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Pat, you clearly don’t understand what Stub Hub is, much less how it works. Brokers sell tickets on Stub Hub (as well as it’s sister site Ebay). There is no bidding on Stub Hub.

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I think you may have missed my point. What I’m saying is that the bands should auction off all of their tickets. That would prevent any scalping, because everyone is paying the price the market will bear at the time of sale. So, those folks that will pay $500 to a scalper will just bid $500 on an auction instead. Now a scalper has no way to get the ticket except paying more than I’m willing to pay. I’m obviously not going to pay them more in that case, so they would be at best breaking even and probably losing money. I might then get the ticket for $300, so the band’s thrilled (if they’re newish/small – it’s obviously largely irrelevant to U2) because they get $300 and I’m thrilled because I didn’t pay $500.

Also, I’ve bought and sold on stubhub and ebay and both sites have fixed prices as well as auctions. It’s just that most sellers don’t use auctions on stubhub, but they can and I have.

BTW – “…you clearly don’t understand what Stub Hub is, much less how it works” implies a kind of superiority that’s a bit off-putting, if you care. Especially when it’s inaccurate, but really either way. Good comma usage, though. That’s unusual these days.

My guess is that they’ll do well in the big cities and not so well elsewhere. With roughly 20 shows in the U.S., I think we’ll see Chicago, NY, Boston, Miami, L.A. SF/Oak/SJC. hit and do very well. Chicago could easily see 2 or 3 shows, NY 2, Boston 2. L.A. up to 2 and the same up north. Even if it’s less than that, it’s still about half the 2nd leg in very U2 friendly markets. Miami will draw a lot of people from south/central America.

If the buzz is good from the shows (and we haven’t gone even further into recession), then 2010 will probably do better.

Nevertheless, I have to agree that going for a Stadium tour in this economy virtually guarantees lots of empty seats….then again, if that happens, you can probably buy $30.00 seats and move up to better seats…..but that only works if the tour massively undersells.

————DDDave said —————–
kc, I’m proposing you can return your ticket by a certain date to get a refund, or swap one of them for another seat.
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If I can change the name on a ticket that I have so that my new GF, wife or whatever, then the system won’t work.
You really have 2 choices: make it virtually impossible to scalp the tickets and make life very unpleasant for fans or don’t inconvenience the fans and the scalpers continue as usual. You could say that there’s no resales of tickets at all, but allow official ticket swaps, but that only works if both parties must have a ticket which means you can’t take a different person than you originally said you were going to take.

People who run Ticket brokerages spend a lot of time looking for ways to get the most money from a ticket and I don’t think anything will stop them.

As for Stadiums, I’ve seen U2 in both, and there’s no doubt that Arenas are better. You can’t compare a stadium video from Ireland with the disastrous Boston video of 2001 or the Popmart Mexico video. I loved Popmart, but those shows didn’t sell out in most places and I had the advantage of being close to the stage or at the B-Stage for all but one show. Nevertheless, none of them had a crowd like you see in videos from South and Central America. TO me, the biggest disadvantage to stadium gigs is that most of the time that leads to more hits oriented sets (regardless of the band). The south American Stadium Vertigo shows looked like a lot of fun. The Hawaii show….not so much.

————DDDave said —————–
I’m also rather put off by odd complaint that the band initially plan to tour for “only” 6 weeks in America.
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Dave, Western Europe (which is where the money for shows is concentrated) is more tightly packed than the U.S. How long is a trip from London to Rome? 15 or 16 hours by car? That’s barely halfway across the U.S. It’s just not the same. Driving from one end of TX to the other. To put it another way, driving from one end of TX to the other (in a relatively straight line) is almost 1000km. On that trip through TX, you’d pass, at most, 2 venues that U2 might play (houston and maybe San Antonio, but the latter is unlikely on this tour). The reality is that between Georgia and Phoenix, they’d hit roughly 4 potential cities (over 2100 miles): Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Phoenix. You can add St. Louis for 600 more miles. Chicago is another 500. 6 venues = 4828.03km
That Amsterdam-Rome trip was 1690km. On that trip, you’ll pass near Brussels, Koln, Dusseldorf, Zurich and Milan. 6 Venues for concerts in 1/3 the distance (and that was just a random route I chose, because it seemed like a fairly long north-south run for 2 venues. Turns out they played 10 shows there last tour. On most tours, people in less populated states will likely travel further to get to one venue than you’ll travel to get to the top 3 venues outside of your country.

————–Brett said————–
Do I believe U2 & Live Nation reached an agreement that would truly cut out touts? No, I don’t. But I don’t believe the criticism should be directed at U2, especially given the history of this industry.
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Brett, on the last 2 tours, U2 was charging more moeny for most tickets than most scalpers charged 10 or 15 years ago. On this tour, tix will apparently hit 250.00 (not surprising given the typical U2 Ticket inflation since ZooTV). Yes, there will be $30.00 cheap seats, but my guess is that most(all?) will be the worst seats in the house. last tour, the top ticket price went up a bit from Elevation (which practically tripled Popmart’s top price, which more roughly doubled Zoo’s top price), but the real key was that the cheap seats went up in price and there were far fewer of them (on Elevation $45.00 seats made up roughly 40-45%). Behind the stage lower level was all $100.00 seats ($45 on Elevation) and I saw plenty of venues where the upper deck was 150.00 vs $90ish in 2002. The entire concert industry has become ridiculously expensive for fans.

—————Chris said:————-
Nine Inch Nails started doing this years ago, with the fanclub presale handled by the fanclub, and the tickets with each fans name printed on them being held by the fanclub, with representatives from the fanclub at each venue with the tickets.
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If my name is on both tickets, and I’m a scalper, I can bring in a customer and whomever is with that person will get in with a nosebleed/lawn seat. For Springsteen, you had to show an ID, Credit Card and immediately walk in. The scalpers didn’t miss a beat.

I’m not a fan of scalpers, but until I see a plan that stops them and doesn’t make it worse for fans, I’ll remain extremely skeptical of those looking to stop them.

Frankly, the idea of an official exchange would likely just be another excuse for the bands and ticket agencies to get more money from the fans. What’s that sir, you want to trade with someone? We can do that for a $25.00 fee on each ticket exchanged. To be clear that means if we exchange one ticket, they collect $50.00. And yes, I think those types of fees are likely.

While the whole continent vs single country argument isn’t really relevant here as we’re talking fanbase, why should America be given any preference over Europe in terms of timescale?

Are you telling me that there are more people in the US that want to see the U2 in the flesh than in the whole of Europe? I think not, when it has over double the population. Why should an (potential) American fanbase continue to be given special treatment as they have been so much in the past?

Lest we forget Latin and South America…. Those lovable buggers go mad and stage a national televised event when so much as Jon Bon Jovi turns up with a bloody harmonica.

One of the reasons I think the Boston and Chicago DVDs looked so good was because of the band being surrounded by the crowd – effectively what they’re planning to do this time but in stadiums, by the sound of things. That’s why I think these shows could be awesome. Even before they invented the whole concept of the B-stage, U2 have always had the desire to be in an amongst it all when they’re performing, and in words of Carly Simon, Nobody Does it Better; though I think that’s where the correlations between Bond and U2 come to a sudden halt.

However, speaking generally, a set in your average sports hall or exhibition centre cannot beat the atmosphere of an open-air summer event – as that’s what it is, a proper event. Even in streets several miles away, there’s a real sense that something big’s going down when a band like U2 plays a stadium. Of course, there are exceptions as you highlighted, but to be honest, you can’t really can’t use a comparison like Boston to Hawaii as a fair example. With the exception of the east-end of my own dear Glasgow, there are few places as Irish outside the Emerald Isle that U2 have such an affinity with than the likes of Boston, New York and Chicago. And as you say, Hawaii probably hasn’t had such as big a single event since the bombing of Pearl Harbour, if you’ll permit me to be brutally blunt.

Unless you’re going for sheer, rare record-breaking extravagance like the Stones at Copacabana (brilliant in itself), you want intimacy from any gig, even a huge stadium one, which is just as achievable as an arena, I’d argue. Just look at the Vertigo Milan DVD. Putting it on now I’m still realising what a great show that was. The band and stage design made the San Siro seem like the Colosseum; so much so that it wasn’t until a third watching I realised they were actually playing along one of the sidelines as opposed to a goal end.

My main point is that whether we’re talking stadiums or sports arenas, due to the size of the band, I can’t think of any venues U2, or alike, have played a proper gig in over the last few years that was designed with music in mind. As a result, whilst some venues obviously fair better with hosting the biggest band in the world than others, at worst, or as I’d argue en masse, (if you’ll excuse the pun) the lights, power and magic coupled with warm summer evening atmosphere of an outdoor show most often beat the contrived (and usually failed) intimacy of a sports hall.