the artist?
There are many legal issues to be resolved, but the
government would love to collect taxes on all the extra revenue. Someday, we'll view 2003 as the good old days,
when there was such a thing as "face value". Another development we'll see is the elimination of paper tickets.
They'll be replaced with some sort of electronic process that will be much more difficult to counterfeit.
Street scalpers will carry wireless devices capable of transferring ticket ownership.
The View of Elliot Spitzer, The Attorney General of The State of New York
The most chilling explaination for the entire process and its problems comes from the desk of Elliot Spitzer, The Attorney General of New York:
"Ticket brokers strive to monopolize the supply of tickets by paying illegal and substantial bribes (premiums over the face price of the ticket) to various persons
who have control over tickets at the original point of sale. These persons with control over tickets include box office employees or their supervisors, managers of
venues, ticketing agents (such as employees of Ticketmaster or Telecharge), concert promoters, security personnel, or a variety of house seat holders. The pay-offs
made to a venue operator, agent or employee, (e.g., a box office employee), is historically known as "ice".
Aside from ice and bribery, huge numbers of tickets for popular events are diverted from sale to the public and are distributed through other channels. The extent to
which tickets are channeled through this non-public system, and the persons and businesses that get their tickets through "connections," are subjects that have been
shrouded in secrecy for many years. Whether in connection with illegal payments or not, the sheer number of seats withheld from public sale lends itself to
manipulation and abuse. Such tickets are almost always the best seats in the house. Tickets set aside for theatre party or group sales agents wind up being resold by
ticket brokers; house seats at theatres make up a great part of the ticket brokerÕs stock in trade, as do tickets set aside by concert promoters.
Moreover, the failure of venues adequately to inform the public -- as to the number and location of seats available for public sale, the date on which a new batch of
seats for a show or concert might go on sale, or when unpurchased house seats become available to the public -- goes hand-in-hand with the practices set forth above.
For example, during the 1994 Barbra Streisand concerts at Madison Square Garden, approximately 50 percent of the seats never went on public sale, i.e., they were
withheld for the "house" -- the producer, the promoter, the record company, the performer, or other such individuals. Had this been disclosed to the public in the advertising
for the event, the public would have had more realistic expectations about their chances of obtaining a ticket through general sales.
The Attorney General believes that most consumers would be surprised to learn that for most events, a very large percentage of all seats and most of the best seats
for a particular event are in reality unavailable to the public.
The facts and analysis set forth below have been collected through activities of the Attorney GeneralÕs Office, including:
* The issuance of over 200 subpoenas for documents and testimony, 40% which were to New York ticket brokers (many asserted the privilege against self-incrimination; several failed to substantially comply with the subpoena), and concierges of nine major New York City hotels;
* The taking of testimony from or interviews of owners and management of major venues, representatives of ticketing agencies, concert promoters, group sales and theatre party agents, venue security personnel, clients of ticket brokers, business associates of ticket brokers, various state and city officials, and a number of confidential informants;
* The prosecution and conviction of the treasurer of the Jones Beach Marine Theatre on charges of larceny and computer tampering, and the trial of the owners of a ticket brokerage firm for ticket speculation;
* The execution of search warrants at two New York and two New Jersey ticket brokerage firms;
* The review of the records of six Broadway productions -- at least one in each of New YorkÕs three major theatre chains -- as well as those of a major not-for-profit theatre;
* The examination of computer print-outs of nine major concerts at Madison Square Garden and the Nassau Coliseum, as well as the computer print-outs of all 37 concerts at the Jones Beach Marine Theatre in the summer of 1996;
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* The review of subscription records for the Knicks and Rangers, and the United States Open ticket sales for 1997;
* Comparison of tickets purchased or seized from ticket brokers and scalpers against records of venues;
* Surveys of ticket holders at the June 20-23, 1994 Barbra Streisand concerts at Madison Square Garden; the August 4, 1996 Hootie and the Blowfish concert, and the August 17, 1996 Alanis Morrisette concert at the Jones Beach Marine Theatre; and the July 1, 1998 Spice Girls concert at Madison Square Garden;
* Visits to over a dozen locations such as Ticketmaster outlets, entertainment venues, and ticket brokers.
In addition to addressing the endemic corruption in the ticket business through his criminal and civil enforcement powers, the Attorney General believes that nothing will change until the public knows how the system works and new legislation is enacted.
Legal Complications and Industry Complexity
The movement of much of the ticket brokerage industry to the Internet has caused major complications for law enforcement and the legal community. According to the Seattle Times, a judge threw out a ticket-scalping case,
siting evidence that the Seattle Mariners themselves were profiting from the same secondary ticket market practices the baseball club accused the defendants of practicing. The holding was that limiting enforcement to street
scalping "is not rationally related to a legitimate government purpose." More and more sports organizations are actually becoming involved in the ticket brokerage market, rather than using the legal system to attack it.
Still, because of the nature of the business of the ticket broker, some states (like New York) require them to be licensed and bonded. There's also the National Association of Ticket Brokers
(NATB) which produces a list of bonded brokers registered with that organization. That list can be seen if you click here.
According to NATB, the reason to get bonded is to protect the consumer against fraud and theft.
Anyone conducting business with a broker that's not bonded does so facing the danger that they may not receive the tickets they paid for; such abuse is common in the industry. Even transactions originating on a community website like Craigslist are not protected from
unethical brokers or standard ticket scalpers, even though Craigslist has taken steps to discourage such activity. Indeed, SBS has found that brokers commonly dominate Craigslist ticket posts, and that it's impossible to tell the identity of the person selling the ticket unless
the buyer contacts the broker, and the broker chooses to respond to the e-mail or phone call.
By contrast, a ticket reseller program, like StubHub, is legal in the US. In a ticket exhange, which is product of the Internet age, the buyer has a choice of
tickets at various prices, some below face value, and the seller can post tickets at whatever price she selects. Ticket exchange-generated transactions are online, and such that seller and buyer don't have to meet. However, there are above face value tickets placed
for sale on StubHub , and in some cases by brokers, while many are posted by season ticket holders. It's best to shop around for a below-face ticket. Generally, you're not going to find such values on a ticket brokerage website,
but you may find them on a ticket exchange website, like StubHub.
Still another approach is to arrive to the sports game or concert after it's started. If you're lucky to find a seller and it's legal to buy tickets on the grounds, that person is more likely to offer the ticket for less than face value.
The reason for this is that brokers purchase large blocs of tickets in advance of a show, anticipating a sellout. If that doensn't happen, the broker is stuck with a large inventory of unsold
tickets; they must unload them.
What Should You Pay For Sports Tickets?
With the growth of the secondary ticket market and the emergence of online ticket exchanges, its becoming harder to determine just how much one should pay for a ticket to a sports event. To assist sports fans and sports economists, SBS looked to the extensive research provided by Team Marketing Report, based in Chicago.
TMR has a "Fan Cost Index" which reports not just how much the average tickets costs for a fan who wants to attend, say, the Miami Heat game, but also what that person will spend for parking, sodas, hats, and other items normally purchased at a sports event.
You can study SBS' presentation of the report with just a click here: Sports Ticket Prices and Game Expense Tables.
Ticket Economics and the Ticket Value Calculator
What should you pay for a ticket? How about this 2002 World Series ticket, with a face value of $145?
You've seen it before. "This ticket is below or above face value." That means the ticket is being sold over or below the price printed on it. But is that "other" price -- the one you
purchased the ticket for -- a fair price? When is it appropriate to buy a ticket with a face value of $50 for $500? To help determine the answer, SBS created the "Ticket Value Calculator."
This soon-to-be-released simulator will allow you to determine and compate the average value of MLB baseball tickets between any two teams for this year.
But the question remains, "When is it appropriate to buy a ticket with a face value of $50 for $500?" The simple answer is "when you are willing to part with that amount of money to go to a game and its
legal to do so," assuming that you're able to afford to do so. Such expenditures are personal decisions, but even in this case, there's a difference between reasonable impluse buying and unreasonable sudden purchases.
The difference is that the former applies to tickets for a well-sought-after game where others are paying similar prices for their tickets; the later is context when no one else is seeking a ticket of $500.
For example, if the Montreal Expos are playing a regular season game against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, you're not going to find any $500 tickets. However, you're likely to locate a number of tickets below face value.
In that case, why buy a $500 ticket, let alone try to? It's not going to be there for purchase anyway. But if it is, don't buy it. Even if both teams have records above .500.
If you're wondering why ticket prices seem so high even at face value, you're not alone. This article that originally appeared on ABC.Com sums up the overall inflation problem very well:
Cost of Having Fun
Entertainment Prices Rising Faster
Than Medical Costs, Inflation
By Michael S. James, ABC News.Com
If you want an evening out, you may have to dig for some extra cash. Entertainment is one of the most rapidly rising costs in America. Since December 1997, the cost of admission to entertainment and sporting events in cities easily has outpaced inflation and the escalating cost of medical care.
"Sports is about as bad as it gets" for cost increases, says Malik Crawford, an economist for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
According to the Consumer Price Index's latest data cycle, the cost of sports admission rose an average of 6.1 percent annually from December 1997 to April 2002, while the city average admission to movies, theaters and concerts rose 4.5 percent annually. Inflation was just 2.5 percent over the period, below its historical 3.3 percent average annual rate, and medical costs rose an average of 4.2 percent annually.
$10 Movies, $480 Plays Taken in Stride?
In New York City, the nation's most expensive market, rising ticket prices in 2001 reached new milestones Ñ $10 for movies and $100 for some Broadway shows. The media took note, but people kept coming, judging by a nationwide rise in movie attendance last year and the current hot summer at the box office.
Protests have been few. But a Los Angeles-area man who organized a one-day boycott over the Internet says families are fed up.
"Box office was down that weekend," said the activist, Mark Jonathan Davis, who runs WeCanDoThis.com. "Families across the United States are finding it harder to invest $50 for movie tickets and popcorn for their family, when they could probably just go home and make it a Blockbuster night for a couple bucks."
Davis plans to organize another boycott for a full weekend in August. But former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, a noted movie buff, has observed most people seem not to have the energy to protest, and instead just grin and bear the increases.
"People are addicted," Koch said. "If the price of heroin goes up, I don't think it reduces usage. If the price of movies or sports goes up, I don't believe people stop going. They just stop spending money on other items that are more important if you look at them rationally."
Koch learned his lesson years ago when he got fired up over a movie ticket price increase from $6 to $7 and called for a boycott and picket. Nobody showed up but him.
"I was mayor and I could command a lot of attention, but I couldn't command any people to get into the picket line with me," Koch said. "The minute I looked back and there were no picket people behind me, I walked into the movie."
Concerts, Sports Are Main Offenders
Perhaps the apparent apathy can be explained partially by the fact that while the movies and Broadway recently have outpaced inflation, other entertainment ticket options have risen far more quickly, according to an ABCNEWS.com analysis of various annual average ticket prices.
Arena concerts had the steepest rise. The top 50 tours charged an average of $47.66 in 2001, up from 1988's average of $19.18, or $28.71 in 2001 dollars.
Gary Bongiovanni, editor-in-chief of Pollstar, a concert industry trade magazine, said he is not very surprised the price of arena concerts has risen fastest. He added that high rates charged by scalpers led some within the concert industry to feel prime seats were underpriced.
"It started with the very biggest acts," Bongiovanni said. "Now it's really all the acts, with the exception being some of the younger rock acts, recognizing the fact that their audiences don't have the same discretionary income to spend on the tickets as an Elton John fan or a Rolling Stones fan."
With increasing player salaries, club-level seating and luxury boxes, and a number of new stadiums and arenas to pay for, baseball, football, basketball and hockey were right behind concerts for ticket price increases over the past decade, according to figures from Major League Baseball and the Team Marketing Report, a sports industry newsletter.
TMR reports that baseball tickets, which averaged $3.45 in 1976, held almost even with inflation until taking off in the 1990s. In 2001 dollars, the price rose from $11.23 ($8.64 in actual dollars) in 1991 to $18.99 in 2001. Inflation-adjusted football tickets rose from $32.78 ($25.21) to $53.64 over the period and basketball tickets from $29.28 ($22.52) in 1991-92 to $50.10 in 2001-02. Inflation-adjusted hockey tickets rose to $49.86 in 2001-02 from $40.02 ($33.49) in 1994-95, the earliest year for which Team Marketing Report had data.
Broadway Undervalued?
Broadway ticket prices have risen more modestly than sports or concerts, though they have topped inflation more consistently than movies over the years, rising from an average of $7.43 ($33.91 in 2001 dollars) in 1970-71, the earliest season charted by The League of American Theaters and Producers, to $58.73 in 2001-02.
The Producers introduced the $100 theater ticket in April 2001, only to blow that figure away by announcing in October that select tickets would cost $480, partly in an effort to compete with scalpers.
Jed Bernstein, president of The League of American Theaters and Producers, said increasing attendance for Broadway shows Ñ and prices in the hundreds of dollars demanded by scalpers Ñ show tickets were priced "artificially low" for a high-risk medium where less than one show in five breaks even.
"The desire for the product way outstrips inflation and way outstrips the price increases," Bernstein said. "It's a private enterprise, and the people involved do have some responsibility to have some return on investment."
Movies Steady Over Long Haul
Defenders of movie ticket price increases point out that while prices have increased in recent years (to an average of $5.66 in 2001, according to the Motion Picture Association of America and the National Association of Theater Owners) they long lagged behind inflation.
Although the average movie ticket price rose from 47 cents in 1951 to $1.65 in 1971, to $4.21 in 1991, the picture changes when the prices are stated in constant dollars. Using 2001 dollars, the price rose from $3.20 in 1951 to $7.22 in 1971, but then fell to $5.47 in 1991, and even dropped below $5 in 1994 and 1996.
Theater owners say increases since then can partially be blamed on new theater construction, as well as upgrades involving features such as stadium seating and digital sound systems.
"Between the mid-'90s and the year 2000, we went through the most significant upgrade in theaters ever," said John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners. "All that building was incredibly expensive Ñ so expensive, in fact, that we had 12 major companies go into bankruptcy. É Given all that, we still only raised ticket prices 34 percent in 10 years."
Of New York's $10 tickets, he added, "I don't think it's shocking. What else can you do out of the home for professional high-level entertainment for that kind of money? Nothing."
Derek Baine, a senior analyst covering entertainment for the media research company Kagan World Media in Carmel, Calif., said the $10 tickets may not represent the state of entertainment prices in rural America.
"In major markets, the demand is there so they push through price increases on everything much more than in other markets," Baine said.
End of Increases?
Some analysts believe the trend toward rising ticket prices may be peaking. "There's too much of everything in the media and entertainment world, and the result of that will be diminished pricing power," said Harold Vogel, author of Entertainment Industry Economics and head of Vogel Capital Management, a New York venture capital firm. "Most of these things have seen the maximum rate of price increase already, and we are headed for a leveling off if not an actual decline."
Kurt Hunzeker, contributing editor of Team Marketing Report, sees the same trend in sports, where basketball and hockey ticket prices have declined in 2001-02 relative to inflation as attendance growth has stalled.
"When people stop showing up, that's going to be your number one indicator," Hunzeker said. "You're already seeing some teams reduce ticket prices."
Various pressures long have held down prices in the video rental market. In fact, the price of a rental actually has gone down over time relative to inflation, even as another home entertainment option Ñ cable television Ñ has risen steadily.
"The price of buying a video or DVD has been dropping dramatically; so as the price closes between actually buying the videotape and renting it," it limits rental price increases, Baine said. "If we hadn't had DVDs, it's almost certain that the rental market would be flat right now."
New World In Concert Tickets
Sept. 1, 2003, CBSNews.Com
(CBS) Waiting in line for tickets won't help you. Keeping an ear to the ground, checking out Web sites and other news about your favorite musicians might
still be of some use.
But in the end, for many concerts, it may soon be true that only cold cash - and plenty of it - will get you the hot concert tickets you are seeking.
According to the New York Times, Ticketmaster (like StubHub before it) plans later this year to begin auctioning off the best concert seats to the highest
online bidders.
The paper says there would be no limit on how high prices could go - it would be simply a matter of how much people were willing to pay.
There is no indication at this point on whether Ticketmaster plans to have any rules to keep ticket brokers or scalpers out of the auction, or
would allow all comers - individuals and businesses - to compete on the same basis.
"The band's biggest fans ought to have the best seats, not the band's richest fans," Tim Todd, 47, a Phish fan in Kansas City, told the Times.
An industry analyst is quoted as saying that prime seats at the hottest concerts are "undervalued in the marketplace" and auctions are likely to push prices up as a whole.
Tickets have long been resold in auction settings - particularly on eBay, which does a heavy volume in tickets of all kinds.
But in many states, the resale of concert tickets is subject to strict rules meant to protect consumers and give the small scale fan a chance to buy tickets for their favorite event.
Ticketmaster's plan, by contrast, involves the first time sale of tickets and does not appear to be subject to anti-scalper rules.
"The tickets are worth what they're worth," said Ticketmaster CEO and president John Pleasants, in an interview with the Times.
"If somebody wants to charge $50 for a ticket, but it's actually worth $1,000 on eBay, the ticket's worth $1,000.
I think more and more, our clients - the promoters, the clients in the buildings and the bands themselves - are saying to themselves
'Maybe that money should be coming to me instead of Bob the Broker.' "
Regardless of your decision, SBS and StubHub welcome your business and encourage you to sell your tickets below face value.
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StubHub Partnership
Thanks to its partnership with StubHub.com, the premier site for secondary ticketing, SBS visitors can now buy & sell tickets to any event in the country.
StubHub is the original online ticket marketplace, where fans can sell their extra season tickets or purchase tickets to sports, concert & theater events nationwide.
While all ticket transactions are between fans, StubHub facilitates everything by acting on behalf of the buyer & the seller, handling all shipping & payment logistics, and offering a 100% Guarantee to both parties.
The StubHub Network is comprised of partnerships that include teams in every major sports league, performing artists, and media companies.
In the sports arena, these partners include Major League Baseball (Seattle Mariners, AZ Diamondbacks, Cleveland Indians), the Clippers, the Dallas Stars, the NY Jets and the Green Bay Packers. Performing artist partners include Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, Jewel, and the Eagles. Media companies within the Network are USAToday.com, AOL, The SportingNews, Knight Ridder Digital, and more.
Season ticket holders can post passes they can't use with SBS / StubHub. For instructions, just click here: Sell your tickets
If you want to sell a ticket for a single event, click here: Sell single event tickets.
Season ticket holders who want to sell tickets for more than one game, click here: Sell tickets from
more than one game. Else, if you have to sell a number of tickets from different events, click here: Sell many tickets
from a number of events. For answers to other questions, visit our FAQ page, by clicking here.
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