There's been plenty of complaining about how ticket scalpers for various concerts and sporting events have been scooping up all of the tickets for events and making it more expensive for fans to get those tickets. Of course, in many cases, companies like TicketMaster and the musicians themselves are in on the deal, pretending to offer "scalped" tickets that they're really selling themselves. With so much talk about this issue, you knew it was only a matter of time until some grandstanding politician got involved. In this case, it's New York's Chuck Schumer, who has introduced new legislation to try to limit ticket reselling (thanks to Eric Goldman for sending this over). It will require ticket resellers to "register" with the FTC, and then such official resellers will only be allowed to get tickets two days after the tickets go on sale.

It's difficult to see what good this does, other than create a bigger bureaucratic mess. If you don't think that the ticket resellers will figure out workarounds, you haven't been paying much attention over the past few years. Besides, the very fact that Ticketmaster thinks this is a good law is a pretty damning sign that it's not doing much to solve the problem, but is really designed to help Ticketmaster make more money.

It's still difficult to see why these issues can't be solved effectively without legislation. Bands can offer early tickets through fan clubs or mailing lists, or use other tools to make sure fans get tickets at lower prices. Besides, if the demand really is that high for certain tickets, what's wrong with letting the market determine that?

Ticketmaster is the sort of company that lots of people love to hate. It's long been dogged by complaints that it is anti-competitive -- complaints which have gathered pace with its recent move to merge with Live Nation. The company has done plenty of things to try to drive scalpers out of business before, in hopes of sucking up their profit margins, and its latest move will further endear itself to fans. The WSJ reports that Ticketmaster is collaborating with artists and concert promoters to sell premium-priced tickets to shows on its TicketExchange site, and making them look as if they're being sold by fans. Trent Reznor explains the situation in the eminently reasonable way we've come to expect, saying that artists know they could charge much higher prices to some of their fans, but they "don't want to come off as greedy pricks asking that much, even though the market says its value is that high." So instead, they feed them to the reseller market, or as in this case, become the reseller themselves, but obfuscate that fact.

Ticketmaster execs decry the scalper market, and claim it's not fair to artists, who don't get any of the scalper's profits; under the TicketExchange deals, it divides the revenues with artists and concert promoters. This is all pretty bizarre: if Ticketmaster wants to jack up ticket prices, it seems like it would just raise them upfront. It's also not clear why the company thinks that it's abhorrent for scalpers to charge consumers high prices, but it's perfectly okay for Ticketmaster to charge them prices over the tickets' face value. This news will hardly endear the company further to consumers, and probably won't help it with government regulators, either.

You may have heard, recently, that some top name musicians went to Congress in support of the proposed Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger that has many people in the industry worried. Eddie Van Halen, Seal, Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins and the four members of the band Journey wrote letters to Congress favoring the deal. But, none of them mentioned a rather important fact, that Bruce Houghton is pointing out: every one of those musicians is managed or co-managed by Irving Azoff, who just so conveniently happens to be CEO of.... Ticketmaster. Doesn't that seem like a bit of a conflict of interest? Or, at the very least, something worth admitting to prior to pushing for the deal to be approved?

An interesting post from Braden Cox talks about how Ticketmaster's new "paperless ticket" initiative, which Ticketmaster claims is all about making the experience convenient for event ticket buyers, isn't at all convenient compared to traditional ticket buying methods. The so-called "convenience" is because ticketbuyers supposedly won't have to wait on a will call line to pick up tickets that were ordered. Of course, most will call lines only matter if you didn't order in time to get tickets sent to you. Furthermore, to get into the event, you now have to present both the credit card you used to make the purchase and a photo ID -- meaning that rather than just handing over a ticket, you need to hand over two separate cards, which then need to be scanned into a machine, slowing down the whole process. Also, if you bought multiple tickets everyone has to be there at the same time to get in and of course, you can no longer resell your tickets. This doesn't sound particularly convenient. Instead, as noted in the comments to Cox's post, it appears to really be about cutting out the resale market. Of course, Ticketmaster may find that this backfires on them. Part of the value of the ticket is its resale value. Remove that and you lower the value of the ticket, meaning fewer people willing to buy those tickets at existing prices.

Ticketmaster is widely considered one of the more hated companies in America, so it made a few people scratch their heads when they saw that Ticketmaster was near the top of the list in terms of the number of "fans" it had on Facebook. Valleywag points to an enterprising blogger who checked out who those fans were and noticed that many, many of the fans appear to be entirely fake creations. They have no picture, no other friends and they're only fans of Ticketmaster. In other words, it looks like Ticketmaster is "stuffing the ballot box" in order to look more popular than it actually is. That's pretty sad. Of course, as people in the comments note, it's not so much that Ticketmaster created the fake fans themselves: they simply offered a promotion to give any "fans" five free iTunes downloads. So it looks like a bunch of folks set up fake Facebook profiles just to get those five free downloads -- and Ticketmaster gets to "pretend" it has all these fans. Except, of course, now it just looks like a serious loser that has to pay for "fans" and gets a bunch of fake fans for its troubles.

There's been a lot of talk recently about how ticket scalpers have been able to score so many tickets to Ticketmaster events, locking genuine fans out of buying tickets at list price. The NY Times had a detailed story on the debate a few weeks ago. That story noted a number of things. First, lots of people are pissed off at Ticketmaster for making it so difficult to get tickets. While there are plenty of legitimate reasons to hate Ticketmaster, in this case, it might not be the company's fault. As it noted in its defense, it often does not get to sell tickets for an entire event, as large percentages of tickets may be reserved or offered through other methods. But, more importantly, Ticketmaster pointed the blame at RMG Technologies, a company that apparently makes software popular among scalpers. The software somehow gets around Ticketmaster's ticket limits, allowing them to buy up vast quantities of tickets the instant they go on sale. The article noted that Ticketmaster had taken RMG to court, and now a judge has banned the sale of the software. There are certainly plenty of reasons to want to make the ticket buying process more fair -- but it does seem questionable that this needed to end up in court. Basically Ticketmaster is admitting that it doesn't have the technical chops to build a site that can actually limit how many tickets an individual can buy (or to come up with an entirely different system that allocates tickets more fairly). While what RMG is doing does seem unfortunate, why should it be illegal?