The Hottest Ticket in Town?
It’s the Arcade Fire at the Chicago Theatre on May 18-20. The three shows sold out last weekend; that’s 11,000 tickets, a huge leap from the 2,500 the Montreal septet sold at its previous Chicago show, at the Riviera in the summer of 2005. Ticket scalpers --- or brokers, as they prefer to be called --- smell money. One such firm, Boston-based ticketsplus.com, was offering a dozen premium tickets to the show at premium prices ($150 to $325, marked up from $31) a day before they went on sale to the general public.
How is that possible? A call to the ticketsplus.com offices yielded this response: “The tickets could come from a Ticketmaster pre-sale or from various registered sellers who watch the industry and have access to tickets,” according to a supervisor named “Jackie.” “We’re just the middle man between the ticket buyer and the ticket seller.”
Sources with access to the Chicago Theatre seating chart said there was no way the advertised tickets could have been available the day before the sale, and that there was no Ticketmaster presale. But ticketsplus.com ended up scoring prime tickets anyway, and this week is offering dozens of tickets for all three shows at extravagant prices ranging up to $999.