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Tuesday, July 06, 2010
Law - "'Paperless ticketing' aims to thwart scalping at concerts, sports events"
A long, interesting article reported by Paul Farhi in the Washington Post. Here is a quote from far into the story:
The debate revives a long-running question about the nature of a ticket: Is it a piece of property that its holder has the right to buy and sell as he sees fit, or is it merely a seat-rental contract subject to restrictions determined by its issuer? State and municipal legislators have wrestled with this question for decades, as they have tried to balance event owners' attempts to control scalping against resellers' desire for an unfettered market.Team owners and promoters believe they are entitled to participate in the secondary market just like everyone else, especially since it's their tickets that are being resold, says Veritix's Kline. But in hearings last month before the New York and New Jersey state legislatures, which are considering updating anti-scalping laws, Adler and his members advocated that consumers and brokers have the option to resell paperless tickets on any Web site they want.
Without such a legislated option, resellers worry that Ticketmaster could impose its will on the concert industry. Earlier this year, the company completed a merger with Live Nation, the world's biggest concert promoter and a major artist manager, giving the combined company a stake in every step of concert production and management.
With the Live Nation merger, Ticketmaster is "now in a position to control both the primary and the secondary levels of the market," says Marianne Jennings, a business professor at Arizona State University who has studied the ticket market. Innovations like paperless tickets "are often touted as being in the best interest of consumers, but in reality, primary [ticket] sellers have been trying to get rid of brokers and maximize their profits for 30 years."
But Joris Drayer, an assistant professor of sports marketing at the University of Memphis, says the concert and sports businesses are too large and decentralized for one company to dominate. He says paperless tickets may become an option, but conventional tickets aren't about to disappear. Not only do sports fans still like them, but "the sports industry is notoriously slow to adopt to new technology."
Posted by Marcia Oddi on July 6, 2010 06:29 AM
Posted to General Law Related