I recently hoped to get into a very popular show at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. I had missed the tickets going on sale so I decided to try my luck outside the club the night of the show.

But this is what I encountered:

1. All tickets were will call so you had to get them at the club the night of the show.

2. All sales were limited to two tickets.

3. All tickets had to be picked up by the owner (ID required).

4. As soon as you got your tickets, you (and your pair, if you had one) were required to go into the club.

Wicked genius. Frustrated as I was at not being able to get in, I had to admire the scheme.

Perhaps this would have some limitations with larger venues or family events but it sure put the kibosh on scalping in this particular case.

Your solution will not work for the simple reason it ignores basic supply and demand economics. You are implying knowledgeable or "real" fans won't sell. Baloney, the incentive is too great.

A great example was in Marketwatch yesterday: "There are 9,000 tickets available for one event in a certain venue. About 4,500 of the tickets are earmarked to the Hannah Montana Fan Club, which gets first dibs. Those go in minutes. The next 4,500 are sold online through TicketMaster, which is also holding some tickets back for VIPs, promotions and the like. So let's say about 4,200 tickets are then made "available" to the public. When the clock starts for them to be sold online, an overwhelming 172,000 people, on average, are logged on.""

When demand is almost 20x the supply, many of those unfulfilled fans will be willing to offer much more than face value to get in. That unmet demand is what drives prices up - and the aftermarket in general. And I mean real transaction prices not the BS prices you see dillusional sellers asking at first before the market reaches equilibrium.

If demand is off the charts like this concert tour, and the real prices paid reach a certain point even the most ardent fan has to think twice about how bad they want to go. The proceeds could mean a rent or car payment, or vacation, or an awesome TV. Everyone has their price, no matter how big a "fan" they are. Where do you think all these tickets on eBay and StubHub and Craigslist come from? There are only so many professional resellers in the country.

I am fascinated at the hysteria over the possible use of bots, homeless people, backdoor deals and other scalper boogeyman urban legends. If you are a season ticketholder, quick look left and right, you are surrounded by the real scalpers!

Scalpers are among the lowest life forms on earth, neck in neck with ticketmaster for their shameless exploitation of people who genuinely love music.

If people are willing to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars to see big name acts, then I suppose those artists are entitled to it, and I generally say more power to them. It's just unfortunate that only the very wealthiest fans will ever get an opportunity to see them perform. But if anyone deserves the money it's the artists.

What I find unconscionable is the thought of paying a several hundred percent commission to someone whose main skill is the ability to stand in one place for a long time, or alternately to click a mouse button. A trained rat can do this.

And I'll never understand how ticketmaster manages to escape antitrust action. They seem to be a textbook case of a monopoly that harms consumers and agressively stifles competition.

For bands that want genuine fans to be able to afford their shows, there are some low tech solutions that seem to work. They can enforce a ticket limit and hold all tickets at will call. Concertgoers then present ID at the door to prove they are the original ticket buyers. I've started to see this more often recently. Maybe it will continue to catch on.

Perhaps more venues should try doing that I could see that thwarting many a scalper. Though it does kind of suck for those that pre-purchased their tickets and something comes up so they can't go and then they can't transfer their tickets to a friend or just get rid of them on stub hub, craigslist, ect.

But it probably wouldn't work for season ticket holders to sporting events. I have friends and family that have season tickets to football or baseball and they simply can't go to every single game each season. So I think it's their right to sell their tickets to people who can go, though usually they are lucky just to get face value, especially if the team isn't doing well that year or the team that is coming no one cares about.

Welcome to ticketscalpers.com! Yes, we've got those Hannah Montana tickets - which don't *officially* go on sale for another two weeks. Click here to pre-order!

Note: To verify that you're a true fan, we may ask you random questions about Hannah Montana or your other favorite artists.

I can't believe no one else has brought up the giant elephant in the room. You're talking about Ticketmaster! The virtual monopoly with excessive "convenience" charges!

Back in the day, way before the internet, I stayed out all night to get tickets for a few concerts. Those times when I was first in line, I was always surprised and disappointed to see the quality of the tickets my efforts provided. I could barely see the stage, and the tickets were usually no better than if I had gotten up at a reasonable hour to buy the tickets.

It was always obvious to me that there was no way that individual scalpers working by themselves would be able to get that many tickets ahead of me. So, it was equally obvious that Ticketmaster was in on it. In addition to setting aside prime tickets for the act/promotor/venue, I always suspected that Ticketmaster itself was withholding the best seats to sell at higher than face value to brokers.

A 2-second web search found this link: http://www.jimdero.com/News2003/Sept14Ticketmaster.htm. I'm guessing that a little more searching will provide more corroboration.