Want to know why you can’t get tickets for Adele at Madison Square Garden in September without auctioning a kidney? New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman knows why: buying tickets in the city, he wrote in a report released on Thursday, is “a fixed game”.

Spurred by numerous consumer and performer reports of “immediate sell-outs” and “outrageous fees”, the attorney general’s office investigated and found that users trying to see acts such as U2 or Bruce Springsteen will find that the majority of seats aren’t even for sale.

Schneiderman’s investigation found half that seats at many popular concerts are never even made available to the general public. A single high-tech scalper bought more than 1,000 tickets in less than a minute for one U2 show at Madison Square Garden. Tickets for Springsteen’s 2016 River tour started appearing on secondary ticket-selling sites like StubHub before they went on sale. Some were offered for $5,800.

The three-year-long investigation will confirm what many concert and theatre goers have long feared. While Schneiderman’s team targeted mainly concert venues, complaints to his office came from across the New York performance world and will be familiar to anyone trying to secure tickets for sold-out Broadway shows such as Hamilton and A View From the Bridge.

“Ticketing is a fixed game,” Schneiderman said in a statement. “My office will continue to crack down on those who break our laws, prey on ordinary consumers and deny New Yorkers affordable access to the concerts and sporting events they love. This investigation is just the beginning of our efforts to create a level playing field in the ticket industry.”

Those that do manage to bag a seat will likely run into a raft of fees that inflate the price of a ticket by 21%.



Performance venue Madison Square Garden, ticketing firm giant Ticketmaster and eBay-owned ticket re-seller StubHub came under particular scrutiny in the investigation.

HELLO FROM THE OTHER SIDE I MUST HAVE TRIED 1000 TIMES TO GET ADELE TICKETS IT WAS BREAKING MY HEART — INTJosh (@JoshTRoden) December 17, 2015

The interaction between a hapless fan and the venue holding the concert or show usually goes something like this:

Log on as soon as tickets go on sale to see what tickets are available from the ticket seller. “Before a member of the public can buy a single ticket for a major entertainment event, over half of the available tickets are either put on ‘hold’ and reserved for a variety of industry insiders including the venues, artists or promoters.” And there’s usually a big section reserved for people who hold high-end credit cards too.

Find what looks like a reasonable base ticket price – between $39.50 and $149.50 – only to find that it has gone up considerably even before the sale begins. “Our examination of ticket fees set by 150 venues in New York raises concerns, revealing that unclear ‘convenience charges’, ‘service fees’ and ‘processing fees’ sometimes reach outlandish levels,” wrote the investigators. One bull-riding competition at Madison Square Garden included an extra $42 in surcharges.

Check to see if a secondary dealer has tickets for a reasonable price. Brokers “mark up the price of those tickets – by an estimated 49% on average, but sometimes by more than 1,000% – yielding easy profits. In at least one circumstance, a ticket was resold at 7,000% of face value.”

Check eBay. On eBay, the report said, buyers were especially likely to encounter someone selling “speculative tickets” – tickets they don’t have in hand, but will be able to purchase if they can charge the user a high enough price.

See what’s on television that night.

The company said that beyond simple venue-owner greed, ticket brokers were acting illegally, often using bots to buy huge numbers of tickets immediately as they were released to the public – an activity, the office said, that ought to be a criminal offense rather than a civil one.

One unlicensed one-man operation, armed with a sophisticated bot and a thousand credit cards, made $1.4m in a single year; a larger-scale illegal business made $42m in 2013. Even the profits of legal, licensed ticket brokers – $25m over the same period – “are direct evidence of the prices that the public pays on the secondary ticket markets”.

“Whereas in many areas of the economy the arrival of the internet and online sales has yielded lower prices and greater transparency, event ticketing is the great exception,” said the report’s authors.