One of the staple topics of Phish discussion on the internet as far back as I can remember, when I first got internet access and hopped onboard the old “rec.music.phish” newsgroup in 1994, is “scalping” and the extreme dislike for those engaged in reselling Phish tickets for well above “face”.

People were complaining then about “scalpers” and three digit prices being asked for tickets to the sold-out Halloween show at my hometown hockey rink, the Glens Falls Civic Center (capacity 5,500), during Phish “1.0’s” meteoric rise in popularity in those years.

The complaints have persisted for every Halloween, Vegas and New Years Eve run since then, up to and including a thread on the .net forum last week beginning with a complaint by user @ashefly.

In reading Dean Budnick and Josh Baron’s new book, Ticket Masters, recently reviewed by Jim Raras in the Phish.net blog, I was therefore mildly surprised to find out that “scalping” has a long and controversial history, going back well beyond Phish and modern arena rock shows, to shows in pre-Civil War America:

An excerpt from the book explains:

Ticket scalping, however, was by no means a recent phenomenon, as it plagued Charles Dickens during his second tour of America in 1867-68. The author’s manager, George Dolby, estimated that just before the Boston box office opened in November, "by eight o'clock in the morning, the queue was nearly half a mile long and about that time the employers of the persons who had been standing in the streets all night began to arrive and take their places." A frenzy soon ensued, leading contemporaries to decry "the horrid speculators who buy all the good tickets and sell them again at exorbitant prices." Dickens himself responded in a letter to his sister-in-law: "We are at wits' end how to keep tickets out of the hands of speculators... The young under-graduates of Cambridge have made a representation to Longfellow that they are five hundred strong and cannot get one ticket. I don't know what is to be done, but I suppose I must read there, somehow." When tickets went on sale in New York, Dickens reported that "speculators went up and down offering twenty dollars for any body's place. The money was in no case accepted. But one man sold two tickets for the second, third and fourth nights; his payment in exchange being one ticket for the first night; fifty dollars and a 'brandy cock-tail.'"

This matter was of particular concern to Dickens, not only because he wanted to satisfy everyone's interest, but also because frustration led to intimations that he was in league with the resellers. "We cannot beat the speculators in our tickets. We sell no more than six to anyone person for the course of four readings; but these speculators who sell at gready increased prices and make large profits will employ any number of men to buy. One of the chief of them — now living in this house, in order that he may move as we move! — can put on fifty people in any place we go to; and thus he gets three hundred tickets into his own hands."

Yet Dickens was not the first to find himself traveling with ticket scalpers. His predicament echoed the events of 1851, when the "Swedish Nightingale," singer Jenny Lind, toured the United States. An article entided "The Jenny Lind Fracas" outliried a combustible situation in Hartford, Connecticut. "It appeared very evident, as early as Friday afternoon, July 4th, that there was much dissatisfaction on the part of a majority of our citizens, in consequence of the tickets to the concerts getting unfairly into the hands of speculators. ... [When tickets went on sale after a fifteen-minute delay] there was a rush for the ticket stand. It was soon discovered that a very large number of tickets for the very best seats in the house had already been disposed of; and in the course of an hour and a half every ticket in first hands was sold, and yet hundreds, perhaps thousands who wished to procure tickets, were not supplied. The next morning large painted signs were floating from four different places around the State House Square, with the words, "Jenny Lind tickets for sale here." The regular price of the tickets was three and four dollars. The speculators demanded four and six dollars.... The general belief that [Lind's] agents and speculators were in fact bona fide partners in the swindle — for they travel together from place to place — raised the indignation of our citizens to an unnatural degree."

Collusion between resellers and insiders was long suspected and often documented. A letter to the editor in the April 5, 1908 New York Times, signed by Grandpa, related his attempts to attend the circus at Madison Square Garden with his family. Upon arriving at the facility, "The box office man smilingly informed me 'All sold out.' And at my elbow stood the bargain speculator. 'Saturday afternoon, sure!' and from his well filled satchel he produced a bunch of tickets and showed how well he was stocked.... The speculator was cheek by jowl with the management, for he stood well into the lobby, only a few feet from the box office. I suppose this condition of affairs will endure as long as fools continue to buy tickets from speculators but there should be some pretense of protection for people like me who can’t help themselves.”

Over the following decades, local, state and even national officials looked into doing just that. In 1927 New York City resident and newly appointed United States Attorney Charles H. Tuttle hosted hearings on the matter. Producer Arthur Hammerstein testified to the corruption and graft of "gougers and ticket brokers." The investigation swiftly revealed that box office workers were funneling tickets to agents in exchange for monetary kickbacks, with individuals often attaining $50,000 to $75,000 per year. The prevailing "commission" at that time was a dollar per ticket for primo seats that otherwise would be held by the box office, which led to the early closing of the show Yours Truly, when brokers eventually refused to accept the $1.50 charged by the musical's George Buck, who soon came to be known on Broadway as "Buck and a Half."

The situation hadn't changed considerably by the time of a 1949 probe initiated by John M. Murtagh, commissioner of New York City's Department of Investigation. Two pieces of industry jargon soon captivated reporters and entered the public parlance. The word "digger" described those individuals who had once vexed Charles Dickens, hired by brokers to wait in line when tickets first went on sale. "Ice" was the term for the money directed to box office officials by the agencies to ensure a steady flow of choice tickets to popular shows. However, other than the proliferation of such colorful language, little came of Murtagh's efforts.

— Excerpt from Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How The Public Got Scalped, pp. 20-21 by and © 2011 Dean Budnick and Josh Baron, quoted by permission.

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