Aaaaahhhhh! Friday morning, I was looking for tickets for me and my sister to one of Lady Gaga’s concerts at Radio City Music Hall this coming January and found it was sold out – not even 30 minutes after tickets went on sale. Tickets from TicketMaster ranged for $50 to $400 (for a meet & greet). I checked StubHub and there are already 7 pages of available tickets ranging from $250 - $4,000… Are you fucking kidding me? How is that legal? What normal person, especially in these economic times, can afford concert tickets at prices like that? Not me!

This is not the first time I have had this happen to me either. 2 years ago Björk was playing the United Palace New York and tickets were gone within minutes. Björk doesn’t tour that often so I would expect the show to sell out but come on… Me and my sister ended up paying $130 EACH for tickets in the VERY LAST ROW in the balcony that were originally $35. (purchased from StubHub of course) The show was amazing, despite the fact I could barely even see the stage, but it was pretty hard to stomach paying that much for a ticket that was clearly marked $35. It’s really disgusting and infuriating to me to that people can “harvest” tickets like this and blatantly rip people for hundreds of dollars. It keeps real fans from seeing artists they truly admire. The most annoying thing is most of the time the artists aren’t even getting any of the money from these bloated ticket prices…unless you are Madonna .

In fact, according to TechFold “StubHub and eBay are profiting hugely on what can best be described as gray area behavior, and in many jurisdictions, what would be outright illegal.” The New York Times wrote an article about the same thing happening with Hannah Montana tickets. The article states “Ticket sales for big-name concerts now follow a distressingly consistent pattern: At 10 a.m. on a Saturday, tickets go on sale, and by 10:05 a.m., all tickets are sold. Yet by 10:05, StubHub and other ticket exchanges already have a plenitude of tickets listed for the sold-out event — only now, they cost much more. Montana tickets, whose face value is $21 to $66, have been resold on StubHub, on average, for $258, the company says, and that is without taking into account StubHub’s 25 percent commission (10 percent paid by the buyer, 15 percent by the seller). None of the proceeds from the resale of tickets at inflated prices make their way back to Ms. Cyrus. “

I hope people will just stop buying these tickets (if they are even buying them in the first place) and the artists that are playing to “sold out” shows in half full venues will step in a prohibit these secondary ticket sites from ripping off fans that really want to see the show. Until then, I guess I’ll just be watching Lady Gaga on YouTube….

This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Music, WTF. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.