Word: pearls
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...than once, by middlemen. These operators are a mix of quick-buck artists at street level, high-priced attorneys who speculate in tickets for profits, corporate executives trading favors, music-industry insiders and Mafiosi who control key blocks of tickets and take a cut of the inflated price. While Pearl Jam is pointing the finger at Ticketmaster's relatively modest service fees, it is these behind-the-scenes brokers who are responsible for the hundreds of dollars added to the price of some tickets. Though these scalpers handle less than 20% of the tickets, they are often the best tickets...
...current rebellion started when Pearl Jam laid plans for a low-cost tour their young fans could afford. They wanted their tickets to cost no more than $18.50, with service fees held to $1.80. Ticketmaster balked, arguing that it must charge $2 or more to cover its costs. Pearl Jam hired Sullivan & Cromwell, the prestigious Manhattan law firm. In a memorandum filed with the Justice Department, the lawyers claimed that Ticketmaster's control over tickets and its exclusive contracts with most of the leading concert arenas constitute anticompetitive behavior that enables it to prop up prices. Soul Asylum, another popular...
...performers claim that Ticketmaster, as the only large agency ticketing national tours, exerts excessive control over access to arenas. Pearl Jam says it cannot tour this summer because Ticketmaster is so powerful -- and so feared -- that no arena of decent size was willing to book the band. Ticketmaster denies that it has interfered in any way with Pearl Jam bookings. Artists afraid to be quoted by name claim that after buying out competing agencies like Ticketron, Ticketmaster is so powerful that it can hold up payment of ticket receipts for months, block bookings or just "experience computer problems" in selling...
Whether or not Pearl Jam's accusations against Ticketmaster are valid, law- enforcement officials are trying hard to curb the far more significant problem of illegal ticket scalping. According to authorities, organized crime is deeply involved in the illicit reselling of tickets. When a $25 ticket can ultimately sell for $500, the difference amounts to a large chunk of untraceable cash -- a phrase that is pure music to a mobster's ears. Police sources told Time last week that the Mob runs some scalping operations in New York and other large cities. Blocks of tickets earmarked by performers for charities...
...Summer Olympics in Atlanta. Even such a law, however, does not mean that fans will have access to all the best seats, since corporate sponsors and other powerful fans can still pull strings legally to buy up huge blocks of prime tickets for all the key events. Pearl Jam's campaign against Ticketmaster will do nothing to curb such practices. So long as people with plenty of cash are willing to pay a premium to sit down front, some fans will be more equal than others at the box office...