Click It for Ticket

Online Firms Emerge as Legitimate Resellers, And as Options Rise, Customers Begin to Win

Radio Telescope And Its Budget Hang in the BalanceA new Washington Redskins football season begins tomorrow at FedEx Field, and just as sure as there will beer on ice and burgers on the grill, there will also be scalpers outside the stadium hawking tickets.

The scalpers' days may be numbered, though. Ticket resellers are moving out of the shadows and onto Web sites that aim to serve as trustworthy marketplaces for fans with tickets they can't use or resellers who buy in bulk.

Concert promoters, venues and professional sports teams, including the Redskins, are partnering with sites such as StubHub, Viagogo and even Ticketmaster, legitimizing an online industry that was largely unrecognized a couple of years ago.

"We knew that people were buying and selling tickets all over the place," Redskins spokesman Karl Swanson said. "The consistent comment from ticket holders was, 'If I can't attend a game, and there's no mechanism to return the ticket to the team, isn't there a way to do this and have some assurances that I'm not breaking the law?' "

For the most part, anti-scalping laws have placed limits on the price markup of a resold ticket. But state laws vary, and many have been repealed or revised in recent years.

In many ways, the Internet is doing to the ticket industry what it did to the photo, music and movie industries: offering tools that shift some of the power back to the consumer. As in those other industries, some of the players in the ticket business have embraced the change, while others have fought back, a struggle that has led to lawsuits and angry fans, as well as increased competition and new partnerships.

"What we learned from digital music and video is if there's consumer demand and technology that enables it, you can't put the genie back in the bottle," said Eric Baker, a StubHub co-founder who left the company and started Viagogo, a European competitor that recently launched in the United States. "Either you get on board or get out of the way."

For Joseph Freeman, general counsel for Ticketmaster, based in Los Angeles, that reminder is just across the street from his Sunset Strip office: the boarded-up building that was once Tower Records' flagship store in Hollywood, a victim of the digital music revolution.

Ticketmaster has seen its dominance challenged by the Internet. Last month, for instance, worldwide concert promoter Live Nation ended negotiations to extend its partnership with Ticketmaster and plans to use the Web for direct ticket sales to consumers. In its most recent quarter, Ticketmaster's revenue was up 3 percent, but its profit was down 24 percent from the comparable period a year earlier.

"Technology and the advent of Internet ticketing has brought new opportunities," Freeman said, noting that Ticketmaster's own online venture, TicketExchange, has partnered with more than 65 sports teams. "We're very excited about where we stand."

The shift online is being fueled by supply and demand. The rise of numerous competing Web sites has allowed consumers to dictate what they consider to be fair ticket prices in the weeks, days or hours before an event, said Stephen Happel, a professor of economics at Arizona State University. In some cases, the sites have brought lower prices, not markups, to tickets that are plentiful on the Web. No one wants to be left holding a ticket after the event starts, Happel said. "Once it expires, it's good to nobody," he said.

Ticket buyers and sellers have been connecting online for years on sites like eBay and Craigslist, but the new reseller sites argue that those transactions can be as risky as buying from a street scalper. "You've got to get fraud and deception out of the market," Happel said.