TicketBastards.

Some unsavory news on the net today. Rewritten to suit my own bias:

Three years after Ticketmaster introduced ticketFast, its online print-at-home ticketing service, consumers have so embraced it that the company now sells a half-million home-printed tickets for sporting and entertainment events each month in North America. Where ticketFast is available, 30 percent of tickets sold are now printed at home, said the company, which is by far the nation's largest ticket agency.

But consumers — many of whom have complained for years about climbing ticket prices and Ticketmaster service charges — may be less eager for the next phase of Ticketmaster's Internet evolution.

Late this year the company plans to begin auctioning the best seats to concerts through ticketmaster.com.

With no official price ceiling on such tickets, Ticketmaster will be able to compete with brokers and scalpers for the highest price a market will bear.
"The tickets are worth what they're worth," said a Ticketmaster rep. "If somebody wants to charge €50 for a ticket, but it's actually worth €1,000 on EBay, the ticket's worth €1,000. I think more and more, our clients — the promoters, the clients in the buildings and the bands themselves — are saying to themselves, `Maybe that money should be coming to me instead of Bob the Broker.' If fuckin’ retards are going to pay that price we might as well capitalise on it. Man those monkeys are stupid. This is off the record isn’t it? Ah, print it anyway, I have three Porches. I’m fucking untouchable."

"We exist to fuck the consumer," he continued, "and anyway, why are you getting at us? EBay started it. Good bless their greedy little hides"

EBay has long been a busy marketplace for tickets auctioned by brokers and others. Late last week, for example, it had more than 22,000 listings for ticket sales.
Once the auction service goes live, Ticketmaster will receive flat fees or a percentage of the winning bids, to be decided with the operators of each event, said a Ticketmaster's executive.

Along with home printing, auctions are central to "a new age of avarice and greed," the Ticketmaster rep said, "We swim in cocaine, normal hookers are no longer good enough." In the second quarter of this year, tickets sold online, with or without home printing, represented 51 percent of Ticketmaster's ticket sales. The rest were sold by phone or at walk-up locations.

Many of those customers are skeptical about Ticketmaster's plans to auction the best seats to concerts.

"The band's biggest fans ought to have the best seats, not the band's richest fans," said Tim Nolan, a naïve tool from Carlow, who used Ticketmaster recently to buy tickets for a concert by the rock group Aslan. Ticketmaster would be, in essence, official scalpers, Mr. Nolan said, voicing a sentiment expressed by some other customers.

Industry watchers agree that auctions will affect all concertgoers. Prime seats are undervalued in the marketplace, said John Moloney, a professor at Trinity, who has studied ticket prices. He predicts that once auctions begin revealing a ticket's market value, prices as a whole will climb faster. John Moloney admits part of his job is stating remarkably obvious observations. "It’s fantastic that I paid for saying this shit," he said.

Gary Gary Gray, editor of the concert industry trade magazine, StarSmack, predicted that all ticket prices would become more fluid. Tickermaster say after a promoter assesses initial sales from an auction, remaining ticket prices could be raised or lowered to meet goals. "Lowered!" Gary Gary snorted, "when that happens I’ll stop beating my wife. Does anybody believe a word these cocksuckers say?"

The notion of ticket auctions is annoying, Mr. Gray said, but he is resigned to them. But mostly he doesn’t care because his editor picks up the bill.
"I guess the capitalist inside me would say, `Hey, if that's what they can get for tickets, I guess that's just something I can't afford, like a Yacht, a Learjet or a sex-change.' "