At last, the curtain is being lifted on artists' involvement in the secondary ticketing market. The Wall Street Journal's Ethan Smith has an excellent article on Ticketmaster, secondary ticketing services and the extent to which some artists and managers are profiting from legal scalping.

A focal point of the article is TicketExchange, a secondary ticket marketplace owned by Ticketmaster. Here's what the piece has to say about TicketExchange and common practices employed by artists and promoters:

• Ticketmaster "routinely" offers to list hundreds of top tickets per concert on one of its two secondary sites (the other is TicketsNow) and divides the extra revenue with artists and promoters.
• "Virtually every major concert tour today" involves the setting aside by artists and promoters of some tickets for sale on the secondary market. The tickets appear to be priced and sold by fans and ticket brokers. The article gave an example of a ticket being priced at an auction-like $1,164.01.
• Ticketmaster's senior vice president for legal affairs admitted the company's "marketplace" sites only rarely list tickets being sold by fans and that the vast majority of tickets are sold in cooperation with artists and managers.
• But TicketExhange had been billing itself as a marketplace where fans sold to other fans. Wrote Smith: "After inquiries from The Wall Street Journal, the 'tickets posted by fans' message was removed from the TicketExchange Web site. Prices also fell, narrowing the gap between Ticketmaster and TicketExchange Marketplace."
• "Tickets that do not sell at the inflated platinum prices can also be moved between TicketExchange and Ticketmaster's lower-priced main inventory, without any signal to consumers that the ticket's status has been reduced."

Additional reading:

• "An Archived Senate Hearing, Surprising Proclamations" at Coolfer
• "Ticketmaster, Live Nation, and the 'secondary market'" at Hitsville
• "Scalping" at the Lefsetz Letter