Thanks to the Hannah Montana hysteria, ticket brokers have come under fire in recent weeks. Just last night, NBC10 in Philadelphia had their Investigator team “get to the bottom of it”. It’s funny how the media is trying to spin this whole ticket shortage as a result of ticket brokers, when the simple fact is that there just wasn’t enough supply to meet the demand of the public. RMG Technologies gave a VERY SMALL PERCENTAGE of brokers an unfair advantage over the general public, but in cases like this report, they weren’t even part of the issue.

Here are the facts: RMG’s software was only used to manipulate Ticketmaster. The tickets for the Philadelphia Hannah Montana show were sold through ComcastTix. So there was no way for brokers to manipulate the supply of tickets. Furthermore, there were residency restrictions, as well as ticket purchase limit. Given those facts, you’ve now narrowed the field to local brokers, who each could at most purchase 4 tickets (out of an available pool of roughly 16,000 tickets). Hardly the numbers that would control a market.

In Philadelphia, the real blame lies with ComcastTix - Their systems were so grossly overloaded, that if you didn’t already have an existing account prior to the onsale, there was no way you could checkout within the 8 minute window they gave you. And instead of adding servers to their cluster, they just threw you in a virtual waiting room once they hit capacity. If you weren’t in immediately, you were doomed from the start.

I wish more reporters would take the time to get all the facts straight before going to air. But then it wouldn’t make for good television..

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Like it or not, the secondary ticket market is here to stay. But some people still look at ticket brokers as the scum of the earth, and this heated topic has come back into the limelight as parents scramble trying to purchase Hannah Montana tickets. As with any popular show, tickets sold out quickly. But in this case, parents started complaining LOUDLY, and pointed the finger at ticket brokers as the major culprits behind the ticket shortage. The fact of the matter is that there simply weren’t enough tickets to satisfy the demands of the public. Take a city like Philadelphia. The city alone has 1.5 million people, and that’s not including surrounding cities (and South Jersey residents). If even 1% of those people wanted to go see the show at the Wachovia Center, the show would be sold out! And let me tell you, there’s a lot more than 1% that wants tickets to this show!

While most performers simply add additional shows, the management instead decides to impose a residency restriction, limiting ticket purchases to those that live within a certain radius from the show. It’s not the first time something like this has happened - In fact, Garth Brooks just did the same thing for his show in Kansas City last weekend. But it does nothing to solve the issue at hand. All it does is screw the out-of-state fans that wanted to see the show.

About 40% of our customers buy tickets to events that aren’t local to them. Why? Business trips, vacation with the family, they’re buying the tickets as a gift for a family member or friend, etc. So if I wanted to buy tickets to the show in Ohio for my nieces, why shouldn’t I be able to do so?

Every year there’s a must-have item, whether it’s the TMX Elmo, PS3, or XBox360. So why should this be any different? Why wasn’t the Attorney General suing the people selling PS3s for $3000 on eBay? Hmmm…

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