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Whatever the odds were of a true-blue Hip fan getting into a show before the cancer news broke, they can only have been decimated. The Hip is a terrific and legendary Canadian band, but it’s no hit factory. Its last chart-topper was a decade ago. Tickets for the latest tour would likely have sold briskly, even if no one knew of Downie’s illness. But once that news broke, demand went through the roof. Anyone with a touch of nostalgia for youthful days rocking out, beer in hand, to “Fifty Mission Cap” or wearing out a Hip CD on a summer roadtrip — i.e., an entire generation of Canadians — naturally felt that pang to see the band one last time, even if they’d never planned to before. Diehards were suddenly competing with a nation of lapsed but sentimental fans and, of course, the scalpers who saw them coming a mile away.

What followed was disaster. No one knows how many tickets were made available for pre-sale, but it can’t have been a lot, and a great deal (again, no one knows the number) were snapped up by scalpers using automated ticket-buying “bots,” who immediately jacked up the price on resale sites. Fan and media outrage ensued. But while it may be indelicate to say so, had the Hip and its managers really wanted only their most devoted fans to get seats at affordable prices, it would have been more effective to hold back revealing Downie’s situation for a week or two.

The scalpers have been taking all the blame, naturally, and politicians keep threatening to finally think of some way to stop them. But scalpers are just a symptom of a screwed-up system. We all know tickets are scarce and typically priced well below what the market will bear, leaving room for anyone who can get one to flip it for a profit. But even that simple supply-and-demand lesson masks the absurdity of the concert business, where everyone who stands between the band and the audience is in on a scheme to extract more money out of a ticket than the price printed on it.