sounds like this knob slobberer is prepping to make run for high office, getting some headlines, blah blahing, and in the end nothing will change. There is too much money made on this scam... just like all the obvious scams/BS that are bad for common people and the planet... if/when "they" make enough money on it,

Nothing will change as long as the PIC get their cut... and if they don't, then they will allow the business to operate until the bank account get high enough then they will fine them 200gazillion Dollars, no jail time and allow them to keep on doing it.

Ticketmaster is in bed with the secondary (scalper sites) market

They are all in bed with each other... it is rigged from top to bottom... from radio stations to arenas to promoters to artists to ticket sellers to ticket scalpers to the regulators to etc to etc to etc... all of them. It is obscene and obvious to anyone who has been looking at this for 20+ years with fees for concert tickets (including scalped prices) that range from 20% up to 75% to 200% to 3000%+ and they are all in on it, slithering around in bed together.

But the good news is
the end might be coming into sight
and ticket prices might go back to $12.50
I read that on the internet.

still $15.00 day of show though.

This isn't off topic actually.
Suggest edit thread subject to remove "OT"...

Quote
TheGreek
Ticketmaster is in bed with the secondary (scalper sites) market

As personally stated by Prince on his Twitter account when he pulled the plug on his European Piano and Microphone tour, due to exorbitant ticket reselling.

Cheers,
SonicD

Quote
SonicDreamer

Quote
TheGreek
Ticketmaster is in bed with the secondary (scalper sites) market

As personally stated by Prince on his Twitter account when he pulled the plug on his European Piano and Microphone tour, due to exorbitant ticket reselling.

Cheers,
SonicD

Good for Prince, I think...

I never heard anything about this, but reading here [prince.org] there are some mixed emotions about it.

I looked around to see exactly what he will do / if he will do / how he do a rescheduled tour... but didn't see much news.

I am very interested to see if he can come up with a good way to beat the touts and the crazy high fees.

The worst ticketing issue I see is the lies. Lies that good tickets were sold to the public when really they were sold to resellers and everyone is on on the scam.

It is such an obvious scam when tickets go on sale, then are gone in 10 minutes and show up on reseller websites for 4X-10X in 15 minutes.


I will be interested to see how Prince handles tickets on his next tour

Cat Stevens canceled his Beacon show due to insane prices on the secondary market.[www.yahoo.com]

Quote
bleedingman
Cat Stevens canceled his Beacon show due to insane prices on the secondary market.[www.yahoo.com]

Cheers to Yusuf, that deal looks like it was honestly and only about scalping, good for him for making a stand. Artist doing things like that is the only way any of this will ever be fixed. Relying on AGs planning a run for office, or hoping ticket sellers will sell regulate is not going to get it done.

I am all for the market determining the proper prices for tickets, I just think that money should go to the artists not scalpers who are wired into the corrupt system.

Based on the recent Springsteen, Gilmour, etc. (attempted) ticket buying experiences, I'm already fearing the worst should the Stones play NYC any time soon.

Quote
bleedingman
Based on the recent Springsteen, Gilmour, etc. (attempted) ticket buying experiences, I'm already fearing the worst should the Stones play NYC any time soon.

I am with you on the attempted part. There have been shows in recent years that I have tried at, looked, logged in a looked and laughed then skipped versus dealing with this nonsense. They can have that mess and I can live happily without dealing with it.

But of course the Stones are another story, if/when they come close to where I am I'm going. And from what I saw on the Zipper tour they played it pretty close to the vest as far they got the money as opposed to scalpers.

But they were honest out of the gate. The killer seats were labeled by gemstone names (Diamond etc) and the best seast were crazy expensive, but they sold... to rich people... heck some rich people took their kids too. What the heck $10,000 is nothing for a night out with the family and kids to a zillionaire.

But if that is what the market will bare, then OK, it is what it is.

But at least the Stones got the money not scalpers. And the Stones priced the rest of the seats accordingly. Crappy seat up top were 50-60 bucks and of course they did the lucky dips which got you in for 40 bucks.

TL/DR If when the Stones make it back to NYC you will be fine.
They are pros when it comes to dealing with scalper scum (e.g. they always release 400-500 tickets the day of (or before) the show to ease demand)... but of course demand will set the price, but hopefully they will do some deals for people who need a break.

A couple of interesting articles here on this particularly thorny subject, with a little less than a week to go before the UK government publishes its review into the workings of the secondary market as represented by Seatwave, Getmein, Viagogo, and Stubhub.

[www.theguardian.com]

Some of the music industry’s leading players are demanding that ticket touting be made a criminal offence for all UK concerts, plays and sporting events, Guardian Money can reveal.

The calls for ministers to take action come on the eve of the publication of a government-commissioned review of the secondary ticket market, which is dominated by four players: Seatwave, Viagogo, Get Me In and StubHub.

The review has been looking at whether consumers are sufficiently protected by legislation introduced last year, amid claims that ticket resale websites are flouting the rules. The panel is due to issue its findings next week.

In the wake of a growing outcry over the reselling of tickets at vastly inflated prices – in February it emerged that seats at Adele’s London shows were being offered for sale for up to £24,000 each – an anti-touting petition launched about three weeks ago has amassed 38,500 signatures after winning the backing of stars including Mumford & Sons, Little Mix, and Florence + the Machine. One idea gaining support is for the UK to copy Queensland in Australia by banning people from selling on tickets for more than 10% above the original price. The idea of such a cap on resale prices was first floated in 2011 by Labour MP Sharon Hodgson, who is co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on ticket abuse.

In recent years there has been an explosion in the number of so-called bedroom touts, many of whom use software known as “bots” that automatically sweep up huge numbers of tickets the moment they go on sale. They then resell them via secondary market websites. These market themselves as a safe, easy way for fans to buy and sell, but, say some critics, are merely a hi-tech version of the old-fashioned street tout.

In February 2015, in the face of a growing clamour for action, the government reluctantly agreed to change the law. New rules in the Consumer Rights Act 2015 require anyone reselling tickets via a secondary market website to provide details of the block, row and, crucially, seat number, as well as the face value and information about any restrictions. It was hoped these rules would deal a major blow to touts because disclosing the seat number means promoters and venues can, in theory, log on to a secondary market site, check who bought a ticket being sold for profit, and cancel it. But campaigners and consumer bodies such as Which? claim the websites are failing to ensure that the required information is provided when people list tickets for sale.

Touting is illegal in football. Touting was made illegal when the Olympics hit the UK. The government needs to intervene

Adam Tudhope, whose management company represents Mumford & Sons, Laura Marling and Keane, told Money: “Touting is illegal in football. Touting was made illegal when the Olympics hit the UK. The government needs to intervene and make touting a criminal offence for all music, arts, theatre and sporting events. The existing civil legislation isn’t doing the job.”

He adds: “If we had a blanket law that tickets can only be resold for their face value, plus a small handling fee along the lines that the primary ticketing services use – no more than 10% of the face value, for example – it would stop the large-scale industrial touting of tickets dead in its tracks.”The idea of a 10% cap on resale prices was first floated in 2011 by Labour MP Sharon Hodgson, who is co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on ticket abuse. She said that despite the legislation introduced last year, “fans are still being ripped off”, adding: “The public outcry to the failure to enforce the Act is clear from the many tens of thousands of people who have signed the online petition on the parliament website calling for this very fact to be addressed.”

Hodgson’s proposal was based on what happens in Queensland, where since December 2006 it has been an offence to sell or buy tickets to events at nine major venues for more than 10% above the original price. The venues include the Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane, which last year played hosts to acts including Foo Fighters and Ed Sheeran, and the Brisbane Entertainment Centre, where Madonna performed two shows in March and Little Mix played earlier this month.

The 10% cap means that if and when Adele decides to take her world tour to Queensland there would probably be no repeat there of what happened in the UK, where some resale websites were offering seats for her arena dates for 290 times their face value.

Queensland police are responsible for enforcing the legislation and can issue on-the-spot fines. Sellers of “scalped” tickets face a maximum fine of AU$2,356 (£1,200) while buyers face a maximum fine of AU$589 (£300) – however, it is not clear what impact the legislation has had.

Hodgson chose the 10% figure in order to restrict the amount of profit that people could make, while at the same time ensuring the original buyer was able to recoup any fees and costs, such as paying for the ticket to be sent to someone else. The petition, generated by online fan-to-fan ticket exchange Twickets and sponsored by Adam Tudhope, calls on the government to enforce the act, and to go further by forcing ticket resellers to reveal their identities, and by bringing in tougher sanctions for resale websites that do not comply.

In October, the UK government announced an independent review of how the secondary ticket market is working. The review panel, chaired by Professor Michael Waterson, is due to publish its conclusions and recommendations by 26 May. Those worried that the government may decide to resist a tightening of the rules point to the fact that business secretary Sajid Javid, whose department is leading on this issue, has previously spoken out in support of ticket touts, saying they “act like classic entrepreneurs because they fill a gap in the market that they have identified”. Some campaigners have also expressed concern that one of the Department for Culture, Media & Sport’s non-executive directors (senior business figures from outside the department) is Ajay Chowdhury, who until 18 months ago was chief executive of Seatwave.

The resale websites say they rely on sellers to provide accurate information and comply with the law. They say they make it very clear to sellers what their obligations are, but it is possible that they do not always have confirmation of the row and seat number at the time of listing.

Read this article too ...

[www.theguardian.com]

[ I want to shout, but I can hardly speak ]

I can see it coming ..... actual criminalisation of the way these individuals/companies work at the moment. Various parties have tried to defend the completely indefensible for so long, but are increasingly unable to do so ... because sheer greed and stupidity has been allowed to run rampant to the detriment of the ordinary punter who just wants a fair chance at scoring tickets for a chosen event, and not have to compete with criminal activities carried out on an industrial scale.

[ I want to shout, but I can hardly speak ]

[www.theguardian.com]

When David Bennett, a passionate music fan, moved to London at the age of 25, he was desperate for any kind of break in the entertainment industry. So when a job came up with a secondary ticketing website – an online marketplace that matches fans selling gig tickets with buyers – he took it.

A few years later he had quit, disillusioned and appalled by an enterprise that lined the pockets of touts at the expense of fans. “It was my job to look after the power sellers [industry term for ticket touts] and help them get the tickets they wanted,” said Bennett, who asked for his name to be changed for fear of reprisals. “Some of these guys set up companies with eight or 10 employees using multiple credit cards to buy tickets.”

He continued: “I once went to meet a guy in a hotel who took out a stack of credit cards, there must have been 20 or 30 of them, to show how serious he was about getting tickets. I thought that was shady and wasn’t really comfortable dealing with people like that.” The last straw was when one primary ticket website wised up to the actions of one of Bennett’s clients and blocked his credit card.

The tout’s response was to use his daughter’s card instead. “That changed my mind about everything,” said Bennett. He handed in his notice shortly afterwards.

Welcome to the world of ticket touting in the UK. For as long as there have been ticketed events, there have been people trading on the fact that demand for live sports or music events outstrips supply. But the advent of the internet put rocket boosters under the trade. You can still find the old-fashioned touts outside venues, repeating their time-honoured mantra, “Tickets for the gig, buy or sell”, but these days the real money is made online by armchair touts who target the most popular events.

The armchair army will now be gearing up for the annual bonanza that is the British summer. Packed with sporting and musical events such as Wimbledon, Radiohead at the Roundhouse, the England v Sri Lanka Test series, the AC/DC tour – not to mention dozens of hugely popular festivals and outdoor gigs – the next few months will do wonders for the touts’ bank balances.

These individuals can hoover up hundreds of tickets at a time and sell them on at a huge mark-up via resale, or “secondary ticketing”, websites such as Get Me In, StubHub, Viagogo and Seatwave.

The mark-ups can be eye-watering. An extreme example was when a ticket for Adele at the O2 Arena in London in March was listed on Get Me In for £24,840, some 290 times face value. When Elton John tickets went on sale at the end of last year with a top price of £90, minutes later the same tickets appeared on secondary ticket websites priced at £500.

So why is it that touts are able to sell gig tickets at such exorbitant prices?

Most ordinary fans simply don’t stand a chance. Within seconds of an event going on sale, the tickets are harvested in their thousands by a small but ruthlessly efficient army of touts, many using multiple credit cards to bypass the limit on the number of tickets that one person can purchase. They make their profit by flipping the tickets they secure on to the secondary ticketing sites.

Although secondary tickets are often advertised at a huge mark-up, there are usually enough devoted fans willing to pay what it takes to be there.

The tout makes a quick and easy profit, while the resale website takes a commission of anything up to 25%, or sometimes more.

Even more egregiously, secondary sites Get Me In and Seatwave are both owned by Ticketmaster, which ends up getting paid twice over. Everybody wins, except for the fans.

The Observer spoke to one seasoned tout, who has built a business worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, thanks to the secondary ticketing world. Speaking on condition of anonymity, he said that the use of multiple identities and credit cards – to circumvent limits on the number of tickets one person can buy – is commonplace.

“Yeah, that’s standard,” he said. “You can use multiple credit cards, multiple identities … it bypasses the ticket limits.”

Savvy touts, he said, will pay to join fan clubs in the knowledge that bands sometimes release tickets early to their most devoted followers. Even if they have to pay a subscription fee, the profit margin on the ticket easily covers the cost.

“You can make a lot of money,” he said. “If somebody buys £50,000 of tickets, they should be able to make £12,500 out of that.”

A few key players appear to play a pivotal role in the secondary ticketing game. Andrew Newman, for example, is just 25 years old but has built a business, Newman Corporation, worth £1.6m from his home just outside Glasgow.

He declined to comment on how the company operates or the methods he uses to get tickets.

One rung below Newman is Peter Hunter, who runs and part-owns TicketWiz, one of the UK’s most successful secondary ticketing businesses. The company has not published accounts since 2014, but these show a business whose assets increased in value from £157,000 to £270,000 in a year.

Another big player is Norfolk-based Maria Chenery-Woods, owner of Ticket Queen. Companies House filings show that the business had assets totalling £543,000 as of March 2014, up from £395,000 a year before.

Raymond Sullivan owns Double 8 Tickets, a firm with assets of more than £405,000 as of November 2014.

Asked how they got their tickets, one such individual simply said: “Front door, back door, side door.” An investigation by the Observer revealed at least 10 businesses of similar scale, although the likelihood is that there are dozens, if not hundreds, more.

Thom Yorke of Radiohead, another band fighting for fairer ticket prices. Photograph: David Wolff - Patrick/Redferns

Whatever one makes of the morality of the ticketing money-go-round, some experts believe that the rules and regulations governing the system are routinely flouted. “There is no lawful way to harvest tickets in bulk,” argues Reg Walker, Britain’s leading ticket fraud expert and a director of ticket security firm the Iridium Consultancy.

He points to the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading regulations 2008, which prohibit “falsely representing oneself as a consumer”. Anyone masquerading as different people to get hold of multiple tickets for the purposes of a sale risks breaching these regulations, he says. As for selling the tickets on, the Consumer Contracts regulations 2013 say that any trader using online secondary ticketing platforms should provide their identity and their address or contact details.

But punters will struggle to find an event on one of the secondary ticketing websites with information about who the seller is.

Last year measures were included in the Consumer Rights Act 2015 that require anyone who resells an event ticket via a secondary market website to provide details of the seat row and number, as well as the face value. Critics say that the secondary sites are routinely ignoring this requirement, too.

In November consumer group Which? said it had spent eight weeks investigating and had found that the rules were “being repeatedly flouted on all the major secondary ticketing sites”.

Often there is very little information provided about where someone who buys a ticket will end up sitting. Campaigners say such information would make it easier to cross-check whether tickets were being sold by genuine fans or touts in it for the money.

“It does appear that some secondary ticketing companies are breaking the law in the course of their business,” said Nitin Khandia, director at BTMK Solicitors, a legal adviser on consumer-related problems. These regulations are supposed to be enforced by local authorities, but with central government cuts biting they lack the resources to police the existing law.

It is not in the interests of resale websites, which make commission on every ticket sold, to crack down on touts who flout the law. And the touts themselves certainly have no interest in derailing the gravy train.

Another tout, who declined to give his name, said: “The whole system works to the detriment of the consumer. But what does taking the moral high ground mean for touts? It means bankruptcy.”

One measure of the power that touts wield is the extent to which they are not just tolerated by secondary websites but courted by them.

According to industry sources, back in 2011, before launching in the UK, StubHub threw a lavish party for some of the UK’s biggest touts at the Radisson Blu hotel in London’s Fitzrovia. Unlike Ticketmaster, which can boost secondary sales on Get Me In and Seatwave by redirecting fans to those sites, StubHub needed the touts on board – after all, they had the tickets.

“These sites are protecting the identity of the touts, and they’re doing it because they need them,” said Labour MP Sharon Hodgson, who is co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on ticket abuse. “Nobody’s policing this. I would say that the secondary market, and especially touting, is a parasitical business. They’re making money off the backs of other people’s hard work.”

The ticket sites have developed sophisticated lobbying efforts to support their opposition to any measures that might curb touting. Fan Freedom UK is a website that casts itself as a grassroots organisation for fans, battling against plans that might prevent ordinary people from selling on their tickets.

Only a prolonged look through its US parent website reveals the truth of who is behind it: “Initial funding for Fan Freedom and Fan Freedom UK was provided by StubHub, an eBay company.”

So why, with all this apparent evidence of dubious practices, is the government not doing more to crack down on ticket touting via resale sites? One of the reasons is that not all MPs are as anti-secondary ticketing as Hodgson. In a debate on secondary ticketing, Conservative MP Philip Davies branded fellow MPs trying to curb touting in the secondary market as “socialists”.

One of the arguments deployed by Davies is that curbing ticket resales would disadvantage the ordinary fan who simply wants to recoup money for a ticket he or she can no longer use.

But according to Reg Walker, legitimate resellers are very much in the minority on the major websites. “There was a WWE [wrestling] event in September where there were only 14,000 tickets released and 1,346 advertised on Get Me In the next day, so 10% of tickets have appeared immediately on the secondary sales.

“Are those people who had bought tickets and immediately decided they couldn’t go? Of course not. The overwhelming majority of tickets on resale platforms are being sold by traders.”

Now, however, the government has a new opportunity to tighten the law on secondary ticket sales.

Last October the government launched a long-awaited review of how the secondary ticket market was working, and whether consumers were sufficiently protected by the new rules. The review panel, chaired by Professor Michael Waterson, is due to release its findings in the next 10 days.

A number of politicians and music industry representatives are calling on the government to enforce the provision already made in the Consumer Rights Act and, ideally, go further by requiring ticket resellers to reveal their identities. “I’d like to see some form of enforcement,” said Hodgson. “The regulation and the laws that we have should be upheld.”

But those who will perhaps have more clout are the growing number of artists, including Elton John, Adele, Mumford & Sons, Little Mix, Royal Blood and Coldplay, who have become increasingly vocal in the past few years in their opposition to the way touts are allowed to use secondary sites. At the end of last year, Chris Martin, lead singer of Coldplay, co-signed a letter to the government with a number of other high-profile musicians calling for changes to the law to prevent ticketing resale sites from “ripping off fans”.

There are also now alternatives emerging to the secondary sites such as mobile ticket exchange app Twickets, which allows fans to offer tickets at face value or below for events they can no longer attend. Its founder, Richard Davies, is fed up with the greed of touts impinging on the rights of music and sports fans, and rejects the notion that touting is simply the free market in action.

“The argument that a crackdown on secondary sales is dangerous because it infringes people’s rights and could drive touting underground is nonsense, because we are already witnessing illicit behaviour,” he said. “Profiteering and deception are rife on the secondary platforms. Those selling through these channels are regularly breaking the law and the platforms themselves do very little about it.”

Ticketmaster failed to answer when asked to respond to this article, and StubHub declined to comment. ......... says it all really !!

TOUT MARK-UPS

Before and after… what they cost when they first go on sale and what they cost when they land on secondary sites

ADELE
O2, London, 21 March 2016
Face value: £85
Price on Getmein: £22,000 - or £24,840 when fees are included


RICHARD ASHCROFT
Albert Hall, Manchester, 14 May 2016
Face value: £40
Price on StubHub: £900

RADIOHEAD
Roundhouse, London, 28 May 2016
Face value: £65
Price on Viagogo: £3,934

COLDPLAY
Wembley Stadium, London, 15 June 2016
Face value: £50
Price on Seatwave: £549

BEYONCé
Wembley Stadium, London, 2 July 2016
Face value: £50
Price on Get Me In: £825

DAVID BOWIE PROM
Royal Albert Hall, London, 29 July 2016
Face value: £20
Price on Viagogo: £250

[ I want to shout, but I can hardly speak ]

I'd pay £500 not to have to sit through Coldplay

Quote
exhpart
I'd pay £500 not to have to sit through Coldplay

><

[ I want to shout, but I can hardly speak ]

Not just concert goers that deal with this problem...I was in New York City last week and everywhere people were talking about how to get tickets to see Hamilton. Nice to see that the theater is trying to do something to stop the scalpers.

[www.nytimes.com]

[www.ft.com]

Yeah yeah yeah, absolute bollocks.....

[ I want to shout, but I can hardly speak ]

I don't believe this will be stopped there is too much money involved and the government seem pretty uninterested in doing anything about it.

Nate

Quote
Nate
I don't believe this will be stopped there is too much money involved and the government seem pretty uninterested in doing anything about it.

Nate

That's my fear too, all the indications are that the government is not actually interested in doing anything about it. It's not that they might fail to see that there is a problem and that in the interest of fairness it does need legislating against, because the evidence is so completely and utterly overwhelming. It's just that if they are to be judged on their past record of getting to grips with this matter, they will yet again fail to do so. Ultimately, they will have to be dragged kicking and screaming all the way. So be it ... dragged kicking and screaming all the way they will surely be, because neither the public - nor those actually in the music business - who favour legislation to outlaw the current activities of these sorts of organisations are going to let this issue go, the momentum for intervention of the legislative kind is now simply too great .....

[ I want to shout, but I can hardly speak ]

It's been an issue in Canada this week. One of our most popular bands, The Tragically Hip, have announced their last tour as lead singer Gord Downie has terminal cancer. They have always been strongly fan driven, with fan club pre-sales. Tix went on sale this week to fan club members, were sold out in seconds, and on StubHub in minutes for wildly inflated charges. The provincial government is threatening an investigation. Again. At least the CBC is trying to air the last show live - it might reduce ticket demand and leave some of these thieves hanging. But this one was really supposed to be for the fans, who are gutted. It HAS to stop. Pauly - make it stop!

[www.thestar.com]

I used to love the ticket scalpers! I scalped for many a show, always at lower prices. The scalpers panic when it gets close to show time, they don't want to be stuck w/ tickets and they sell them for less so they don't lose all the money.

I remember I got $300 Stones seats for $150 back in, '99 I believe. Ended up about 10 rows back from the stage!

The main problem is that I've heard too many stories of people getting screwed by fake tickets, which I guess is too easy to do these days, so I decided to never use scalpers again.

Well, the UK government 'enquiry' into the entire issue that resulted in a report being issued on the 26th of last month barely got a mention in the press. The report basically stated that the amendment to the consumer rights act going back several months - the major requirement of which was that secondary tickets sites display BLOCK/ROW/SEAT NUMBER for anything they're selling - was by and large being completely ignored. All the report recommended was that the four major sites that represent the secondary market get their wrists slapped ... as in 'naughty naughty, please obey the law' !!

In other words, they'll carry on as they have been for years ....... nothing in the short term is going to change !

[ I want to shout, but I can hardly speak ]

Here ya go ........

[www.gov.uk]

[ I want to shout, but I can hardly speak ]

Go Paulywaul !

Quote
exhpart
I'd pay £500 not to have to sit through Coldplay

or ,for myself, to Beyonce

Quote
SwayStones

Quote
exhpart
I'd pay £500 not to have to sit through Coldplay

or ,for myself, to Beyonce

One of my best friends paid his niece $200 in addition to the cost of tickets to take his youngest daughter to a One Direction concert. He said it was worth every penny for him not to have to be inside that building. I think I agree with him.

Peace,
Mr DJA

Quote
EJM
Go Paulywaul !

I'm afraid 'I ain't goin' nowhere' (as the song goes) on this one, and more to the point - neither is the UK government on this particular issue !!

Seems they are not remotely interested in reining in the secondary ticketing sites for their unscrupulous and dishonest practices that make life such hell for those mere mortals among us that want nothing more than to be given 'a fair crack' at getting a ticket for an event. So there we have it !!

Next ...........

[ I want to shout, but I can hardly speak ]

Quote
SomeTorontoGirl
It's been an issue in Canada this week. One of our most popular bands, The Tragically Hip, have announced their last tour as lead singer Gord Downie has terminal cancer. They have always been strongly fan driven, with fan club pre-sales. Tix went on sale this week to fan club members, were sold out in seconds, and on StubHub in minutes for wildly inflated charges. The provincial government is threatening an investigation. Again. At least the CBC is trying to air the last show live - it might reduce ticket demand and leave some of these thieves hanging. But this one was really supposed to be for the fans, who are gutted. It HAS to stop. Pauly - make it stop!

[www.thestar.com]

Hi STG: Any idea when they will tour the states?