Scalped! A History of Ticket Reselling

From Charles Dickens readings to Taylor Swift concerts, scalpers have driven prices sky high.

Who’s the Boss? Though he initially spoke out against scalpers and high ticket prices, Bruce Springsteen has taken a more dynamic (and lucrative) point of view. (Shutterstock)

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Tickets for the great entertainer’s shows in Boston and New York went on sale, and fans waited in line for up to 12 hours. Thousands tried to buy at the same time, but resellers nabbed them quickly and resold them for more than 10 times the price of the original tickets. “We are at our wits’ end how to keep tickets out of the hands of speculators,” the star complained.

This scene could have easily played out virtually, last summer, on Ticketmaster and StubHub, when Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band concerts went on sale for $60 to $400 and resale prices surged to as much as $5,500. But it actually happened in the late 1860s, when novelist Charles Dickens went on his second reading tour, and 5,000 fans began lining up on a frigid Tuesday at midnight to buy tickets, according to John Forster’s 1872 biography The Life of Charles Dickens. Shady “sidewalk men” paid bystanders to wait in queues nearly a mile long, and prices increased in the resale market from $5 to $50.

The Dickens ticket speculators were just the beginning of a 150-year market operating at the edge of legality and legitimacy. Over the last 20 years, the battleground over “scalpers” has shifted from sidewalks to the internet, jacking up prices to shows such as the Super Bowl and Taylor Swift to such a lucrative degree that eBay sold one of the top ticket resellers, StubHub, to a European company for more than $4 billion in 2019.

That’s the ticket! Just as with a Taylor Swift concert today, finding a seat for a Charles Dickens reading was well nigh impossible 150 years ago. (© CHARLES DICKENS MUSEUM)

Contempt for scalpers hasn’t changed with the streamlined business. “The pertinacity with which these gentlemen persist in thrusting reserved seats in your face is intolerable,” a journalist wrote in 1856, quoted in Kerry Segraves’ 2007 book Ticket Scalping: An American History, 1850-2005, referring to the Academy of Music in New York City. “It cannot be beyond the resources of the Academy to kick them out of the lobby and off the steps into the street.” Last year, a Bruce Springsteen fan tweeted: “I’m downright depressed at the prices for #Springsteen tickets. What about fans who work nine to five and somehow survive until the night?”

In the early days, scalpers bought low and sold high on seats for passenger trains; a popular singer, Jenny Lind, known as the “Swedish Nightingale”; Madison Square Garden boxing matches; and the Princeton-Yale football game. They caused so much frustration among ticket buyers that police and politicians cracked down, arresting speculators on the streets near theaters and passing bills declaring it illegal to “buy or sell, traffic or speculate” in tickets. Sometimes the lines between good guys and bad guys were hard to draw — the people who complained about scalpers in newspapers had resold tickets themselves, and promoters and theaters sometimes quietly held back tickets to resell to speculators before the public could buy them.

In 1964, Time reported on the concept of “ice” — in which theatre employees and even Broadway producers scalped tickets from the inside, making as much as $100 on a ticket with a face value of $9.60. A New York attorney general held hearings, and Time told of one anonymous Broadway producer who used his scalping largesse to buy himself a lobster boat.

This problem of theater insiders scalping their own tickets persisted: In 1999, the Backstreet Boys accused their promoter, House of Blues, of selling tickets directly to middleman brokers who turned around and sold them to fans for 10 times their face value, or as much as $350.

The ticket-scalping wars intensified in the late ’60s, when rock ’n’ roll was expanding from hayrides and theaters to stadiums and festivals. Many stars fought back against scalpers and speculators. The Rolling Stones, in 1972, cooked up an elaborate scheme to sell tickets in a lottery system to fans (560,000 of them, it turned out) who mailed requests via postcard. It didn’t work. Rampant fraud broke down the system. In 1980 and 1981, Springsteen tried to sell tickets for his tour for a reasonable $12.50 apiece, but scalpers pushed prices to as much as $200. “Tickets should go to the fans, not the scalpers,” declared the Boss.

Can’t get no satisfaction: To prevent ticket scalping, The Rolling Stones unsuccessfully tried using a lottery system for their 1972 tour. (EBAY.COM)

By the mid-2000s, easy-to-use websites such as StubHub and eBay allowed scalpers to conduct their business anonymously, without so much as setting foot on a sidewalk. Brokers figured out how to use computerized “bots” to flood Ticketmaster to scoop up thousands of tickets and raise the resale prices before regular fans could procure them. Fans complained, and state legislatures passed bills outlawing the practice, but fans participated, too, buying four tickets, selling two online, and attending their favorite concerts for free.

Some artists continue to fight back against scalpers — country singers Eric Church and Luke Combs use online fan clubs with membership fees and monitor buying patterns to keep face-value tickets at roughly $100 apiece, while artists from Pearl Jam to Taylor Swift have been employing Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan system to achieve a similar goal. Springsteen, however, has changed his philosophy since the ’80s. He allows Ticket-master to use “dynamic pricing,” which means each seat costs a different amount, according to demand.

So a fan in a nosebleed seat might pay $100 or $200, while a front-row-center seat might go for thousands. In this way, Springsteen himself pockets the money, rather than allowing it to go to the 2023 version of Dickens’ nameless, faceless sidewalk men. “I said, ‘Hey, let’s have the money go to the guys who are sweating up on stage for three hours,’” Springsteen told Howard Stern last November. “If that’s controversial for you, I don’t know what to say.”

Steve Knopper is a Billboard editor at large, former Rolling Stone contributing editor, and author of MJ: The Genius of Michael Jackson. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Fortune, and others. Follow him on Instagram @steveknopper.

From the Archive

At the Opera by Tempest Inman, The Saturday Evening Post, December 9, 1933

The Theater-Ticket Gouge

Formerly, theater managers fought ticket speculators. Then managers and speculators joined hands to levy toll on theatergoers and divide it, 50-50. The result, for a time, was simply to increase the price of good seats at popular performances by 50 cents. Now for good seats at a really popular performance no one thinks of going to the box office, and the price is whatever the speculator can get.

The two-dollar seat for a preferred location at a popular play is as apt to be three dollars as two and a half. The six-dollar opera ticket is anywhere from ten to fifteen; the three-dollar one is from five to ten. The present arrangement, with tickets scattered in a dozen places, is less convenient to theatergoers than the old one, under which you could go or telephone to the box office and get a choice of all the tickets that were unsold. That the theater flourishes under this arrangement shows its strong hold on the public. Such a relationship with patrons would kill the book trade. It would kill any magazine. We do not at the moment think of any business except the theater that could live under it.

—“The Theater-Ticket Gouge,”
Editorial, January 2, 1915

All Kinds of Suckers

People in many parts of the country must have rubbed their eyes in some astonishment a few months ago when that august tribunal, the Supreme Court of the United States, was asked to pass upon the constitutionality of a law forbidding theater-ticket speculators in New York to charge more than a fixed addition to the box-office price. By a close decision the court declared unconstitutional the statute which restricted the resale price to an advance of 50 cents above the printed rates. But the demand in New York that ticket speculators be curbed is insistent.

This whole bother cannot be dismissed by calling it a tempest in a teapot. Theatrical entertainment constitutes a very large industry in New York, and is patronized with an almost solemn devotion by visitors from every section of the country. Many will agree with Justice Holmes when he says, “We have not the respect for art that is one of the glories of France; but to many people the superfluous is the necessary, and it seems to me that Government does not go beyond its sphere in attempting to make life livable.”

But even the Government cannot put a sense of financial values into the heads of citizens who lack it either all the time or when engaged in their regular New York theater orgy. The plain fact is that while newspapers and public officials rail against ticket speculators, the public which pays ten dollars for a three-dollar seat rather enjoys the experience.

Ticket speculators would disappear like an early-morning mist if the public failed to patronize them. But it is said that these purveyors manage by one dubious device or another to gather up all the best seats. Yet public refusal to buy the best seats would annihilate the evil. Why should Government attempt to remedy a condition which the individual could correct instantly except for laziness, an exaggerated idea of his own importance, and the necessity at any price of having the best?

After all, the Government has more worthwhile things to do than to protect people from the consequences of the last word in gilded indolence. Besides, there is just a little question whether even the Government can repeal the law of supply and demand.

—“All Kinds of Suckers,”
Editorial, August 13, 1927

This article appears in the March/April 2023 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.

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Comments

  1. Compelling feature on what seems like an age-old problem, likely going back FAR past the mid-1800s. It’s really disgusting what people will do, but we know that, so it’s not surprising at all. All that can be done to keep it at bay to the extent it is, of course should be.

    In the end, no one’s forcing people to pay these outrageous prices for concerts, and their getting ripped-off is on them, not the scalpers; not to excuse the latter in any way. I agree with what Springsteen told Howard Stern recently. Musicians DO work damn hard up on that stage for three hours, and they’re the ones who should profit from this unfortunate, unethical situation they did not create, if anyone should.

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