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BROWN: Fix is in for online 'brokers' of event tickets

Published October 20, 2007 at midnight

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It used to be a pretty straightforward deal: If you bought a ticket to a ballgame, concert or play and then sold it for a profit, you were a ticket scalper. Pure and simple. There were laws against it and you'd be arrested.

But it has been a slippery slope for a long time. Denver's policy is that it's illegal to scalp anywhere in the city proper. But it's usually only enforced on the grounds of the event. That's why you get scalpers haranguing you like panhandlers as you walk to the event site.

Recent years have seen scalpers band together to form businesses and call themselves "ticket brokers." They formed the National Association of Ticket Brokers in 1994 as a lobbying firm; it was also an attempt to put an acceptable face on a notion that a lot of music and sports fans find distasteful, if not reprehensible.

The NATB even established a "code of ethics" with such stringent requirements as disclosing the seat location before selling the ticket, maintaining a working phone line and displaying the NATB logo on your literature. Nothing slipping through the cracks there.

You'll notice, of course, that there's no language in that code about not using illegal, unethical or dishonest methods to obtain the tickets in the first place. Not that it matters - only two ticket brokers in the state of Colorado have even bothered to become NATB members.

Scalpers have long used inside connections to get the best seats. At a Monsters of Rock show in Denver in 1988 I asked the two guys, front-row center, how they managed to snag the best seats in a 70,000-seat stadium. "From a couple of pals who worked the Ticketmaster machine in a Colorado Springs record store," they told me.

I've lined up for tickets with homeless people hired by scalpers to stay in line overnight. Ticketers have tried everything from lotteries to strict ID enforcement to overcome the problem.

Those days are long gone. The flap over hot tickets such as the World Series and next week's sold-out Hannah Montana show is now a war that's waged online.

On one hand, there are the artists and Ticketmaster, trying to get as much money as they legitimately can for the tickets. On the other, there's the booming online "ticket reselling" business, be it on StubHub or eBay, that's getting what seems to be a disproportionately huge number of the tickets.

That's because scalpers have found a way to bypass the annoying Ticketmaster security, which requires you to type bizarre passwords into your order, by using sophisticated software and online "bots" that automatically find and buy the best tickets in the blink of an eye. Don't blame yourselves, parents of Hannah Montana fans - you never had a chance.

There is some good news: Ticketmaster won an injunction this week against a technology company in Pennsylvania that has the core business of developing software to outwit the Ticketmaster security codes and buy blocks of the best seats before you can. This technology is then sold to multiple ticket agencies around the country, all of which can buy and sell in the Denver market even if they're based in Miami. Not only are you competing against thousands of other parents trying for tickets, you're also competing against scalpers nationwide who are competing against each other for the biggest share of the best seats.

Five years ago, getting tickets online was the fans' best chance of getting great seats. Nowadays, however, it's a broken system that rewards cheating and enriches scalpers who do no work except for a few mouse clicks, then mark up the price to sell to you. Yes, it's the free market at work; but as we've learned, an unregulated free market isn't always in everyone's best interest. Chinese toys, anyone?

The Colorado Rockies announced this week that all public sales of World Series tickets would be online only, starting at 10 a.m. Monday through ColoradoRockies.com. If Ticketmaster can't beat the scalpers, what makes them think they can?

Mark Brown is the popular music critic. or 303-954-2674