For those of you who have been keeping up with how the concert industry has been slowly trying to combat scalpers (aka ticket resellers), there has been a development thanks to AC/DC and Ticketmaster.

Over the weekend, a Dallas show for AC/DC went on sale and the only way you could purchase your ticket is by means of paperless tickets. The entire building was sold this way. Through doing a paperless ticket, it means that there is nothing physically available for sites like StubHub or eBay (or anywhere/anyone else looking to resell the ticket). For example, if I bought 3 pairs of tickets, and walk in 3 times with 3 different people, I’d have to pay 100% for 3 tickets and can only resell 3 as opposed to up to 6 (if it was a show I wasn’t interested in going to.) Waste of money for the ticket reseller, not to mention a heck of a headache to manage. The reselling market dries up as a result.

According to an industry source, this is most likely the way U2 will go with their concert ticketing for next year. Also, the source said that Live Nation will partner with Ticketmaster for the ticketing: “U2 is the biggest client and they don’t want to risk something going wrong with their system while they are still working on it.”

Now, the only issue with a paperless system would be the amount of swapping that happens between fans from city to city, and even between General Admission and seats. I’ve been a part of multi-city General Admission trades and I know how helpful they can be. This will impact this type of fan-to-fan help…but I’d take this inconvenience over having to deal with the ticket resellers ANY day!

More information about paperless ticketing:

• TicketMaster’s AC/DC news release
• TicketMaster’s Q&A about Paperless Ticketing
• Billboard: AC/DC Embraces Paperless Ticketing

Who is David Batstone?  He was the man who in 1986 took Bono and Ali on a tour through El Salvador and Nicaragua, providing experiences for Bono which got channelled into the songs “Bullet the Blue Sky” and “Mothers of the Disappeared” for U2’s The Joshua Tree.

Batstone wrote of this trip for the book accompanying the boxed set of U2’s re-issue of The Joshua Tree last year.

Fast forward to now, and Batstone is the president of the Not For Sale Campaign, an organization fighting human trafficking and leading the campaign to “end slavery in our lifetime.”  He shows up in the new film Call + Response, “the first feature rockumentary to expose the world’s 27 million most terrifying secrets,”  which opened in select American cities October 10 and should be going into wider release soon.

Along with Batstone, there are plenty of other A-list actors, musicians and intellectual and political  heavyweights in the film.  Bono and the music of U2 are absent from the film, curiously, because it seems like the sort of project that’s a natural fit for a cameo or song clip.  Maybe there’s something in the works??

Call + Response covers a lot of ground, but the efforts of The Garden of Hope in Chiang Mai, Thailand, are featured prominently in the film.

If you’re looking to engage the ol’ heart and mind, please check out The Garden of Hope and look for the nearest theater showing Call + Response.

The Garden of Hope is one of the organizations featured at the upcoming academic conference on U2 — “The Hype and The Feedback: A Conference Exploring the Music, Work and Influence of U2″ — for which @U2 is proud to be the Media Partner.

You may remember my giddy blog entry last May about meeting Bill Carter of Miss Sarajevo documentary fame.

Well now, his 2004 book Fools Rush In, about his time in the Bosnian war (and his time spent coordinating U2 satellite hookups to the war), is being made into a feature film. Carter is reportedly writing the screenplay and until now, we weren’t sure who was going to play Bono…but this article about an aspiring intern from Washington state who wants to work on the film claims that Bono is one of the stars (along with Orlando Bloom and Liam Neeson). I can only deduce he’ll appear as himself.

And if he’s signed on to play himself (at age 33 no less), are the other three band members, Paul McGuinness and Ali Hewson also going to play themselves? They’re all mentioned repeatedly in the book, so I suppose it’s possible.

A girl can dream, right?

Like many U2 fans, I’m anxiously awaiting the arrival of the new book U2 - A Diary, written by our very own Matt McGee, which hits shelves later this month.

To help get the word out, Matt has been conducting interviews with various fans and has posted these interviews on the book’s official site.

The fun part?

He’s made a contest out of it—and the interviewer with the most votes by Friday night will win a copy of the book and a gift certificate.

So what are you waiting for? Go vote!

As an American immersed in following the current Presidential race, I especially look forward to Saturday nights because SNL is funny again. And the skits that are working are the ones that feature dead-on impersonations of the current candidates for office (and former winners). Darrell Hammond nails GOP contender John McCain and former President Clinton, and Tina Fey couldn’t be better as Vice Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin.

Last night, in a sketch making fun of the recent Katie Couric interview with Palin, they couldn’t help but reference her encounter with our favorite front-man (though in reality, they only spoke by telephone).

In case you missed it, I’ve posted it here. I hope you’ll laugh as hard as I did…

If you’re in the mood for a new piece of U2 fashion but don’t want to pay the high prices, then Circuit City has the item for you. Sure, you might already have this CD in your collection, but it comes with an iron-on of the album art. Of course, for those more trendy and crafty, you might decide to make a throw pillow or book bag out of it. That’s the beauty - you can turn it into whatever you want! And the price couldn’t be better. CD and iron-on..$12.99 at the store. Not bad, all things considered.

The other 11 covers are with other artists’ CDs, so it’s not a U2-only type of promotion going on.

I know it’s been available since July…it’s just that I don’t shop there very often and never noticed it ’til now.