Imagine that concert tickets had no face value and instead were sold on the Internet to the highest bidders. You might wind up paying more for front-row seats and less for spots in the nosebleed sections. In any given row, prices could vary widely, as they do now on airplanes.
That is no fantasy scenario. Ticketmaster Corp., the world's biggest ticket seller, recently held its first concert-ticket auction, putting about half of the general-admission tickets to a Sting show in New York last Saturday up for bids in a seven-day Internet sale. While it was billed as an experiment, the unusual sale fueled the idea that ticket auctions are the next frontier for event marketing.
"We will see this more and more," said Stephen Happel, an economics professor at Arizona State University who studies the ticket-sales industry. "While Ticketmaster is the most visible one, they have major competition with online ticket marketplaces," Happel said.
To see how the Internet is changing ticket sales, you need only look at eBay. About 4 million event tickets were offered for sale there last year, by professional resellers and fans. This year eBay is on track to sell even more.
While many tickets sell for more than their original value, others are bargains, as I discovered when I scooped up two seats for Shania Twain's Oct. 17 D.C. show on eBay for 20 percent below face value. EBay doesn't offer cheap tickets to every show, of course. Good seats for the Simon and Garfunkel reunion tour are selling for as much as $700.
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