Springsteen Tickets and Swampland in Milwaukee

Bruce Springsteen will be performing at Milwaukee's Bradley Center on March 17. Tickets go on sale Monday at 11:00 AM.

But brokers are already offering tickets to the concert, tickets they don't have.

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

In the free-market world of ticket scalping, don't expect brokers to stop selling just because they don't actually have any tickets.

Example: the March 17 Bruce Springsteen show at the Bradley Center.

Tickets, at $65 and $95 plus service charges, will be available at 11 a.m. Monday, and the Bradley Center is advertising that they will be sold "the old-fashioned way . . . all at once with all fans having a shot at the best seats."

There are no exceptions, Bradley Center President and CEO Steve Costello said Friday. "Not a single seat has been sold, committed or distributed to anybody," he said.

All the same, Internet-based brokers already are offering scores of tickets at well above face value.

StubHub lists general-admission floor tickets starting at $164 each. At TicketsNow, seats in Section 414, Row T are going for $300 apiece. TicketsIWant says seats in Section 424, Row Y are available for $539 each. And the more than 100 tickets offered on Tix2Event include a couple in Section 226, Row X. The price per seat: $1,319.

What's happening?

The brokers weren't available for comment. But it appears they're betting they'll be able to obtain tickets to cover their pledges - an unusual practice, a brokering consultant said.

"Sometimes brokers do that - they speculate on the availability of tickets," said Aaron Song, a 23-year-old Washington state man who runs several Web-based businesses from Vietnam, including one that forecasts concert demand for brokers much as more-conventional consultants might forecast demand for oil or pork bellies.

It's uncommon for brokers to speculate like that with concert tickets unless the act is "insanely popular," Song said. He said the practice is more often seen for major sports events such as the Super Bowl.

Springsteen is touring with the E Street Band this time around.

His Devils and Dust solo stint and his Seeger Sessions tour didn't sell out in Milwaukee. Tickets were available the day of both shows, good seats, floor seats, at face value, from the box office.

I guess, the E Street Band is what's putting this Springsteen tour in the "insanely popular" category.

I imagine the March 17 show will be close to a sell-out. But who would agree to pay $1,319 for one crappy seat before tickets go on sale?

That's insane.

That's Barbra Streisand 5th Farewell Tour insane.

And let's face it. Springsteen is no Hannah Montana.

Brokers risk irritating customers if it turns out they can't get enough tickets to fill the orders they've sold in advance, Song said.

On Friday, Milwaukee broker Ticket King listed 46 available tickets for the Springsteen show, but those were simply listings for seats other brokers were carrying - or said they were carrying.

"Bottom line is right now, I don't have any (hard) inventory," said co-owner James Bryce Jr.

The various brokers' Web sites list tickets by section and row, but not specific seat. Fine print on the sites gives the brokers the right to switch buyers' seat locations.

Bryce said that if the seat a Ticket King customer purchased in advance wasn't available, the firm would deliver a ticket for a better location.

I don't see how brokers can be so sure that they can deliver.

Ticket scalping has long been controversial.

The Web site for the ticket brokers association says members provide a service to people who don't want to spend time getting tickets, who want the best seats or who need tickets on short notice. Prices reflect market demand, and brokers themselves pay premiums for the seats they sell, the association says.

But brokers have come under attack, most recently for the wildly popular Hannah Montana tour.

With tickets for the teenage pop star (Miley Cyrus in real life) selling on the secondary market for hundreds of dollars, and in some cases more than $2,000, some parents and politicians have gotten angry.

A Nebraska legislator wants to bar brokers from using software to scoop up the best tickets before the average concert-goer has a shot at them.

Connecticut's attorney general has called for restoration of the state's anti-scalping laws, and his counterparts in Missouri and Arkansas announced investigations related to the sale of Hannah Montana tickets.

Ticketmaster, meanwhile, has won a preliminary injunction against a Pittsburgh company that it claims has sold brokers devices that let them use computers to place huge numbers of ticket orders in violation of Ticketmaster rules.

One client of the Pittsburgh firm, RMG Technologies Inc., has made more than 425,000 ticket requests in a single day, Ticketmaster contends. Another has made more than 600,000 requests in one day, Ticketmaster claims.

Costello, the Bradley Center chief executive, said Springsteen and his management are among the entertainers most concerned about scalping. They have tried to diminish the impact of the practice through measures such as the no-presale rule in Milwaukee, he said.

Obviously, brokers with software to scoop up mass quantities of tickets have an unfair advantage over the average person trying to get tickets the old-fashioned way.

The brokers certainly wouldn't be selling tickets they didn't have unless they had faith in their systems to acquire them.

For brokers to have a business, they're dependent on people dumb enough to fork over huge amounts of money for a concert or a sports event.

They're in business because they have a clientele.

I guess you can't blame the brokers that there's a segment of the population willing to pay anything for a ticket.