Where Do All the Best Tix Go?

Fans have long wondered why it's nearly impossible to get good seats to big shows — and now they're beginning to get some answers, as Ticketmaster's attempt to merge with Live Nation has brought congressional scrutiny to ticketing and scalping issues in recent months. Top concert–industry sources confirm to Rolling Stone that the practice of skimming the best seats off the top of the pool and selling them at huge markups happens at nearly all concerts.

Even some artists are going public with their concerns. "The venue, the promoter, the ticketing agency and often the artist camp (artist, management and agent) take tickets from the pool of available seats and feed them directly to the re–seller," NIN frontman Trent Reznor wrote on his blog recently. "This is a very common practice that happens more often than not."

In recent testimony to Congress, Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff confirmed 15 to 20 percent of tickets — "the vast majority of the best seats" — are regularly excluded from the public on–sale, and industry sources say that number could be as high as 30 percent for many shows. Those tickets make their way to the secondary market — including ticket brokers, websites like eBay and StubHub, and Ticketmaster's own TicketsNow and TicketExchange sites — in a variety of ways.