Best Scalping For Ebay Users

Welcome to Scalper Nation

While most of the focus on the changes digital technology has wrought on the music industry has been on the creation of a generation of scofflaws via filesharing/illegal downloading, the Internet has had no less an impact on the live music business, which, from time immemorial, has been where the vast majority of musicians always have made the lion’s share of their incomes.

As my Sound Opinions ). But it seems even less likely, given legislators’ unconscionable tolerance for ticket brokers/resellers/scalpers in the past, that we’ll see any government reform of that vile trade in our lifetimes.

Is vile a harsh word? Hardly. Scalpers are scum. From quaint old-school methods such as hiring homeless people to stand in line to scoop up tickets from in-person Ticketmaster outlets back in the day, to modern scamming tools such as robotic programs that are able to besiege computerized on-sales with thousands of requests for ticket buys in less time than it takes you to meekly try to score two “best seat availables,” the professional scalpers always have been immoral, duplicitous crooks indulging in music’s answer to the reprehensible mortgage brokers and investment banker speculators prompting these long-overdue Occupy Wall Street protests.

Think of them as bullying thugs elbowing aside genuine fans to cut to the front of the line, buy tickets to your favorite show at the face price, and then peddle them back to you or some other mark at 10, 20, or 100 times the cost, with all of that profit going not to the artist or the promoter—the people doing the actual work of playing and staging the show—but straight into their greedy pockets. A pox upon their houses, now and forever. But increasingly, those full-time scalpers seem to be less of a problem than… the fans themselves.

Every few weeks, this blogger gets an email from a frustrated music lover who hit his or her computer the second tickets to a favorite artist were supposed to go on sale, only to find themselves with slim pickings at the back of the house, or nothing to buy at all. Then, a few hours later, they check StubHub and find hundreds of prime tickets to the same show readily available… now at many times over the advertised face price set by the artist and the promoter, with no regard to their efforts to keep that cost reasonable.