Don't miss some of the biggest hitmakers of the '60s, including:
The Contours (Do You Love Me? First I Look at the Purse, Shake Sherry),
The Cryan' Shames (Sugar & Spice, I Want to Meet You, Could Be We're in Love, Up on the Roof), a rare appearance by Question Mark & Mysterians (96 Tears), The Shades of Blue (Oh How Happy), The Reflections (Just Like Romeo & Juliet), Spiral Staircase featuring Pat Upton (I Love You More Today than Yesterday) and The Rivieras (California Sun).

Headlining this year: Incubus.

LINEUP:
Rise Against
30 Seconds to Mars
She Wants Revenge
Jack's Mannequin

More to be announced......

Headlining this year: Incubus.

LINEUP:
Rise Against
30 Seconds to Mars
She Wants Revenge
Jack's Mannequin

More to be announced......

The call of "Who needs two?" is familiar to anyone who has attended a ballgame or a concert. But, increasingly, it is being replaced by "Can I recommend a nice restaurant to go with those seats?"

By combining service techniques found at Amazon.com and the social networking aspects that made MySpace.com a Web powerhouse, Crystal Lake's TicketsNow.com wants to reinvent the secondary ticket market.

An online broker to events ranging from "Wicked" to White Sox games, TicketsNow can arrange for a limousine to pick up a customer at home and drop them off at a restaurant well before the curtain rises. This week, tools used for customers to share their experience at an event, including reviews, blogs and snapshots, will start appearing on the site.

"This is an upgrade in service, not simply just a new Web site," said Kenneth Dotson, chief marketing officer for TicketsNow. "Going to events is a lot more than buying tickets."

When the event is over, the company wants customers to write a review or post photos so they can relive it.

"This will be a huge differentiator in the space for them," said Brett Hurt, chief executive of Bazaar Voice, an Austin, Texas, company that helps e-commerce firms launch review services.

"It's proven to work. When people write a review, they come back four times on average to see if it was posted," he said.

The market for tickets is a crowded field, including scalpers who hawk their inventory outside a ballpark, mom-and-pop storefronts, auction-based Web sites and hundreds of online destinations that specialize in new or resold tickets. On the Web, eBay and Craigslist are the top sellers of resold tickets, but companies like TicketsNow, StubHub and RazorGator are gaining legitimacy among consumers as a safe place to shop.

More>>>

THIS IS GENERAL ADMISSION ONLY

In their endless search for more cash, the major U.S. professional sports leagues and even colleges are getting a piece of the ticket-scalping business, a multibillion dollar industry that until recently had been controlled mostly by small-time companies and street sellers.

NFL, NBA and NHL teams have partnered with Internet firms with names such as StubHub and RazorGator to reap a share of what is known as the "secondary ticket market," where ticket holders can resell their tickets, often at prices well above the price they paid for them.

The emergence of these new enterprises ends years of frustration for sports teams, which have watched as scalpers and brokers sold tickets for several times their value without teams being able to capture any of that market.

"Teams for decades were frustrated by the fact that they couldn't get any of those profits from the secondary market," said Stephen Happel, an economist at Arizona State University who follows the secondary ticket market. With the help of the Internet and entrepreneurs such as RazorGator's David Lord or StubHub's Jeff Fluhr, "they get a cut of this and it's more money in their pocket."

All four major professional teams in Washington now have an online ticket reselling presence, including the Redskins, who in the past have stripped season tickets from customers who resold them. A year ago, The Washington Post lost its tickets, most of which went to the newspaper's carriers, when the team alleged some had been resold.

"We had the Redskins a couple of years ago taking tickets from people who had big accounts," said Jeff Greenberg, owner of ASC Ticket.com, a ticket broker in Rockville. "We had them last year going on eBay to see that people were listing their tickets on eBay and taking them right away from people. But this story is a 180-degree switch. . . . They have teamed up with these people just to get a piece of this pie."

Karl Swanson, a spokesman for Redskins owner Daniel Snyder, said StubHub came highly recommended by other NFL teams and that the team has not changed its policy on the resale of tickets.

"We have never been concerned with individual ticket holders selling individual tickets," Swanson said. "Our concern has been with blocks of tickets."

Industry experts estimate the revenue potential from the resale market at around $2.5 billion. The money to the teams isn't big -- yet. MLB.com Chief Executive Officer Bob Bowman said the total revenue from online secondary ticket resales is less than $10 million across all 30 teams, but that number is expected to grow as teams try to decrease eBay's share of the market on the Internet. More>>>

They are public enemy number one as far as many music fans are concerned: the individuals and firms who buy up gig tickets in bulk and then flog them on websites such as eBay at vastly inflated prices.

Arctic Monkeys and Morrissey are just two acts whose recent tours have been targeted by touts, leaving many genuine fans empty-handed in the rush, and then facing the choice between paying through the nose or not going to the gig.

But ticket touts could soon become an endangered species after the government this week announced a crackdown.

On Monday, culture secretary Tessa Jowell hosted the third in a series of "ticket tout summits" in response to growing concern about the behaviour of online agencies such as the now-defunct Getmetickets.net, and the use of internet auction sites to sell overpriced and fake tickets. Concert promoters and representatives of the major venues and ticket agencies attended, and an action plan was hammered out which includes:

- An industry agreement to introduce a returns policy for all concerts so fans can obtain refunds from the point of purchase if they are unable to attend an event. This looks set to go live in September.

- A website to be set up by the Concert Promoters Association where people will be able to exchange tickets at face value.

- Plans for a "kitemark" for ticket sales websites.

- A pledge to continue working on a code of practice for all firms selling tickets.

It is an issue that arouses strong emotions among music fans - and the acts themselves. Alex Kapranos, lead singer of Franz Ferdinand, recently encouraged gig-goers to "smack a tout in the face. Then they'll stop doing it."

For many, the real villain of the piece is eBay. Many music fans will be all too aware that if an event sells out in a flash, you only need wait a few minutes and the site will be flooded with people selling tickets at high prices.

When tickets for next year's T in the Park festival in Scotland went on sale on July 11, the entire advance allocation of 35,000 was snapped up in just over an hour. Within five minutes of going on sale, they were on offer on eBay for up to five times face value. More>>>