Quoted Text

In New York and elsewhere, scalping goes corporate

First published in print: Friday, February 13, 2009

Eliot Spitzer and I last saw Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in Albany in November 2007, when I was still this paper's entertainment editor and Spitzer was still governor.

     
I had a better seat than the governor did that night. After seven years of letting other writers review Springsteen's Capital Region concerts, I had finally succumbed and self-assigned the task.

As a working journalist, I was given a seat at Springsteen's eye level, just to the right side of the stage at an angle that allowed me to see the entire band.

Last week, I was reduced to logging on to Tickets.com to scramble for entry to The Boss's next Capital Region visit, on May 14 at the Times Union Center. Only Springsteen could get me to part with more than $300 for three tickets; I doubt I'll pay more than $30 a ticket for any other show this year. If you go to the arena's official ticket broker today, you'll find the show is sold out. But at the resale site TicketsNow.com, a subsidiary of Ticketmaster that serves as an online bazaar for third parties selling tickets, you can still secure seats close to mine — just two rows behind me, actually.

The bad news: They're $482 apiece.

Springsteen's previous Albany concert came four months after Spitzer signed a piece of legislation strangling New York's anti-scalping laws. These days, it's perfectly legal for Ticketmaster and other services to become fully vested in the fabulously lucrative "secondary market," which is corporatespeak for "scalping."

Last week, Ticketmaster's resale operation earned the ire of politicians, including U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., after hundreds of fans were directed to the resale site when primary-sale tickets became scarce, leading to confusion and general price-gouging. Schumer asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate, and intimated that Ticketmaster's practices should sour regulators on its proposed merger with LiveNation, the company that is to concert promotion what Godzilla is to Tokyo.

But it's one thing to tick off Schumer, something else to get on the bad side of Springsteen himself: "The abuse of our fans and our trust by Ticketmaster has made us as furious as it has made many of you," read a letter signed by the rocker and his management team.

The previous state law held that no ticket could be sold for more than ......................http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=769722

Schumer has bigger fish to fry...it's just a concert.....The entertainment for the plebs should come from the plebs----not the government.....

come on folks---a congressional investigation into steroid us and athletes......who are we kidding?.....ourselves of course.....