Artists Secretly Ripping Off Their Fans was a top story in March. Here it is again as we recap 2009: antiMusic reports: The Wall Street Journal's Ethan Smith has published an interesting article about how artists are dishonestly scalping their own tickets. The worst part of this whole thing is that fans don't get the chance to actually buy the tickets at their face value; they are set aside so they can be scalped for exorbitant prices. Why don't they just sell these "select" tix directly at these insane prices and at least be honest about the whole thing? Here is part of Ethan Smith's article on this scam:Less than a minute after tickets for last August's Neil Diamond concerts at New York's Madison Square Garden went on sale, more than 100 seats were available for hundreds of dollars more than their normal face value on premium-ticket site TicketExchange.com. The seller? Neil Diamond.
Ticket reselling -- also known as scalping -- is an estimated $3 billion-a-year business in which professional brokers buy seats with the hope of flipping them to the public at a hefty markup.
In the case of the Neil Diamond concerts, however, the source of the higher-priced tickets was the singer, working with Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc., which owns TicketExchange, and concert promoter AEG Live. - more on this story
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