He's got the way to move tickets, ch-er-ry

Just last May I was blog-moaning the fact that I was unable to get tickets to see Neil Diamond's August show at Fenway Park.

Try as I could, I couldn't get cheap seats - although jacked up versions of the cheap seats were instantly available on Ticket Master's legal scalping site. Now, thanks to The Wall Street Journal, I know why. (Note: access to source story may require a subscription.)

It seems that Neil Diamond - and plenty of other singers - withhold bunches of seats from initial public distribution, and make them available at a hefty multiple of face value on Ticket Master's "premium" site, TicketExchange.

Selling premium-priced tickets on TicketExchange, priced and presented as resales by fans, is a practice used by many other top performers, according to people in the industry. Joseph Freeman, Ticketmaster's senior vice president for legal affairs, says that the company's "Marketplace" pages only rarely list tickets offered by fans.

The thinking behind this is to take the profit out of the hands of scalpers - or fans trying to make a buck - and making sure it stays in the pocket of the artiste.

Fair enough: it must be really galling for concert performers and athletic teams to see someone else extract revenue that they consider theirs. But, wait, aren't most secondary market ticket sellers - like StubHub and Ace - already in cahoots with concert performers and athletic teams?  How would they get their money grubbing hands on so many tickets to begin with? Obviously, it's in the interest of the performers and teams to let someone else assume the risk of not selling out. Fair enough.

So what must be really galling is seeing Joe Blow who lucked into a couple of tickets, out there on Craig's List trying to score.

However ticked off I can get about scalping, legal or otherwise, I'm enough of a free marketer to be okay with it. (Old lefty that I am, however, I'd rather see individual scalpers profiting than I would corporate scalp jobs, with the caveat that I'm talking about "honest" scalpers, not those selling counterfeits.)

But the artistes aren't the only ones galled by scalping.

I'm pretty galled myself about Neil Diamond et al. (where al. includes Billy Joel and Elton John, by the way) "pretending" that these tickets are fan re-sells, sold on the soi-disant "fan to fan" TicketExchange. Of course, I'm sure that Neil Diamond is his own biggest fan, so there may be some Clintonian truth to his selling bulked-up tickets to his own concerts as fan to fan.

Virtually every major concert tour today involves some official tickets that are priced and sold as if they were offered for resale by fans or brokers, but that are set aside by the artists and promoters, according to a number of people involved in the sales.

Impossibly, even Britney Spears is involved in this. (Say it isn't so!)  Some of the $125 seats for her upcoming concert in Pittsburgh are available in the "TicketExchange Marketplace" for nearly an order of magnitude more than face value. (Note to Britney fans: an order of magnitude more means ten times more. In other words, a lot.)

Apparently, now that the WSJ's been poking around, TicketExchange has expunged the "tickets posted by fans" note from their site.

So, is it too much to ask for a bit of transparency here?

Naturally, the artistes don't want to appear to be sticking it to their most devoted fans. But think of how ticked off those devotees are when they find out they've been played? Why not just list the tickets as at "market price", kind of like the lobster at Legal Seafood. State outright that you set aside a certain percentage of tickets so that the most loyal, extravagant, besotted fans can pay through the nose for them, pointing out that the money goes to the object of their affection, not some rotten scalper.

Not all performers do this sort of ticket finagling, by the way.

Bruce Springsteen's policy is not to play in the secondary ticket market.

Way to go, Boss. (And I'm sure that your August concert at Gillette Stadium, which I saw, was an order of magnitude better than Neil Diamond's outing at Fenway Park, anyway. In fact, if you'd just sung Sweet Caroline, it would have been perfect.)

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In tribute to this revelation about Diamond's ticket mastery, I've played around a bit with his classic Play Me, written from a fan's perspective.

You are the star
I am the fan
You have the tickets
I am your lamb
Play me

Or, alternatively:

I am the star
You are the fan
I have the tickets
You are my lamb
Pay me