by Brian White
To those of you with younger females in the house, you may know the Disney television show Hannah Montana. It features the real-life daughter of country singer Billy Ray Cyrus as a normal teenager that has a secret double life as a Hillary Duff-esque teenie-bop singer. This past Saturday morning, tickets were to go on sale at 10 a.m. CDT for tickets to a December Hannah Montana concert.
To girls in the eight-to-15 age bracket, this is gold stuff. Problem is — no tickets were actually available at 10 a.m. when they were supposed to go on general sale. Using a combination of live, box-office presence, wireless Internet website checking and old-fashioned box-office phone calling, it was pretty clear to probably thousands of local parents here that no tickets would be for sale. . .
As always, the problem with high-profile concerts and appearances is the scam-laden “ticket broker” industry. These opportunists somehow manage to scoop up all tickets to major events (especially high-demand children’s events) before general public ticket sales even happen, then spread them all over the web at 400% to 1000% markups. Some parents don’t care and will do anything to buy these tickets, while level-headed ones become incredibly annoyed that ticket travesties like this happen, and consistently.
It’s not fair, but then again, life is not. There is nothing like supply and demand, and it works in this case – well. So, the beef is not with price gouging practices at all. The beef here is the process. How can every ticket be sold before the tickets are even on sale? Something fishy is up here — very fishy. . .
Full Story: http://csco.bloggingstocks.com/2007/08/27/concert-ticket-opportunists-crash-the-party-before-it-begins/
