Smart Buying
Score Great Tickets
No event is ever sold out if you know where to look. We tell you the best sources for seats, and how to avoid paying scalper prices.
By Sean O'Neill
From Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine, June 2006
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Brandon Tesmer celebrated his 40th birthday in fine style by holding a mini reunion in March with three college buddies at a Rolling Stones concert in Las Vegas. His fourth-row seats at the MGM Grand Garden Arena were so close that he could read the drummer's song list as the motorized stage wheeled past. Says Tesmer: "When Mick came out with tux and top hat and sang 'Sympathy for the Devil,' that was as good a live performance as I'll get in my lifetime."
Although Tesmer's tickets each had a $450 face value, the Anaheim, Cal., bakery owner paid $1,400 apiece at StubHub.com. Yes, you can still get tickets at face value, and we'll advise you on the best ways to do that. But if you're willing to pay a premium, you can play the new ticket game to win the sports, concert and theater seats you want. Now is a fine time to brush up your ticket-scoring skills.
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Go to the source
Buying tickets from the source is still the cheapest way to get a seat at a hot event. The key to landing tickets at face value is to be ready the moment they go on sale. To zero in on the latest list of artist dates, sign up for free e-mail alerts at Pollstar.com, a concert-tour information Web site. Then visit Ticketmaster.com to find out when tickets go on sale. Create an online account at Ticketmaster.com and be ready to start clicking the moment its virtual box office opens.
Even better, avoid the hordes and learn how to buy "pre-sale" tickets. Sometimes a band sells a cache of these in advance to a select group, such as a fan club. Online fan clubs will tell you when and how to buy face-value tickets in advance, although you must join the club and pay dues of about $20 to $40 a year.
Scalpers, who buy tickets to resell them at jacked-up prices, also join fan clubs to buy pre-sale tickets. But many musical acts have figured out ways to thwart them. For example, Nine Inch Nails insists that its fan-club members who buy tickets in advance go to a special concert entrance. Buyers must show identification and be escorted into the venue without having a chance to resell the tickets. Other performers, including Bruce Springsteen, have used similar methods.
Even if you don't grab tickets in the pre-sale offering or initial ticket-buying melee, you can still try later by contacting a venue's box office. Box offices typically reserve tickets, called house seats, for corporate sponsors and others. The number of seats held may range from about 100 for a popular Broadway show to about 1,000 for a popular sports event, such as the Indianapolis 500. The box office releases unused seats in spurts until the "sold out" event begins. Call the box office and ask for released house seats.
Pay the middlemen
Once it was the realm of shady men whispering "Need two? Need two?" Now, ticket reselling has gone upscale. Many ticket resellers, such as TicketsNow.com, let you buy online, offer guarantees of valid tickets or your money back, and have good records with the Better Business Bureau. Pardon us, though, if we don't nominate them for sainthood. They are still middlemen -- that is, scalpers -- marking up ticket prices by roughly two to five times their face value, depending on demand. Scalpers use two Internet methods -- ticket brokerages and ticket marketplaces -- to resell tickets. Markups at each are roughly the same.
Ticket brokerages use several methods to get tickets. Some hire large numbers of contract scalpers to buy tickets online or at box offices when a Ticketmaster sale opens. Others buy them from insiders, such as teams, music promoters and corporate sponsors.
The most visited ticket brokerage on the Web is TicketsNow.com, which resold $140 million in tickets last year. TicketsNow charges a fee of 10% of the ticket price, which already includes the scalper's markup plus a shipping fee.
