pudge's Journal: Hannah Montana Tickets

On CNN, in a story about Hannah Montana tickets, where ticket brokers bought most of them and are reselling them for hundreds and thousands of dollars, an angry mom says, "it is taking advantage of me and my children."

Why? How? You don't have to buy them, and it's not like anyone had an obligation to put on this concert or make tickets available to you for it at all, let alone at a certain price. If you don't like it, don't but the tickets ... so how are you being taken advantage of?

She went on, "and it's not teaching my kids a good lesson: that you can get what you want if you pay the right price." How is that not a good lesson? Generally speaking, it's true. I think it's a great lesson, about supply and demand of course, but also about priorities and comparative values. Teach your kids, well, we could take a vacation to Europe for two weeks, or buy a huge TV, or get a loaded iMac and iPod, or buy you an all new wardrobe ... or go to this concert.

If you really hate what these ticket brokers did, then organize a boycott of the concert. If no one buys the tickets, the people you are most angry at -- the brokers -- will lose a lot of money. Disney will too, because even though they sold tickets, they will lose a lot in potential merchandise sales, and so on.

This whole thing is a fantastic lesson for kids, if you understand what's really going on and how the world actually works.

Amen!

[mgessner]

And Amen!

Show the kids how to make a free market economy work FOR them.

Amen!

Re:

[ces]

If all the tickets are selling on a secondary market for this huge sum, then the venue should have just put them up for auction and realized the additional profit themselves.

This is a good idea. It would also solve the problem of tickets selling out within minutes of going on sale. Some sort of dutch auction system with a 2 week bid window comes to mind.

Typically the way venues, promoters, etc. try to limit the scalping problem is either by pricing the tickets high enough to limit demand to the available se

Re:

[Qzukk]

Some sort of dutch auction system with a 2 week bid window comes to mind.

I think that since not all of the seats are the same value, a simple dutch auction won't cut it. The only thing I can think of is to run multiple auctions in parallel, with winners of better-seat auctions getting removed from any worse-seat auctions they were in.

The problem is that then, after taking the winners out of the worse-seat auctions, what happens if you can't fill the back row because of people bidding on front-row seats onl

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[pudge]

how are you being taken advantage of?

You must have missed the part of the story where the Hannah Montana Goon Squad comes around to your house with guns and forces you to buy the tickets at whatever price they ask.

OMG ur right!

Congress = Tic Hoarders too

[fishrokka]

Here in DC it's not just the scalpers and brokers snagging all the tix -- we have to deal with the PAC's too!

Letter to the Editor [washingtonpost.com] from disgruntled Springsteen fans in re: this article:
Congressional Fundraisers Let It Rock [washingtonpost.com].

Key Quote

[Talinom]

This whole thing is a fantastic lesson for kids, if you understand what's really going on and how the world actually works.

Obviously they don't and will pass on to their children the perceived evils of a capitalistic society. They will shout "This isn't fair," in response to this event (Oh, wait. They already are.).

I'm all too familiar with that phrase. It seems to equate to "My expectations were not met and I am angry about it." Sadly the "expectation" was that they could just walk down to Ticketmast