Billy Joel @ Shea

I was lucky enough to actually get 2 tickets to Billy Joel's concert at Shea which will be the final concert before the tear the stadium down. I went online on Saturday morning, had to wait a while, but finally got thru and was able to get 2 tickets in the upper deck behind home plate for $100 each. I chose "best available" when purchasing but there were only two choices....the $50 ticket and the $100 ticket (maybe it was $95? but it was close to $100).

Currently on StubHub.com, tickets are going for as much as $20,000 a piece. That's corret...$20,000 each. The person who sells that ticket is set to make $19,900 on each ticket. And when I say "that person" chances are it's a ticket broker. There is obviously some flaw in the system where brokers and scalpers are always able to get the best seats for every concert and them sell them at a massive premium. On the one hand, you can say that the massive premium is fair market price and if someone is willing to pay that price, that's the actual market value of the ticket. However, if that is the case, why not auction off the ticket in the first place? 507tixx.com can't be loving the fact that THEY could be selling these tickets for their actual market price, but instead a scalper is and making all the profit on the sale.

With that being said, is $20,000/ticket really the fair market price? Probably not. You'll have to go to Ebay to see what people are actually bidding and to see what the true market price actually is at the current time. To get an even better idea? Check out the completed ebay listings to see what people actually ended up paying.

The system is flawed and needs to be fixed. Is there a way to block the scalpers and professional brokers out of the initial buy? I don't know. Should all tickets be initially auctioned off to the highest bidder and therefore be sold for it's market value at first sale? I don't know that either. What I do know is that I'm a HUGE Billy Joel fan. I don't have hundreds of dollars to spend on tickets and while I ended up with shitty seats at $100/ticket, some broker got the great seats at the same $100/ticket and stands to make a ton of money.

Enough ranting...as Crazy Carl just pointed out "i think every seat at shea is pretty good. and you're witnessing history". Great point Carl. Even in my shitty seats, I'll be at the concert and loving every second of it.