Fans want to know why they can’t get Tragically Hip tickets.

“I’m angry — I’m sure a lot of scalpers are making money off of the love that people have for the Tragically Hip,” said Shawn Hayward from Montreal. “I don’t think that’s right.”

Hayward said he’s frustrated that scalpers appear to be using sophisticated software called “ticket bots” that scoop up large quantities of tickets at a time.

Jeff McFayden, who’s seen the Hip perform 15-20 times, said he feels “shut out” of their last tour.

“When you hear about these bots . . . it’s ridiculous.”

Each time a new round of Hip tickets was released online for their upcoming summer tour, they were sold out in a flash, leaving fans with unanswered questions:

How many seats were up for sale?

How many were available to the general public?

Why does it appear so easy for scalpers to get seats?

And what measures have the band and its ticket vendor, Ticketmaster, taken to prevent scalping?

The Star has asked those questions repeatedly of the Hip’s promoter, Live Nation, and the band’s management company, Eggplant Entertainment, and its vendor, Ticketmaster.

So far, no company will say what it has done — if anything — to block “bot” technology from scooping up tickets for the Hip’s Man, Machine, Poem tour.

Nor will anyone say how many tickets for the now-sold-out shows were actually offered for sale to the general public to begin with.

Carrie Davis, chief communications officer for Live Nation, referred questions about ticket sales to Live Nation’s subsidiary, Ticketmaster.

Reached by email, Ticketmaster spokesperson Catherine Martin declined to speak on the record. Instead, she directed the Star to previously published news stories about other tours in lieu of an official statement regarding Hip ticket scalping.

There are many reasons why fans had trouble getting tickets, from these so-called “ticket bots” to a demand that greatly outpaces supply. Although no one told us how many tickets were on sale for the whole tour, venue capacity suggests that only about 300,000 people could attend.

Only about half of available tickets are ever released to the general public, a recent report, theNew York attorney general’s officefound, with the other half being earmarked for industry insiders and special pre-sales.

Many of those tickets held back from the general public wind up in the hands of scalpers, the report found.

“Nobody knows how many tickets are in the market,” Pascal Courty, an economist at the University of Victoria who studies scalping, told the Star in a previous interview.

“I think artists should be honest.”

Ticketmaster would not say how many tickets were made available to the general public.

It directed the Star to tour promoter Live Nation and the band.

Once again, Live Nation told us to talk to Ticketmaster.

Eggplant Entertainment, which is run by Patrick Sambrook and Michael Schipper according to documents filed with the province, did not respond.

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This is not to say that the Hip’s team did nothing for fans. The band has tried to accommodate the “overwhelming demand” by adding tour dates and redesigning the stage to add more seats to venues.

For the most recent crop of tickets released on Tuesday, the Hip limited the number oftickets thatcould be purchased at one time to just two per order.

But the team remains silent on what steps were taken to block ticket bots. The Star asked Eggplant and Live Nation what they did specifically to prevent scalping.

Live Nation’s Davis declined to comment.

Again, Eggplant never responded.

For its part, Ticketmaster has come out against ticket bots in the past and has supported anti-bot legislation.

In an interview in May with tech blog Recode, Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino said 90 per cent of purchases during the first few minutes of a hot sale are bots.

Ticketmaster offers a few services to get at the bots, including tech tools like Captcha. Yet scalping technology is often one step ahead of the vendor, Rapino said.

“It’s an arms race,” he said.

There are things the entertainment industry can do to stop the bots, says Stuart Ross, an executive at Red Light Management who has been the tour director for such artists as Tom Waits and Weezer.

For Adele’s most recent tour, the artist had people monitor online ticket sales for suspicious purchases, such as a big batch of tickets from the same IP address.

Credit-card authentification requires the person who bought the ticket to present the card they used to buy the tickets at the gate, which also cuts down on the bots.

But it’s up to the artist and their promoter to determine which tickets will require authentication and which won’t, or how much they want to scan for suspicious purchases.

Some seats for the Hip’s concert did require credit-card authentification, but no one will say how many. Nor would anyone with the Hip’s team say what measures they’ve taken to track suspicious purchases.

Meanwhile, the provincial government is trying to come up with ways to fix the scalping problem. Ontario has agreed to re-examine its ticketing regulations, which it amended last year to make scalping legal.