Syracuse.com By Mike McAndrew |
[email protected] 1/28/2016
http://www.syracuse.com/state/index....rman_says.html
Best concert tickets are kept from public, AG Schneiderman says
SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- More than 50 percent of the tickets to Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan, Jay-Z and other performers' shows at New York state venues were reserved for insiders and not available to the public, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said Thursday in a report.
He called on the music industry to reform its ticketing practices and the New York State Legislature to pass laws to prevent such abuses.
None of the concerts Schneiderman cited in his report were held in Central New York. Most were in New York City.
For the most popular concerts, the investigation found that many tickets are never made available to the general public in the first place. A majority of tickets for major entertainment events are either put on "hold" and reserved for a variety of industry insiders including the venues, artists or promoters, or reserved for "pre-sale" events and made available to non-public groups, such as those who carry particular credit cards.
On average, more than half of all tickets -- 54 percent – are reserved for insiders. Those reserved tickets are split between insider holds (16%) and pre-sales (38%), Schneiderman said.
The investigation cited the following concerts where more than 50 percent of the tickets were kept from the public, with the artist, venue, year and percentage of reserved tickets:
Jay-Z and Justin Timberlake, Yankee Stadium, 2013, 71 percent
ColdPlay and Jay-Z, Barclays Center, 2012, 70 percent
Steely Dan, Beacon Theater (NYC), 2013, 65 percent
Fleetwood Mac, Madison Square Garden, 2013, 61 percent
"Ticketing is a fixed game," Schneiderman said. "My office will continue to crack down on those who break our laws, prey on ordinary consumers, and deny New Yorkers affordable access to the concerts and sporting events they love. This investigation is just the beginning of our efforts to create a level playing field in the ticket industry."
In addition, the investigation found that venues and ticket sellers like Ticketmaster regularly tacked on fees that added more than 21% to the face price of tickets.
The AG's investigation found that third-party brokers resell tickets on sites like StubHub and TicketsNow at average margins of 49 percent above face-value -- sometimes more than 1,000 percent.
Some of the brokers are using illegal specialty software – called "ticket bots" -- to quickly purchase as many desirable tickets as possible and resell them at a significant markup. The investigation, for instance, found that on December 8, 2014, a single broker used a bot to purchase 1,012 tickets to a U2 show at Madison Square Garden within the first minute they went on sale. The investigation confirms that hundreds of thousands of tickets are being acquired using illegal software.
Read the Attorney General's report