Ever wonder how ticket scalpers -- excuse me, ticket brokers -- always seem to wind up with all the best tickets for the big shows? Well, here's your answer: TicketBots.net, an online retailer where your wildest front-row dreams can be had starting for about $750, which will get you web-robot software capable of scooping up scalpable golden-circle seats by the bushel.

I'd like to tell you more about this site, such as who runs it and what, other than buying up blocks of tickets to scalp, one might use such a product for. But when I sent a message identifying myself as a newspaper reporter who covers the ticket-scalping industry, the agent on duty wrote back the following reply:

I don't think, I can help you with anything here..

Now that is a pity...

I was recently perusing the Durham Performing Arts Center website to check the date on a concert, when I saw something I hadn't noticed before. Tucked into the bottom of almost every listing was this notice:

NOTICE OF PROHIBITION OF ONLINE RESALE OF ADMISSION TICKETS
Pursuant to §14-344.1(b) of the General Statutes of North Carolina, the Durham Performing Arts Center has filed a notice with the NC Secretary of State prohibiting the Online Resale of Admission Tickets to this event.

This goes back to a story I wrote last year, about parasites -- broker sites that try to pass themselves off as venue websites, even though they're populated by scalpers selling tickets well above face price. After that story ran, DPAC management met with the Secretary of State's office and decided to give prohibiting online resales a try. So far, it's working at least some of the time.

"We filed our first prohibitions early last fall," says DPAC general manager Bob Klaus. "We tested five shows and to our amazement, many of the biggest ticket re-selling sites dropped those listings."

Brokers, of course, don't agree that this is a good thing. The argument for "secondary market sales" is that it's classic free-market economics based on supply and demand. The ticket-broker industry's position is that attempts to regulate ticket resales are misguided and even counterproductive.

"You can't regulate the resale of tickets," declares Gary Adler, general counsel for the Washington, D.C.-based National Association of Ticket Brokers. "If you try and make restrictions, you are limiting the amount of tickets in the market. The secondary market when it's open and free is a beautiful thing, it puts tickets into people's hands at a fair market price. Maybe that's more than face value, but that's the band's fault for not having more accurate information about what they should be charging."

Whether you agree or disagree with that viewpoint, it's an issue that won't be going away anytime soon. In fact, you can probably count on the NATB lobbying the North Carolina legislature about amending this law before too long. For more, see the story in Sunday's paper.

In the old days, ticket-scalping was a pretty unsophisticated business. Scalpers would get people to stand in line, buy what tickets they could, jack the price and try to sell them. But online ticket-selling has introduced ever-more-complex ways to gouge people, some of them quite sneaky. The latest wrinkle is the "sham site," websites that look like they're connected to a venue -- but they're not, and you can wind up paying big bucks for lousy seats if you're not careful. For more, see the story in Sunday's paper.

ADDENDUM (7/14/11): Followup editorial.

SECOND ADDENDUM (9/10/11): More on brokers.

So the ticket-scalping story from last Sunday's paper is the subject of an editorial in Friday's paper -- check it out. The story also drew a response from one of the acts mentioned, which is below.

Dear Mr. Menconi,

Tony Margherita
manager, Wilco

You could say that concert-ticket prices are like the weather, in that everybody complains without doing anything about 'em -- except to go right on paying sky-high prices. Prices have only gotten higher on the "secondary" ticket-selling sites, where people buy and sell tickets with little regard for what the original face price was. And when it comes to where those tickets originally came from, more often than not the fix is in.

So even though, say, Taylor Swift's upcoming Raleigh show has been "officially" sold-out for months, plenty of tickets are still available, just as long as you're willing to shell out big bucks. Confused at to how and why that happens? See this story from Sunday's paper.

ADDENDUM (5/23/10): More on V.I.P. tickets.