NBC: NYTimes: Hot Tickets, Hawked Legitimately Online

Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2003 11:37:37 -0700
Newsgroups: rec.music.artists.springsteen
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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/03/technology/circuits/03basi.html?8hpib
Hot Tickets, Hawked Legitimately Online
By TOM DI NOME
FOR decades, ticket scalpers have been as much a part of concerts or
sporting events as overpriced food and merchandise. With the rise of the
Internet, scalping went online, as ticket holders seeking buyers turned to
bulletin boards, newsgroups or eBay.
For sellers, going online is more convenient than standing outside a stadium
or concert hall to do business, but for buyers, there are sometimes
questions about the reliability of the source and legality of the
transactions.
That has begun to change, with the acceptance of a new, more legitimate term
for scalping - "selling on the secondary market'' - and the emergence of
virtual marketplaces that provide safe forums for reselling tickets, at or
even above their face value. Using technologies designed to guard against
the sale of counterfeit, stolen or fraudulent tickets, these services
threaten to dent the scalpers' franchise.
There is no shortage of secondary ticket options online. Depending on your
choice of event and how much you are willing to pay, you can probably find
what you want. The sites all operate on the same simple principle - demand
drives supply - but there are some variations, including delivery options
and fees.
Ticketmaster and Tickets.com, the top players in online ticketing, are both
better known as primary ticket outlets, but each has formed relationships
with professional sports organizations to give season-ticket holders a way
to resell tickets that would otherwise go unused. At eBay, event ticket
auctions are a distinct marketing category. Other sites, including StubHub,
offer a secondary market for tickets to all kinds of events. There are also
broker sites like TicketCity, which aggregates the ticket inventories of
brokers around the world.
Call it organized scalping or a consumer service; either way, online ticket
sales are big business. Total sales of movie and event tickets online are
expected to reach $3.1 billion in 2003, according to Jupiter Research, the
Internet consulting firm. And while an estimate of the secondary market is
hard to come by, the activities of several online ticketing companies
suggest that it is a fast-growing area.
The most recent entrant, Premier Ticket Window, is a secondary marketplace
started last month by Tickets.com and accessible through a prominent link on
the company's home page.
"This is our answer for consumers who come to our Web site, and for whatever
reason can't find a ticket to either the performance or venue they're
looking for," said Carl Thomas, the executive vice president for sales and
marketing at Tickets.com. Premier Ticket Window offers access to events at
venues that do not have arrangements with Tickets.com. For example, a
visitor to the site who searches for a team not listed with Tickets.com is
directed to the Premier Ticket Window.
The inventory for Premier Ticket Window is provided by RazorGator, a service
that handles the entire process behind the scenes.
Another option for ticket-seekers are secondary ticket exchanges set up by
sports teams, which both Ticketmaster and Tickets.com operate. In these
systems, a would-be seller of a ticket posts it for sale at a virtual
exchange window. When a transaction is completed, the original ticket's bar
code is invalidated and a ticket with a new bar code is created. The buyer
can have the ticket mailed, pick it up at the box office or print it at
home. The bar code is scanned when the holder enters the event to verify
that the new ticket is genuine.
Double Play Ticket Window, created for season-ticket holders of the San
Francisco Giants and operated by Tickets.com, is one such secondary market
ticket exchange. Only season-ticket holders can post tickets for resale, and
they can set the price at or above the face value of a primary ticket,
according to Russ Stanley, the vice president for ticket services and client
relations for the Giants. "It's occurring anyway in the parking lot, but
this is a safe way to secure tickets," he said.
Ticketmaster's version of the secondary market forum, TeamExchange, is used
by 17 professional and collegiate teams. Madison Square Garden was among the
first arenas to use TeamExchange, for tickets to the Knicks, Rangers and
Liberty. Sean Moriarity, Ticketmaster's executive vice president for
technology, said that TeamExchange had a rules engine built into its
operation to insure that all sales comply with state and local laws. "It
looks at the venue location, what the team-specific rules may or may not be
and where the buyers or sellers are located," Mr. Moriarity said. "We want
to make sure the transaction is good on all fronts." TeamExchange also
offers a print-at-home option. Ticket auctions at eBay use a similar rules
engine.
Ticketmaster is also experimenting with online ticket auctions. Last month
it auctioned tickets for the Lennox Lewis-Vitali Klitschko heavyweight title
fight at Staples Center in Los Angeles. Mr. Moriarity said that Ticketmaster
planned to offer auctions regularly service by year's end.
StubHub offers tickets for sports, concerts, theater and arts events, and
provides a forum for individuals to sell unwanted tickets. Users can buy and
sell tickets for Broadway shows, entertainers' appearances in Las Vegas and
the 2003 Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall. There are even tickets
available for popular minor league baseball teams like the Brooklyn
Cyclones.
For sports events, StubHub offers various ways to buy secondary tickets
online: through the Web sites of teams that work with it, through StubHub's
own site, or through links to one of the company's media partners.
"Whether we work with a team or not, we allow and we have tickets for any
event, any team in the country," said Eric Baker, the president StubHub. A
pull-down menu on the site displays events in regions and cities in the
United States and Canada. StubHub places few restrictions on sellers;
tickets can be posted for auction, sold at a fixed price, or discounted each
day leading up to an event.
StubHub also works with artists and entertainers to set aside front-row
tickets to be auctioned for charity as part of packages that might also
include backstage passes and autographed memorabilia. Such auctions have
been held for performances by Ellen DeGeneres and for coming appearances by
Christina Aguilera and others.
So before you find yourself standing outside an arena scanning the crowd and
asking, "Got two for tonight?," keep in mind the online options.