A growing number of rock bands and sports teams are auctioning some of their best tickets to the highest bidder in an attempt to increase their revenues and deter scalpers.

Ticketmaster, which has helped pioneer the concept, said the number of tickets being auctioned online right now is tiny but growing fast. Of the 58 million tickets Ticketmaster sold through the first half of this year, 2,945 were auctioned, but that's up from 860 during the same period last year.

"It grew out of what our clients were telling us they wanted," said David Goldberg, executive vice president of strategy and business development at Ticketmaster. "They were tired of seeing the markups on tickets in the secondary market that scalpers and brokers were getting."

Groups such as Bon Jovi, Coldplay, Motley Crue and teams such as the Indianapolis Colts and Chicago Bulls are auctioning only a small portion of the seats they sell, Goldberg said, but he predicts it won't be long before the price of nearly every seat for a concert or sporting event will be set at auction.

"At some point, you'll see all parts of a venue dynamically priced," Goldberg said.

The British band Coldplay is auctioning off a handful of the better seats to its upcoming Twisted Logic tour through the Ticketmaster Web site. For the April 3 show at the Verizon Wireless Arena in Manchester, N.H., tickets for the second row on the floor that normally would have sold for $75 had a high bid of $210 as of Friday evening. On its Web site, Coldplay said a portion of the proceeds from the ticket auction would go to charity, but Dave Holmes, the band's manager, said in an interview that all of the proceeds would be going to charity.

In forums on the band's Web site, some fans have been grumbling about the auction process.

"I guess the best way to fight scalpers is to scalp the tickets yourself," said one fan who went by the name of scfanscfan on the Coldplay forum. "It's just an excuse to scalp the best seats to the highest bidder."

"I guess you could look at it that way," Holmes said. "But we did this because as soon as we put our tickets on sale, a lot of them would end up on eBay or scalper sites online like TicketsNow.com. A lot of our fans were also complaining about getting stuck with counterfeit tickets."

Sports teams also are experimenting with auctions. The Indianapolis Colts regularly conduct what the football team calls sideline auctions, basically packages that include two tickets and two pregame field visits.

The Boston Red Sox at the end of last season auctioned off 10 seats to a handful of baseball games in a new seating area near the Green Monster. The winning bids ranged from several hundred dollars to more than $1,000 per seat. Only members of Red Sox Nation, a club that costs $9.95 to join, were eligible to bid on the seats plus some extras like T-shirts and VIP tours of Fenway Park.

Mike Dee, the Red Sox chief operating officer, said the club probably would auction the same seats next season, but he said details haven't been worked out yet.

The ticket auctions are part of a broad campaign by bands and sports teams to undercut the burgeoning secondary ticket market and garner more revenue. Initially, the bands and teams ratcheted up prices for the best seats in the house to make ticket resales less attractive. Now they are experimenting with auctions, and many have even created their own secondary markets.

Lots of sports teams, including the New England Patriots, Boston Celtics, and Toronto Maple Leafs, provide resale Web sites to help season-ticket holders unload unwanted seats. Most of the Web sites limit how much sellers can mark up the price of their tickets.

Ticketmaster is experimenting with a no-holds-barred secondary market concept. For a Dec. 29 Celine Dion concert at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, it is allowing people who have purchased tickets to the show to resell them at whatever price they can get through its TicketExchange link at ticket master.com.

Ticketmaster says what makes TicketExchange superior to eBay is that it guarantees the legitimacy of the tickets being sold, and guarantees that the seller will be paid. Ticketmaster collects a processing fee from buyers and sellers on each transaction. Ticketmaster official Goldberg said Nevada law places no restrictions on the resale of tickets.

Jeff Fluhr, the chief executive of StubHub.com, one of the nation's leading online ticket resellers, said he doesn't think any of the steps being taken to stamp out the secondary market will work.

"What it does for us and the secondary market is it gets customers comfortable with the concept of paying a fair market price for tickets." Source>>>

<---Back To Home Page

Concert Tickets, Sports Tickets, Broadway Tickets, Family Show Tickets

posted by ADMIN @ Saturday, December 03, 2005