Scalpers Triumphant!

Long-time readers of this space may recall my posts in October of 2007 about scalping, and the scandal that occurred after the company that runs the Colorado Rockies baseball team’s website was hacked during the critical few minutes after tickets went on sale, preventing any of the team’s frantic fans from purchasing tickets and ensuring that the local scalpers would make ever more of a killing than usual – because they were the only ones who could buy anything. You can revisit that post here if you want to, but a story that has popped up in New Jersey this week not only tops that old post, it leaves it in the dust…

A story being reported in the New Jersey Star-Ledger is claiming that the Ticketmaster web site was giving off an error message to anyone attempting to purchase tickets for two Bruce Springsteen concerts, allowing more than 30,000 tickets to be scooped up by scalpers who just happen to be selling all of them on a Ticketmaster subsidiary service called TicketsNow. There has been outrage in various New Jersey communities, to the extent that one of the congressmen from the state is now calling for a full-scale Federal investigation into what happened. Meanwhile, Ticketmaster is insisting that there was nothing wrong with its website, only a few people were blocked from purchasing tickets, and it has no knowledge of who all of those scalpers are, how they managed to obtain all of those tickets so quickly, or why all of them would be selling those tickets on TicketsNow for 400% and 4,000% markups…

Now, I have no evidence that there has actually been any wrongdoing in this case. It’s actually possible (however unlikely) that there was no involvement by Ticketmaster to cut themselves in for a share of the (huge!) scalper’s market for concert tickets, that the disruptions on their website were naturally occurring computer and communications errors, and that several thousand (it would be 7,500 if ticket sales were limited to the 4 that is customary for hot concert events) individual hackers are responsible for these events. I’m even willing to discuss the possibility that more than seven thousand people bought tickets for the purpose of reselling them and all decided to use the same Ticketmaster service to do so. What I am saying is that even if all of that is true, this event sets a new standard in incredibly bad public relations, and Ticketmaster should really have known better…

Will this present case result in Federal laws being passed to prohibit ticket scalping and establish fair-play requirements for selling tickets? There’s no way to be sure, but it seems clear that the point at which the public is no longer willing to just sit by and watch the scalpers walk off with ten or twenty times the face price of various tickets (preventing all but the wealthiest fans from attending) is just about upon us – and that Ticketmaster is not likely to prosper from their refusal to regulate their own business to prevent this kind of outrage. Only time will tell if such legislation will pass, or if the average fan will be any better off under the new conditions, but it’s hard to imagine how things could be much worse than a popular even selling out within 90 seconds, being unable to even log into the purchase site, and then being offered the same tickets at ten or twenty times the price…

But if anybody has any ideas, I think both Ticketmaster and the U.S. Congress have “suggestions” pages on their web sites…