scalpers

Should Apple rethink iPad 2 distribution system?

I remember, last year, waiting on line one morning for an iPhone 4. I was on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, and I gave up after an hour and a half. The lines were too long and had formed hours before.

This was two months or so past the iPhone 4's launch, and it was still impossible to buy one of the phones at a store. Lines would form every morning, scoop up whatever little stock there was, and leave the Apple Store once again drained of its supply. The cause? Grey-market resellers.

Sound familiar?

We're less … Read more

Live Nation hopes to sell higher-priced tickets

When I first heard about the proposed merger of music promoter and venue-owner Live Nation and ticket broker Ticketmaster, I predicted that ticket prices for big-name musical acts would rise. Now that the merger's completed and ticket revenues are down for the first part of 2010, Live Nation is admitting that it's hoping to charge higher prices for desirable concert seats.

The reason? Simple economics. As long as customers are willing to spend $500 or $1,000 on front-row seats, why sell those seats for $150 and let a scalper or broker make all that extra money? In … Read more

FanSnap--another way to find cheap concert tickets

Tuesday's post on using Craigslist to buy secondhand concert tickets drew a response from a company called FanSnap, which uses live feeds to aggregate ticket listings from online marketplaces and broker sites (such as StubHub and TicketNetwork) and eBay auctions.

FanSnap would argue Craigslist is fine for price-sensitive fans who don't need to go to a particular show and who are willing to meet and negotiate with other individuals, pay cash where necessary, and run the risk of buying a fake ticket. (Although the only time I've ever seen a fake concert ticket was in 1989 on … Read more

Will Craigslist drive scalpers out of business?

Ticket scalping has been a hot topic in the music industry for years, causing a lot of uproar and complaints among music fans.

The sad fact of the matter is that lots of parties in the music industry try to sell secondhand tickets for a markup. Ticketmaster owns a premium resale service called TicketsNow. It also owns a resale exchange, TicketExchange, which lets any individual (including scalpers) buy or sell a ticket. Even artists and managers frequently take their allotments and sell them on broker sites for a markup, as The Wall Street Journal has reported.

Worst of all is … Read more