Bon Jovi’s free concert at Central Park’s Great Lawn this Saturday, July 12, will not only not be free to some fans, but having a ticket does not even guarantee admission.

Thousands of the 67,500 distributed tickets are being resold on online auction sites. On eBay, there were more than 490 listings with prices ranging from 99 cents to $1,100. Ticketliquidator.com, owned by TicketNews parent company TicketNetwork, prices ranged from $24 to $943. Tickets are still being distributed today for the July 12 show.

Although the Great Lawn capacity is 50,000 for this particular concert (the city allows more people for its classical music shows, and Paul Simon once drew in excess of 600,000 people to the site for his solo concert), more tickets were distributed to counter any no-shows, so the concert would still be at capacity; organizers say that about 15 percent or 7,500 tickets will not be used.

According to Kimberly Spell, senior vice president of communications for NYC & Company, the city’s official marketing and tourism organization, there is space for up to 10,000 people in an “overflow area” on the perimeter of the Great Lawn, where fans will be able to hear the performance but not see it.

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“The scalping is just a way of life. I can’t tell you it’s not worth that kind of money,” New York City Mayor Bloomberg told The New York Post. “It’s up to you if you want to spend the money. But whatever the scalping laws are, you’re going to have to comply with them.”

A Bon Jovi spokesperson has denounced the ticket-sellers as “lowlifes”, adding: “It’s a bad enough thing to suck money out of paid concerts. It takes unmitigated chutzpah to scalp free tickets.”

The 8 p.m. concert is first-come, first-served. People will be admitted to the site six hours before show time even though the city expects people to gather a day or so earlier.

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