Less than a minute after tickets for last August's Neil Diamond concerts at New York's Madison Square Garden went on sale, more than 100 seats were available for hundreds of dollars more than their normal face value on premium-ticket site TicketExchange.com. The seller? Neil Diamond.
I admit it, when I first read this, I thought it was going to be a gotcha moment where a fan caught Neil Diamond selling his tickets online. The reality is much worse.
Ticket reselling -- also known as scalping -- is an estimated $3 billion-a-year business in which professional brokers buy seats with the hope of flipping them to the public at a hefty markup.
In the case of the Neil Diamond concerts, however, the source of the higher-priced tickets was the singer, working with Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc., which owns TicketExchange, and concert promoter AEG Live. Ticketmaster's former and current chief executives, one of whom is Mr. Diamond's personal manager, have acknowledged the arrangement, as has a person familiar with AEG Live, which is owned by Denver-based Anschutz Corp.
The article goes on to say how this is a very normal practice -- where the artist sells some of the best seats that are reserved for their guests at highly inflated prices. Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff (who the WSJ waits until the end of the article to mention that, oh, also happens to be Neil Diamond's manager!) writes it off with this bit of ridiculousness: "It's our job to make our clients aware of every opportunity that exists."
I get that it's harder to make money as a musician these days, and that Liz Phair's gotta do the occasional Gap ad to keep the bills paid and the kid fed. I draw the line at this.
