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Online 'Corporate Scalping' Makes Tickets Harder to Come By

by Tim Stevens on April 2, 2009 at 03:24 PM

Online Sales Make for More Exclusive Tickets

It wasn't all that long ago that getting the hot ticket meant waiting in line for hours (or days) outside of your local Ticketmaster affiliate, all the while exchanging tales of geeky fan appreciation with other would-be concert attendees. These days, everyone's just a click away from the show of a lifetime -- and a click away from exorbitant prices, thanks to many scalping laws having been weakened or completely obliterated. This has opened the door to a new type of ticket resale: corporate scalping.

No longer is scalping solely the realm of shady individuals who buy tickets and illegally flip them for many times the initial price. These days, scalping has been legitimized -- and in many ways galvanized -- by sites like StubHub (owned by eBay) and TicketsNow (owned by Ticketmaster). On those sites, tickets for sold-out shows go for many times their face value, and, with online tickets often selling out in mere minutes, there's no reliable way for dedicated fans to dodge those high prices (you can't really camp out in front of Ticketmaster.com).

What can you do? Not much at this point, other than write to your local legislators and ask that they get those scalping laws back on the books ASAP. After all, the summer concert season approaches! [From: The New York Times]

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Tags: concert, ebay, scalper, scalping, stubhub, ticket, ticketmaster, tickets, ticketsnow

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