Rock and Roll PING!
It is officially over. The dirty little secret about getting “great seats” has always been that the front rows are rarely entered into the computer for general sale the say the tickets are put on sale. They are often set aside for “promotional” purposes and amazingly a good number of those always work their way to scalping agencies. You stand a better chance of getting those tickets for face value the day of the show at Ticketmaster than the months before that (where you will only find tickets in the back of the area in the computer).
Pink Floyd got out of the stadium concert business in the 1970s when they realized how many thousands of seats at each show were being sold by the promoter without being “sold” (they never appeared as ticket receipts).
So now Ticketmaster has a personal profit motive to encourage scalping. Wonderful.
These are generally civic owned venues. At the Astrodome, there was a national scalper who worked out of the “front office” (I read a profile on him in the Cleveland paper).
The only motion there ever is in Houston to block “scalping” is when the ticket agencies are caught selling Houston Rodeo concert tickets comped by the promoters themselves.
Talk about a scam. These jerks take a lot of the better tickets out of circulation before things even go on sale and then steer folks to the scalping agency they are affiliated with and will soon be tied together with. I hate those crooks and their gigantic fees and their corrupt practices. I hate to see news of companies going under during this crisis but reading about TicketMaster collapsing would bring tears of joy to my eyes.