Vendors deflect blame in ticket resale
Concert sells out in a minute
A company that retails tickets and a website that resells them are pointing the blame in different directions in the aftermath of the Calgary Stampede’s Garth Brooks concert selling out in less than a minute.
Unlucky fans who did not manage to snatch a ticket are peeved not only at how fast they dried up, but by how many were then being touted by scalpers on other websites for many times the initial price.
Ticketmaster blames scalpers with sophisticated computer programs that target tickets for big shows, and says the company spends millions of dollars each year trying to thwart attacks.
“It’s frustrating and disappointing and frankly disgusting that scalpers get into the mix and use tools to gain an unfair advantage over fans, only to then turn around and resell tickets to fans,” said spokeswoman Jacqueline Peterson.
On Sunday, almost 500 tickets were being advertised on the website Stubhub, some for as much as $3,500 — a far cry from the original $62 on Ticketmaster.
But Stubhub says it’s just a marketplace and anyone is free to list tickets at any price they want.
It pointed a finger at concert organizers, managers and promoters.
“Typically what we see with concert on-sales is that a majority of tickets are held back by the promoters, venues, artist, management, etc. and then sold either to brokers or others that ‘anonymously’ list directly on sites like ours,” spokeswoman Joellen Ferrer said in an e-mail.
“It’s fairly typical to see only 2030 (per cent) of tickets for an event actually available to the public during the general on-sale. That’s why tickets sell out so quickly and that’s why prices are disproportionally higher on the secondary market.”
However, a Stampede spokeswoman said all seats available for the July concert did go on sale Saturday, and the organization did not hold any back to sell on other websites.
More than 15,000 tickets for Garth Brooks were sold.
Jennifer Booth, who is with the Stampede, said they will take a closer look at the situation today.