(
)
BOY OH BOY: The hot One Direction band is coming to Jersey’s IZOD Center — but odds are you won’t be able to buy a ticket at face value. (
)
Fans who were shut out of One Direction’s sold-out July 2 concert at the Izod Center were bound to be disappointed.
Even before the tickets went on sale to the public, only a fraction of the 13,687 seats — just 4,474 tickets — were made available to ordinary fans. The vast majority had already been earmarked.
While fans are largely left in the dark about ticket distribution, the majority of tickets are allocated to the artists, talent agencies, record labels, tour sponsors and fan clubs, according to the Fan Freedom Project, a Washington DC-based coalition backed by secondary market seller StubHub.
“Fan clubs and credit cards get thousands of tickets and they’re not all making their way to the hard core fan,” said Dean Budnick, co-author of “Ticket Masters,” a book about ticketing practices.
One Direction isn’t the only act breaking hearts. In March, singer Pink made only 16 percent of tickets — a measly 2,693 out of a total of 16,823 — available for sale at the Izod Center, according to Fan Freedom, which has been waging a campaign to show how widespread the practice of ticket holds is.
As the $4.7 billion concert season heats up, fans are increasingly venting about instantly sold-out concerts, including a host of big-name acts like Justin Timberlake, Beyonce, Rihanna and Bruno Mars.
The rise of the secondary market is giving artists new incentive to skim tickets off the top and resell them at a markup.
“The artists have come to see the extent to which people are using these secondary markets and how much money can be made,” Budnick said.
One associate of a big-name star told The Post that the artist would grab the first five rows of his tour and sell them through brokers to make another $50,000.
Fans are often unhappy to learn that the artists are complicit in the ticket sales process.
One concert-goer, Annie Hutchinson, who tried to buy tickets for One Direction and Taylor Swift, complained when she found the tickets available right away on StubHub and Craigslist at a higher price.
“[It] left a bad taste in my mouth, and I refused to buy something for more than face value,” she wrote on Fan Freedom’s website. “Something needs to be done about this scam.”
One executive close to Ticketmaster, the largest concert ticket seller, said that holds for artists are usually part of their contracts.
This person also said the Fan Freedom data wasn’t representative of the entire business and that holds typically account for closer to 20 percent of the general sale as opposed to 80 percent.
Another concert executive added that “holds” weren’t part of a black market and that fans had to be smarter about it by “friending” artists and Ticketmaster and signing up for e-mails so they had many chances at ticket releases.
“You have to put a little work into it,” said this person.
Chris Grimm, a spokesman for the Fan Freedom Project, told The Post, “Don’t come down on fans when they can’t go to a show, while you are the one pushing the tickets.”
Grimm blasted Ticketmaster and others for blaming shadowy “bots,” or computer programs, for helping brokers buy up all the tickets and resell them on the secondary market.
“They love to point their finger at other people, at automated bots,” he said.
“They should also be looking in the mirror at their own ticketing practices.”
One of Taylor Swift’s tour dates in Florida in April held back 86 percent of tickets. The Orlando Sentinel reported that only 1,740 tickets were for general on-sale out of 12,118 tickets. The management company and the promoter got 3,700 tickets, while more than 5,700 were for credit card holders and other “insider” deals.
Gary Bongiovanni, who tracks the concert business at Pollstar, told The Post that the issue is most pressing in New York and in Los Angeles, where most of the music industry and the media that covers it reside.
“I don’t know how it can get much worse when they do the public on-sale of 5,000 in a venue of 15,000 to 20,000,” he said.
The availability of face value tickets to music insiders is “kind of a joke,” said one veteran music industry executive.
“I can get tickets at face value for just about anyone, and there has to be another 100 to 200 people just like me. Is it unfair? Yeah, but it’s a nod and wink, an accommodation of people involved in the tour.”
However, the problem of excessive holds is one that few in the industry will take full responsibility for. One industry executive said the practice has some benefits, pointing out that big credit card companies, for instance, underwrite tours and help bring down overall ticket prices.
This person also said that artists try to protect fans by holding back tickets for their own fan clubs, although some charge a fee as do most credit cards.
Will Flaherty, a spokesman for SeatGeek, a company that searches other sites for tickets, told The Post: “It’s widely known here that US concert promoters will frequently work with brokers to offload tickets at a premium and split the proceeds after the fact.”
“Marketing messages say they go on sale on sale at 10 a.m. They are lies. Marketing is setting people up for disappointment.”
He says hold-backs prevent regular folks from getting a fair shot. “The distribution is just broken.”