Imagine this.You’re an ingenious, young business owner who essentially has a monopoly on your particular product.For the sake of argument, you sell coffins.Everyone needs one at some point.And for the sake of argument, no one else in your region sells coffins, save for a few pawn shops which try to sell coffins for far more than the going rate.They aren’t making much money because you produce coffins in all types and price ranges. If someone needs a cheap cedar box or a Rosewood palace to spend eternity, they come to you. It’s a seller’s market, and you own it.But you want more money.So you buy out the pawn shops. Then you use these pawn shops to buy your coffins at a cheaper rate than normal, until your original company has very few coffins left to sell. When customers come in looking for the final Redwood-lined satin-filled mother of all coffins, you have to say, “Sorry, we’re all sold out.”But you direct them to one of the pawn shops you’ve bought where they can buy this fantastic coffin. There they buy the fancy coffin for 40 percent more than originally intended.You get all the profits.They have no chance.You’re kind of an jerk, aren’t you?Sure, what you did wasn’t illegal in anyway, but nothing more must be said. You’ve taken a service that only you offer — a service, mind you, that you were making a handsome living off before, err, “expanding” — and you’ve exploited your customers to make more money that you don’t need.You’re a 21st century businessman, no doubt.To take this closer to reality, you are Ticketmaster. Or were Ticketmaster.The innocuous Ticketmaster, who was always frowned upon by ticket buyers for throwing on a service charge that was a decent portion of the actual ticket price, had a brilliantly selfish plan that worked for a long time.By selling tickets to TicketsNow, a subsidiary of Ticketmaster, they could sell tickets to shows that weren’t actually sold out for scalper’s prices, according to The Star-Ledger. Because Lord knows Ticketmaster needs more pull in the ticket-selling community. The first time I saw Modest Mouse, it cost me $12.The last time, it cost me $45.Having essentially the only avenue for selling tickets wasn’t enough.Ticketmaster agreed to stop after being pressured by the New Jersey attorney general.It would seem as if the problem is all tied up. But Ticketmaster is still surviving in a loophole that would make it pretty easy to do again.Worse, though, is that other ticket markets have picked up on the trend.AEG Live, the promoters for Michael Jackson’s “This is it!” tour, did the same thing. They set aside tickets for sale on the secondary market, according to Rolling Stone. This tour is the best-selling tour of all time, and someone still felt it necessary to rip off fans.At the risk of sounding like a petulant, puerile child, this is absurd, wrong and simply unfair.It’s sad to see greed taking over one of the parts of life that makes it worth living — at least for me. It is sad to see the already seedy music industry take a dive into the international industrial dumpster of unabated greed.But it can be stopped. For once, we could actually do something — something simple.We can stop buying our tickets from secondary markets.We stop, then their plan does not work.And we win.It can be stopped. If we care enough.
Travis Andrews is a 21-year-old English major from Metairie.—-Contact Travis Andrews at [email protected]