Does anyone have working Ticketmaster email addresses to contact them directly instead of going through the hassle of forms on their website ?

Worst website user experience yet. I really really hate this site.

But I found it interesting that he told me that there were entire rows of seats empty. I guess that not everyone was willing to spend that kind of bux to attend. I hope that the scalpers lost lots of money on those empty seats.

@Amsterdaam: The venue gets paid. The artist gets paid. Ticketmaster gets paid. The one who's getting ripped off is the person who actually wants to see the show. No one else is losing any money; that scalper had to pay whatever price got set.

@Sushiwriter: when you purchase anything from ticketmaster, you agree to their terms of use. which strictly prohibits bots from being able to purchase tickets. period. reguardless of how many tickets were purchased.

Check out www.neopets.com, seriously. They've been dealing with bots like these since the beginning of their site, and they've been quick to clamp down on this sort of thing. What's taken Ticketmaster so damn long?

(Neopets is a site where you take care of pets, and buy them stuff in shops, the shops sometimes stock super-rare, cool items that you can either use or sell for 1000% more than you paid)

I believe that scalping adds economic benefit, but the venues and TicketMaster have to find a way to prevent these huge resellers from scooping up all of the available supply. That really does a disservice to the entire system.

I put the blame on TicketMaster for having such a feeble security system.

@b612markt: I miss record stores, period.

Well, not in the sense that you'd pay a bunch of money for an entire album that sucked, instead of 89cents for individual songs you like (and have already previewed on sites like Rhapsody).

But in the nostalgic sense, yes, I miss record stores and their lines for tickets. The good old days!

@num1skeptic:

I have an issue with scalpers cheating to get their hands on the tickets, but no issue with someone selling legitimately purchased tickets for whatever the market will bear. The only loser in that scenario is the band, which could have gotten more for their efforts, but decided to sell tickets for less than market. That's their call, though, not mine.

What about tying the ticket to the buyer and CC (or other payment method) used? Can these scalper folks really have a hundred thousand unique CCs available to them, and valid and unique contact info for them all? A ticket is not sold until all unique info is verified. But, Ticketmaster has how much competition?

@D.B. Cooper-Nichol: the difference with Betamax (and Rio, while we're at it) is that the tool(s) in question allow for plenty of legit use, as well; where these scalper tools are purely for hacking in, with no legit purpose (sort of like Ticketmaster, who would be long gone with a free market).

artists should just have free shows (with no tickets involved) for a year. that would kill off not only the scalpers, but ticketmaster itself, and people who actually want to see a show could. a win win win situation. make it a first come first serve policy at the gate.

of course i realize this would never happen. but maybe it could in 'mc world' lol.

i'm sure there are people willing to pay $500 for a roll of toilet paper if i bought all the t.p. up and was charging that for it. does that mean t.p. should be priced $500 per roll?

This is different than the Wii shortage because concert tickets are limited to a certain venue, there is a set number of them and then no more. The wii supply is technically unlimited as they keep producing more, so let people do whatever they want with the Wii, prices will even out eventually.

i hate scalpers! you shouldn't have to be mega rich to see a show.

AND TO THE ONES SAYING A TICKET SHOULD BE PRICED AT WHAT SOMEONE'S WILLING TO PAY FOR IT: you wouldn't feel the same way if the someone did that with cigarettes would you? i bet there's enough rich smokers out there to drive the price to the moon! what would a millionaire pay for a cigarette in a world where just a few people had all the cigs and were auctioning them to highest bidder? i mean, a show gives people (especially poor people) a lot of joy. its bullshit to take that away from them because they don't have fancy software to beat out the scalp hacks at regular price.

When we get in a big touring arena act, the facility simply doesn't have the ticketing infrastructure to handle that. (And as the damned thing is city-owned, we're already paying out the ass in taxes for it. I don't need them to expand their payroll, thank you very much.) Any profit the arena makes on these big shows mostly goes to cover extra security and ushering personnel.

The one big event they run their own ticketing for is the state high school boys basketball tournament, and they do an okay job, but it IS a pain in the ass compared to either their small events or to ticketmaster ticketing the big events. And they can only manage it because they have state athletic employees and volunteers who deal with large parts of it, without any cost to the arena.

In a city like Chicago or New York I'd be SHOCKED by an venue that couldn't either handle its own ticketing or band together with several other local venues to do their ticketing together. But for a place like Peoria, with one major venue that's only used off-and-on, Ticketmaster is a big help to them.

God, I feel so dirty now.

@bonzombiekitty:

If it was AC, it was probably the casino which had reserved a bunch of tix as comps, and then discovered that the overlap between "Casino High Rollers" and "People Who Want to See a Henry Rollins Spoken Word Performance" is pretty slim.

If they were to put tickets on ebay, then you'd still have bots autobidding at a set limit price, anything above that price and they'd lay off, but they would drive the price up to the limit on all tickets. Not a good deal.

It's my understanding that some artists have fan clubs that hold certain tickets for their fans.

I remember standing in line for WWF Smackdown(WWE now) and I was out there around 5am. I met a couple of scalpers in line but what really pissed me off was when tickets went on sale, the agent told me that floor seats were already sold out... WTF?

The same ring true to a Kpop Concert last year however since the show was talking place in a small venue, I was able to get seats in the third row right up close to the stage.

We get there and notice that the whole front section is all but empty. Turns out someone had bought up the whole section and only managed to resell a couple of the tickets. They ended up moving all the people from the back rows to the front. We went from two rows from the back to two rows from the front.

@Buran: Because paying for a product in a mutually agreeable transaction is equivalent to theft?

Not everyone can get bots to buy hundreds of thousands of tickets. That's a d!ck move in my book.

Years back, when Pearl Jam tried to raise a ruckus about Ticketmaster alot of people tuned it out. I remember people saying "oh, it's just 2 bucks a ticket, whatever." But it's just this kind of situation, wherein the ticketmaster monopoly is being exploited that we should have really been worried about.

Let's send the RIAA after the ticket hogging slime balls. Maybe the RIAA can FINALLY fight for GOOD and not EVIL. Some artists who don't own the publishing rights to their songs only make money by initial album sales and touring, performing for large crowds. Making ticket prices astronomically unaffordable will only alienate fans.

Trying to get tickets for the BCS LSU/Ohio game is ridiculous. Yes, I want to see the game, but do I want to put a second and third mortgage on my home for tickets that may or may not be legitimate? Not in my lifetime.

Shame on the resellers who take unfair advantage of true fans! And shame on ticket providers who don't provide more security to allow a more fair distribution system!

Gee. If they cancel tourists' ticket buys for their events, they have no right to whine. My money's no good because I don't live in your precious zip code? I'll spend it somewhere else where I AM welcome.

Dear TicketMaster: Antitrust. That is all.

@XianZomby: If the artists really cared, they could just do more shows. More shows=more tickets, more tickets=lower price.

Let's also not forget that the ticket brokers are taking a risk -- if the concert is canceled, for example, it's a lot harder for them to get their money back. And, if it's not as popular as they estimated, then they've got a bunch of excess inventory -- if you really want to go to a show, try getting a ticket from a scalper just before, or even just after it starts.

Some people are doing something about it, though. When I went to the Dylan concert if you were in a good seat you had to pick it up at will call right before the concert. You had to have ID. U2 and Springsteen have all floor areas general admission so the best "seats" go the the biggest fans and you have to line up and get a lottery number to see if you can get in the "pit" area near the stage. Also, Garth Brooks closed sales to buyer outside a particular area. If you're address was not within a certain distance, your order was cancelled. That way someone from NY can't get tickets to some concert in CA that they have no intention of attending and are buying only to sell on StubHub.

There are things that can be done but most band just don't care.

I really think if TM wanted to fix this they could. I've written website scraping programs before (for legitimate purposes with the site owner's approval) and I could think of a million ways to throw a wrench into the system that would be a huge pain in the ass to code around, and a few things that would stop it from working reliably completely.

Concerts are for rich people only now. The only group that can fix this are the artists themselves, because they have control over the only thing that can really put a monkey wrench in the system -- themselves. If they cared, they wouldn't perform unless the tickets were sold directly to fans at a fair price. They could make that a condition of their performance contract. The technical aspects of doing it aren't tough, but they would be criticized on here and in other places. If you made it so that you had to buy tickets from a vendor using your credit card and then your name and the names of the people you bought tickets for were printed on the ticket and you had to show ID to get into the show -- well, people would just be up in arms every time the new system failed them. Oh the complaints on here would never end. Every week a new story on how Joe Shmoe from New Jersey wanted to see "The Boss" but ended up not being able to go and was not allowed to give the tickets to his brother. Then somebody would coin a snarky name for whatever company was associated with the perceived wrongdoing.

I'd just like to point out that where copyright is involved, there is no such thing as a free market.

Dont sell tickets. Sell PERSONAL SEAT LICENSES to the individual event only. Make it a license for that person,that time.Charge a transfer fee for any sale (change fees are common in other businesses) If someone sells their license without the fee,deny admission. Require all PSL holders to confirm attendance within 30 minutes of showtime (much as airline require check in at the airport) Sell the no shows seats to the walk up crowd beginning 15 minutes before the start.Yield management - Near 100%

For the general public- You can hear the music on the radio for free.A CD costs $20 tops. Other than those two options,get ready to pay market prices for the right to attend.

Because eventually people will become disillusioned with Ticketmaster, when they are unable to get good tickets through them. When Ticketmaster is no longer doing any business with the end customer, they become a completely dispensible middleman, and the venues will look at the profits the resellers are making, and the fees that Ticketmaster is getting and start thinking "screw Ticketmaster, I'm keeping that" and deal with the resellers directly.

And gee, people aren't willing to pay as much for pre-recorded music. So again, let the market decide. Use pre-recorded stuff at under cost to basically drum up business for high-priced live shows -- and wow, a live show experience just can't be duplicated either.

The answer is out there...

Alternatively, venue owners could simply require a butt in a seat to pay the ticket vendor. If you sell 1,000 tickets but only 2 people show up, then you get paid your commission for two tickets, not 1,000.

Why is everyone such a scammer these days, anyway? What happened to just being nice to everyone.

Let's face it, concerts have always been expensive. If the acts were concerned about their loyal fans getting tickets, there would be special offers made directly to those fans. They don't, and now with the web, it should be easier and they still don't.

I'd accept the above argument if there was one shred of proof that the acts really cared about those elements of their fan-base.

Ticket brokers (those legal scalpers like Stub Hub) made sense when everyone paid cash and you could only get the tix at the venue...now everyone can get the tix online/on the phone from the venue so why can't we just make the ticket resellers illegal and treat them lik the scalper scum they are?

This is another fight that shouldn't be fought. It cannot be won.

Sure, you 'fight the fights that need fighting,' but as [www.despair.com] so eloquently puts it:

'Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those who never win AND never quit are idiots.'

I suppose [www.despair.com] also applies:

'At some point, hanging in there just makes you look like an even bigger loser.'

So, since the underlying problem that creates this massive incentive for brokers to come in and do this is economic, they need to address it in a way that prevents large purchases by any single person. They should force people to register with a real identity to purchase tickets, and then use that to enforce purchase limits. Prosecute people who commit fraud by signing up under false identities. They could also sell the tickets by random lottery if demand exceeds supply.

In this way, the suit is nearly identical to the RIAA's suit against Grokster, based on the logic that the software/tool can only be used to infringe copyright (or here, to violate TOS). This is the same theory that was rejected in the old Sony Betamax case, but is obviously seeing a resurgence now.

Interesting question to those who hate scalpers - does the end justify the means? And if so, will you feel the same when the TV networks sue DVR makers for letting you skip past commercials?

Perhaps they get around the limits by using gift cards or using "virtual" credit cards like Citibank can generate?

The interested parties can designate for which events it would adopt this system. For example, Staples Center in L.A. could implement this for concerts, but not for the Clippers, Kings, and Lakers.

BTW - My brother's best friend made hundreds of thousands back in the day by getting the special code from inside one of the famous ticket distributors. He could then go to a "friendly" agent, like a local grocery store who had the hardware to sell/print tix. This guy would get all the great event seats, nationwide, in advance. Kickbacks are a beautiful thing, people.

If a specific concert was happening and nobody went because of the price/availability of tickets at a fair price - then the resellers and the scalpers would probably be pooched

---

Re: charging what the market will bear -- I see the point to that, but these ticket resellers create an artificial scarcity that drives up the price, which isn't quite the same as charging what the market will bear.

But I wonder, as a practical matter, how much this hurts the acts. Maybe not the biggest of the big, but others. I know sometimes I'm interested in a local concert by a band/act I've heard a lot about from other people, and I look into availability, and the tickets sold out in the first 30 seconds. Well, I just don't care that much, and I certainly don't care above face value. (And locally I've seen concerts that were half-empty because resellers snatched them all up and nobody WAS willing to pay their inflated prices!) This sort of pricing and reselling seems to limit many acts to only their most rabid fans, and deprives them of a chance to grow a base.

I think it also off-puts some people from lesser acts and smaller concerts, when they get used to concerts they want to see already being sold out, they don't bother even checking for smaller acts that DON'T get bought up that way. I hear a lot of people say, after a local concert by some up-and-coming band gets a tiny draw, "Oh, yeah, I wanted to see that, but I didn't want to deal with finding tickets" ... when there were excellent seats at the box office up through concert night! The half-price ticket scheme that London does for its theaters seems a savvier way to build audience.

And on a somewhat related note, Disney's going to have to get those kids' act ticket issues under control. It's one thing for this kind of reselling for a Rolling Stones concert. For a Hannah Montana concert, when the poor girl has to do the talk show circuit urging parents NOT to spend $2000/ticket, that's horrible PR and it's a system badly out of whack. (And yeah, they've already added more shows.)

*Granted, my favorite venues sell through Ticketweb, a Ticketmaster subsidiary, but it's a much friendlier, less scalper-friendly operation (you can't get paper tickets via web, iirc).

I take great delight in pouncing on ads on ebay going less than face from the obvious resellers (located in Texas, selling 8 tickets to a Seattle event and 6 to an NYC event and then 4 more to something in Nebraska? Suuuure). Screw them, and let them eat the Ticketmaster fees too. The local scalpers are bad enough.

I mean, I went to a show in Portland with 2 extra tickets because a couple friends got stranded due to a snowstorm..nevermind that it wasn't sold out as expected, some dude was hawking TWENTY tickets. What the hell!

Maybe now I'll be able to get tickets to shows I actually care about seeing at a reasonable price again..or maybe TicketsWest will start kicking Ticketmaster's ass (the fees are far smaller, at least)

Hannah Montana on the other hand, its usually one or two kids and a parent, so you're starting off with two tickets.

How they're obscuring their internet addresses to make it look like its coming from various IPs - I doubt its proxies since TM could easily turn around and check to see if the host has ports open. I'm willing to bet they're using a botnet of some kind - an otherwise illegal tactic they could tip the FBI off to.

Second, the payment method. I doubt the person is using the same credit card for every transaction (TM should already be blocking that). How are they creating enough identities to get around any limit?

Also, the fact that these bots are able to get around the stupid captcha so easily points directly to Ticketmaster having a flawed and crappy system.

@Buran: No, because Ticketmaster is using a vulnerable CAPTCHA (image recognition). [haacked.com]

I became aware of this when the hanna montanna concert ticket controversy happened here locally (no I am not a fan).

IMO the BIG ticket resellers should only be allowed to purchase a small percentage of the whole amount of tickets. Individual people who want to have a FAIR CHANCE of obtaining tickets should be able to do so without the big price-gouging resellers snatching them all up.

Perhaps they should go back to not selling online so that the greedy scumbag ticket resellers dont have the advantage? Mail in your request with proof of ID or buy tickets on site. I realize that this handicaps & punishes the legit fans , but sometimes there is no other choice to keep out the resellers who break the rules.

It isn't that simple. If the venues charged those kinds of prices for tickets, they'd see their attendance plummet, because not everyone WOULD pay that. This secondary market introduces stratified pricing.

Putting them on ebay could actually drive prices DOWN after a while, as it allows easy comparison. It wouldn't neccesarily get them any more than they're making now...and it wouldn't prevent ticket brokers from once again artificially cornering the market. (Well, unless you did all sales as auctions set to end on the day of the event...but that would make it impossible for customers to plan for the event)

And they don't actually have to put up with it. They could make the tickets non-transferable, or place restrictions on transfers which would make it unprofitable or unfeasible for brokers to operate.

The tickets are worth whatever someone will pay for them. If someone is willing to pay $250 for a seat to Hannah Montana, then that's the value. If the venue or Ticketmaster are stupid enough to charge $80 for what is worth $250, then they get to tolerate the secondary market.

Put the damned tickets for sale on eBay and be done with it. If people want to go *that* bad, they'll pay whatever price is necessary. If the acts are concerned about the high price of tickets, they'll add more shows.

Everyone should have an equal shot to get the tickets at a fair price. The ticket resellers are taking advantage of the public. I am not a big fan of ticketmaster but I am glad they are doing something about this. It is about time.

TicketMaster should simply auction them off on varying (overlapping) time periods which will raise more money for the event AND deprive the scalpers of profit.

Ticket Resellers are the very reason why I will not go to alot of concert venues. If I can't get it from the original source, I simply just won't go.

But I certainly REFUSE to give in to the bastard ticket-resellers, no matter if they are "official" or not. (Who the hell would pay $2K for a Hannah Montana concert, anyway?)