Hannah Montana fans learn hard lesson with tickets
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The Web postings are pleading and plaintive, a parent's last ditch attempt to grant a preteen daughter's dearest wish -- tickets to the "Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus Best of Both Worlds Tour," coming to the Mellon Arena Jan. 4.
Frustrated that the teen star's concert sold out minutes after the box office opened on Ticketmaster Sept. 29, desperate mothers, fathers and grandparents are pulling out all the stops to obtain tickets hotter than Bruce Springsteen or Jimmy Buffett. On Craigslist.com, an Internet community classifieds site, they offer not just money but Steelers tickets, Penguins tickets, even -- in the case of one poster from the North Hills -- a big screen television.
Similar, almost instantaneous Hannah Montana concert sellouts have been reported in Tennessee, Texas and Arkansas, raising suspicions that scalpers may be to blame for snapping up all the tickets before the general public gets a crack at them.
In Pennsylvania, Attorney General Tom Corbett has asked parents to contact his office at www.attorneygeneral.gov "if they feel they've been improperly denied tickets to Hannah Montana or any other concert, or if they feel that they've been misled by various fan clubs or other organizations who purport to offer a better chance of getting tickets," said Nils Frederiksen, Mr. Corbett's deputy press secretary.
And in the midst of all the frenzy, there's even a Pittsburgh connection. Ticketmaster, which controls most ticket sales at 90 percent of venues nationwide, sued a Downtown firm earlier this year, alleging it rented software to ticket brokers enabling them to jam the ticketing giant's computer with thousands of requests for seats, blocking individual fans from obtaining them.
Jay Coggan, a Los Angeles-based lawyer for RMG Technologies Inc., which owns Downtown-based TicketBrokerTools.com, called Ticketmaster's suit a "public relations ploy to deflect bad press over its monopoly status."
Joseph Freeman, Ticketmaster's vice president and general counsel, strenuously objected to that characterization.
"Not only have the federal courts decided unequivocally that [Ticketmaster is] not a monopoly and does not have monopoly powers, that is not the issue here, and any reference to that issue is a complete red herring," he said in a phone interview yesterday.
"What is at issue here is that our system is getting accessed in an inappropriate and illegal manner by people who are wrongfully depriving fans of a fair and equitable shot of buying tickets."
At the center of the storm is 14-year old Miley Cyrus, daughter of one-hit wonder Billy Ray Cyrus and star of the hit Disney Channel television show, in which she leads a double life, as a demure high school student and a rock star. Her fan base is mostly preteen girls and their little sisters -- and their parents are discovering that it's almost impossible to buy tickets to her concerts when they first go on sale.
Instead, they have to hunt to the secondary market -- ticket brokers, Craigslist or such online services as StubHub.com, eBay's ticket outlet -- and are suffering severe sticker shock in the process.
Hannah Montana tickets on StubHub, for example, are averaging around $200 each, and one 16-seat luxury box at the Mellon Arena is being advertised for $24,000.
"She is the hottest concert on the secondary market, bar none. She's outselling Van Halen, The Police, even Britney of a few years ago," said Sean Pate, a StubHub spokesman.
Linda Bernard found that out the hard way.
"My 8-year-old daughter worships Hannah Montana," said Mrs. Bernard of Jefferson Hills, whose husband recently double-teamed with their 18-year-old daughter Leann to buy tickets, with Leann standing in line at a West Mifflin Giant Eagle at 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning two weeks ago while her father stood by at their home computer. The tickets were gone within two minutes, said Mrs. Bernard, who then turned to Craigslist -- with no luck so far.
"Where are all these tickets? I just feel they're taking advantage of the fans," she said.
"I admire free enterprise and if a scalper wants to stand in line or get tickets online like everyone else, that's fine. But stealing is stealing and as much as I try to explain this to my 8-year-old she can not comprehend and expects tickets and keeps saying things like 'I have 27 dollars I can give you to help pay.' This is ridiculous."
Lisa Warner, of Canonsburg, also tried and failed to find tickets on Craigslist.
"I just think it is so sad that these events come along and you look forward to sharing them with your kids and you are prevented from doing so by these scalpers," she said, adding that "my daughter's father was murdered last year, and it has been a little rough since. I have been trying to find things to do with her to kind of cheer her up and when she found out Hannah Montana was coming she was so excited. Her dad used to buy her tickets for everything that came to Pittsburgh."
What most parents may be unaware of is that for any concert, the majority of tickets are first set aside for premium credit-card holders, fan clubs, and the artist's and venue's friends and associates, leaving a relative minority of seats available to the general public.
Then there are the ticket brokers who insist they should not be lumped in with scalpers, who work outside events, sometimes with unsold tickets from brokers' offices on a consignment basis.
These brokers possess increasingly sophisticated technological means for buying tickets for resale, including the sort of software marketed by RMG that Ticketmaster claims is the culprit in its lawsuit. Mr. Coggan, RMG's lawyer, declined to provide details about his client's software -- "that's proprietary information" -- but said it "facilitates brokers in the acquisition of tickets."
Still, he denied that it swamped Ticketmaster's computers in order to gain access to large numbers of seats.
While dues-charging fan clubs often advertise their ability to score "pre-sale" tickets, that didn't happen this time, said Terri Middleton, whose granddaughters joined Hannah Montana's fan club for that reason -- to no avail.
So Mrs. Middleton, of Overbrook, advertised on Craigslist, only to discover that scalpers were also posting nasty messages taunting families. "I thought you were going to cry to the attorney general instead of crying here? When will you realize that your crying here is unproductive, pointless and pathetic?" reads one anonymous message.
While Mrs. Middleton has already complained to Attorney General Corbett, she may not have much recourse: Pennsylvania's law regulating scalpers was significantly weakened earlier this year after the Legislature removed price caps on the resale of tickets through the Internet.
Before then, tickets could not be resold through Web sites such as Ticketmaster, StubHub or eBay for more than 25 percent or $5 more than face value. The new law removes those restrictions, as long as the reseller is either locally licensed, has a Pennsylvania office, or guarantees refunds for canceled events or tickets that are not honored at the event, Mr. Corbett's spokesman said.
Hannah Montana has introduced the hard realities of this system to a whole new generation of ticket buyers, said StubHub's Mr. Pate.
"What's happened here is that you have a large majority of novice ticket buyers, parents shopping for their children who don't realize it's nearly impossible to buy tickets for these hot acts anywhere but from resellers."
It's a hard lesson to learn, but "there has never been a level playing field and there's not going to be a level playing field, because some people can always afford to pay more for tickets," added Mr. Coggan.
"Adults, when they can't get tickets, know how to cope. But here you have these little kids screaming at Mommy and Daddy," he said.
His point may be best exemplified by Linette Brown, of Ross, who offered up her big-screen television on Craigslist in the hopes of getting tickets for her daughter Massima.
"Hannah Montana is someone my daughter really looks up to on TV."
Even though Mrs. Brown's husband left their son's football game early to get home that Saturday morning to buy tickets online, it was all for naught.
"Our daughter was devastated," Mrs. Brown said.
Her daughter is 41/2-years-old.
First Published October 6, 2007 12:00 am
