The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have both picked up on a story I wrote about last April in which Ticketmaster is suing RMG Technologies over some software RMG sells that allows ticket brokers to purchase large blocks of tickets from the Ticketmaster site, possibly defeating the CAPTCHA that is supposed to keep the bots away. Judging from some of the not-to-civil comments posted in response to my last story, this business has been simmering for a while in the ticket broker community, but it captured the publics interest with the recent Hannah Montana tour when ticket brokers selling through sites such as eBay's StubHub seemed to have cut in line and cornered all of the tickets, offering them for resale to an enraged public for what the Times says was ten times the face value.
There may stil be hope. MarketWatch's Jennifer Walters likens the ticket market to a hot IPO. The venue underprices the tickets so they sell out in a hurry to speculators. But since concert tickets are more perishable than Google stock, the price may drop as the event approaches.
