Ever waited to buy a concert ticket online only to watch it sell out in minutes, and then find
the tickets elsewhere online for twice the price? Here's how that happens. Localize this by finding people at your school who tried to buy tickets online. Add a sidebar, if you want, about kids who camped out for a show to get seats.
In Al's Morning Meeting, Al Tompkins writes:
Missouri, Arkansas and Pennsylvania investigators
are asking questions
about concert ticket sales that leave thousands of fans out in the
cold. Somehow, minutes after tickets go on sale, fans can't buy them,
but the big ticket resellers snap up thousands of tickets.
Fans are fed up and took their complaints to their state attorneys general.
E! Online says the Hannah Montana concert sellouts were the tipping point for buyer frustrations that have been simmering for some time:
Tickets to the teen singer's concert had
a top face value of about $63, but they were being resold online for
upwards of $2,000, Nixon said, calling the practice a "blatant rip-off
of consumers."
The New York Times story explains how Ticketmaster and the attorneys general in three states are suing ticket resellers over this mess. Ticketmaster also is suing a software company called RMG Technologies, which it says is “bombarding Ticketmaster’s Web site with millions of automated
ticket requests that can constitute up to 80 percent of all ticket
requests made." That leaves fewer tickets for everyone else.
