Concert Tickets: For the Fans Or For the Scalpers?
It’s an orgy of corporate dollar signs and the artist and scalpers are in bed with ticket brokers.

By Karen Kendall
Published: June 28, 2006

I’m not sure the last time any of you tried to buy tickets via Ticketmaster, but what a joke! If you are waiting in line at the “secret” location no one else knows about, forget it. You won’t get tickets any faster than the rest of them if you even succeed at all. Digital wait rooms? Forget it. And have you actually called them lately? You hear the busy signal swan song. Concerts sell out in a matter of seconds but when you see no one in line actually purchase tickets, you have to wonder who gets them. Scalpers. Good for nothing cockroaches of the industry who try to make a dime off of a desperate, dedicated fan.Actual ticket face prices for some artists are getting out of hand already setting the benchmark too high. Madonna tickets are up to $385. The Rolling Stones get away with charging up to $575 a ticket. And the worst part of it all is people are paying that much! Are the Stones that strapped for cash that they have to charge that much for a ticket or do they do it because they can? Not hardly. In 2005 their A Bigger Bang tour racked in a cool 162 million dollars in ticket receipts alone. Artists also make some $150,000 per show in merchandise alone and often times get multi-million dollar advances for tour-only gear.

Bands may take pride in the fact that they can sell out a concert in seconds, but can they take pride in the fact that their fans will pay for overpriced seats? Scalpers and vendors are the first to buy these tickets at bulk, making it hard for the loyal fan to get them first. In Chicago, season ticket holders for the Blackhawks get first dibs on any concert that comes through the United Center. Given this is more of a ploy to save a sport that is fading in its own previously bright twilight but at what cost to thousands of others? Blackhawk attendance is at an all time love but season tickets sales are on the rise. So great if you are one of those people, but are they going to see bands that comes through there? Probably not. So what they do is buy those tickets and then resell them at outrageous prices. Again, we, the fans are ripped off forcing us to go elsewhere to find concert tickets through alternate avenues.

EBay has become a popular site for finding those “hard to get” tickets, as well as StubHub.com. It seems that auctioning tickets is the wave of the future. Even Madonna is joining in on the fun by holding her own auctions. At least she saves the best seats for her fans, but she just wants to make sure she gets the profit, not someone else. If you can afford to pay $1,000 for a ticket, great, more power to you. For the rest of us, tough shit. By these numbers, Madonna is set to break the single female ticket sales record at 200 million plus on a single tour. Most artists, when the venues house more than 5,000 demand 25% plus for ticket sales. So, by these numbers Madonna is set to get over $50 million for a single tour. That doesn’t even include promotion contracts and merchandise deals. She is set to make over $120 million - take home - when all is said in done. By cutting out the scalper from her sales, she’s taking in 200% more in revenue - at your cost.

But what can we do? In all honesty, we will continue to wait in line or online or on the phone and hope it will be our lucky day. I’m always happy to pay $20 in fees to Ticketmaster so they can continue to support the scalpers.