One of the hottest tickets in Boston is the Rolling Stones tour, which swings through later this month. But it took Keri Heffernan only a few minutes to purchase a pair on an Internet site that links buyers with ticket scalpers.

The catch: She paid $1,004.35 for her seats in the arenas loge level -- triple their face value. "It is unfair," says the 29-year-old pharmaceutical sales representative. "The prices of concert tickets are out of control."

The Internet has forever changed the economics of rock concerts. Legions of high-tech scalpers now snap up seats instantly when they go on sale. Then they flip the tickets on Web sites like StubHub, where the markup can reach many multiples of the face value. The result is that buying concert tickets is becoming akin to getting in on a hot initial public offering of stock: Scrappy insiders get them at face value, often with an eye on reselling them to regular folks at a big premium.

Indeed, the number of people buying tickets the old-fashioned way -- at a ticket outlet, on the phone, or when they first go on sale online -- is surprisingly low. At a U2 concert Nov. 22 at New Yorks Madison Square Garden, at least 29 percent of the fans said they purchased their seat on the Internet at a source other than Ticketmaster, the authorized ticket agent, according to a survey conducted by Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton University economics professor. Eleven percent said they got their seats through online auctions, especially eBay. Fully 10 percent reported paying $300 or more for a ticket. More>>>

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