Cyber-Scalpers Ruining the Concert Experience

Tickets for U2 in Charlotte Selling for $882

Not long ago I rediscovered a concert ticket stub from my teenage days. The year was 1974 and I was 14 years old. The price on the ticket stub was seven dollars and fifty cents. At the moment that it was torn in half it earned me admission to a three-band rock show at the downtown auditorium in Mobile, Alabama.

I remember that I went to that show with my younger brother Greg and my best friend Mike. The opening act was a little-known band out of Detroit called Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band that would later on do quite well for itself. The middle act was the Charlie Daniels Band, hot on the heels of the hit novelty tune “Uneasy Rider.” The headliner of the show was none other than Canadian power trio Bachman Turner Overdrive.

Being three teenage boys without dates, we were easily able to squirm our way right to the front row. The show was a non-stop barrage of classic electric blues-rock and that newfangled southern rock. For BTO’s encore, Charlie Daniels returned to the stage and traded licks on his fiddle with Randy Bachman’s electric guitar for a blues boogie jam session that could not be beat.

We left the show exhausted and pleased that BTO had not only touched on their mega-hits such as “Takin’ Care of Business” and “Let It Ride” but had also played a couple of tunes from Randy’s days with The Guess Who. It was one of the better of what must have been two-dozen rock shows I witnessed during the three years we lived in the Mobile area. All of the concerts featured at least two big name bands and I don’t believe I ever paid more than $15 for a ticket.

What a difference three decades makes.

The Edge, Adam, Bono and Larry relax on my couch between sets at the only U2 concert I will ever pay $800 to see.

I recently went online to find out about the availability of tickets for the U2 concert coming up in December at the new Charlotte Arena. Tickets for the show went on sale a few months ago and ranged from $50 to $160. They sold out—all 17,000 of them—in slightly less than an hour. Unfortunately, most of them were not bought by U2 fans. They were snatched up by people in the profitable business of reselling them. You and I might call them scum-bucket ticket scalpers although they prefer to be called professional ticket brokers.

A quick trip through cyberspace let me know that plenty of tickets for this concert are available and on sale through websites run by the ticket brokers. Only now, they range in price from $147 to $882.

The same situation holds true for the Charlotte Arena’s debut musical concert, a show featuring the Rolling Stones scheduled for October 21st. Tickets to see Mick and the boys originally topped out at $160 for the best seats in the house but are now on sale for about four times that amount on the World Wide Web.

Ticket scalpers are getting around state and local regulations that bar the resale of tickets for exorbitant profit by buying them through legitimate sites such as TicketMaster the second they go on sale. Then they sell them through their own sites such as www.stubhub.com. These scalpers can buy and sell tickets to the U2 show without having to come anywhere near Charlotte. They could be operating their business from North Korea for all we know!

These scalpers could be stopped in their tracks if arenas and auditoriums around the country would just grow some spine and change their ticket-selling policies. Tickets should go on sale at the auditorium box office first for a certain amount of time before they go on sale over the Internet. That way only the diehard fans of the band and our hard-working local scalpers could get their hands on the best tickets (preferably after camping out all night). Secondly, authorities should go online and figure out how they can bust some of these scalpers who charge four and five times the original price of a ticket.

The whole thing begs the question, are these scalpers outrageously greedy or are they simply charging what the market will bear? Who, exactly, is buying a Row E seat to the U2 concert for $882?

For that sort of money, I’m going to want U2 to come over to my house and play for me and my friends in the friendly confines of my living room. Bono will have to bring enough groupies, booze and snacks for everyone at the party, and the rest of the band has to serve on cleanup detail at the end of the night. Bono will not be allowed to talk about world hunger between songs and I want the set-list to mainly consist of material from the albums War, October and The Joshua Tree. I absolutely do not want to hear any songs from All That You Can’t Leave Behind.

Then, and only then, will we talk about spending $882 on a U2 concert.