CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: Pssst! Want a Ticket? Hey, I’m Legit. Really.  Sun Aug 30, 2009 4:32 am | |
| EVERYTHING in Don Vaccaro’s world is called ticket something-or-other.
There’s his software and online resale company, TicketNetwork, and Web sites like TicketLiquidator.com and TicketsPlus.com. And his trade convention, Ticket Summit. At TicketNetwork’s headquarters in leafy Vernon, Conn., software engineers and search-engine strategists take turns feeding the company mascot, a cat named Ticket. (Her kittens: Stub 1 and Stub 2.)
It’s a growing, high-tech empire, but Mr. Vaccaro, burly and vigorous at 46, is well aware of his street roots. On a tour of his tchotchke-filled office one recent morning, he pointed to a desk lamp in the shape of an American Indian chief. “That’s my scalper,” he said with a grin.
Once infamous — and in many places illegal — the reselling of tickets for profit has gone mainstream. Accelerated by the Internet and changes in state laws across the country, it is now a multibillion-dollar business serving consumers who want that last-minute ticket to Taylor Swift or “Wicked.”
“The days of scalping sounding like drug dealing in a dark alley are gone,” said Randy Phillips, chief executive of AEG Live, whose deal for Michael Jackson’s 50-night engagement in London included a partnership with a ticket reseller. “It’s all aboveboard. It’s very transparent now.”
And it’s become very easy, thanks to companies like StubHub and TicketNetwork, which operate vast online marketplaces for what are essentially secondhand tickets, traded after already being sold once by an official box office. Economists call it a secondary market, and it’s booming: a report by Forrester Research last year predicted that by 2012 secondary-market sales for entertainment and sports would reach $4.5 billion.
But scalping has also stumbled on its way to legitimacy. Controversies have broken out over access to high-demand shows, and brokers — the term that ticket resellers prefer, though fans have been slow to accept it — face opposition from politicians and consumer advocates who see them as economic predators.
“Tickets are snapped up seemingly as soon as they go on sale, and the average consumer is forced to go to one of the ticket brokers and pay outrageous prices,” said Edgar Dworsky, the founder of ConsumerWorld.org and a former Massachusetts assistant attorney general in consumer protection.
(And talk about an image problem: Is there any profession whose pop-culture representative is as questionable as Mike Damone, the scalper-villain of “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”?)
Last month ticket brokers gathered at a Las Vegas hotel for the fourth annual Ticket Summit, a three-day smorgasbord of products, seminars and networking organized by Mr. Vaccaro. At panels like “Web 2.0: Apps to Expand Your Market Base” and “Building a Public Relations Plan” they rubbed elbows with Internet entrepreneurs, Ph.D.’s, marketing consultants and even representatives of Broadway shows and major sports teams.
“Ex-enemies are now friends,” Mr. Vaccaro said as he darted among panels on the second day. “It’s amazing what money does to people.”
But when one panelist addressed the crowd as “all of you who started in the street,” plenty of stony faces nodded in acknowledgment, and animated arguments broke out over the spread of dynamic pricing, a weapon against resellers that allows for continuous adjustment in primary ticket prices. (Ticketmaster is planning to roll out an extensive dynamic-pricing program this year, an executive said. Its pending merger with Live Nation has brokers terrified about how they might be affected.)
The gold rush on the secondary market has expanded the once-narrow ranks of ticket brokers with all kinds of new blood: dot-commers, suburban moonlighters, ordinary fans unloading an extra pair. There is an unspoken divide between the pre-Internet, “old-school” brokers and the new arrivals, who may know their Web 2.0 apps but have not yet acquired the gut-level instincts of strategic pricing.
Harris Rosner, a veteran broker in Los Angeles whose company, V.I.P. Tickets, carries more than $5 million in inventory, he said, describes himself a “risk arbitrager” and has to go way back to explain how he entered the business.
More: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/arts/music/30sisa.html?hpw |
|
