I'm still a little puzzled and curious about this thing with Stubhub and the tickets to Gypsy. The best seats are $471 each at the box office. At the moment, the Stubhub site has someone offering up to four seats in Row F for tonight for $940 each. Lately, there always seem to be four tickets available in Row F for varying high prices and others in the next few rows for slightly lower prices. But to add to the mystery, the site also has a line that says, of tonight's performance, "3 tickets were sold in the last 7 days."
So what I'm thinking — and please correct me if you have direct knowledge or a better hunch — is that these higher-priced seats are being offered by some person or agency with ties to the box office and that they're house seats. House seats are tickets that folks involved with the show can arrange for their friends or contacts to buy at face value at the last minute. So if they sell on Stubhub for more money, great…but if they don't sell by an hour or so before the show, they go off Stubhub and the box office offers them for face value or less at the ticket window.
The point is that somebody is going to sit in those seats for that performance and someone will make money off them. But maybe I'm wrong about this.
Meanwhile, one of my frequent correspondents here, Prentice Hammond, wrote to say…
I don't know why ticket pricing is not more like Comic-Con. Maybe it would not work because Comic-Con tickets are always in demand. However, Comic-Con has made it so external players cannot profit by buying all the tickets and reselling them for a much higher value.
Well, someone is trying to sell Comic-Con 2025 tickets on Stubhub. Right now, someone is offering four-day passes with Preview Night there for $2873 each and there are other offerings for slightly-less outrageous sums. I have no idea who this is or if these passes would actually get a buyer in the door. I do know though that there's a Kosher, legal way to get badges for less money. The Comic-Con Museum sells what they call Legend memberships which give you all sorts of privileges and discounts and access and special invites to the museum but it also includes a 4-Day + Preview Night SDCC 2025 badge.
The price for one of these is $1900, which is steep but not as steep as $2873 or some other current asking prices on Stubhub for badges of questionable validity. I'm thinking of putting up a Stubhub offering that won't get you into Comic-Con but Sergio Aragonés and I will come to your home and sing the entire score from Gypsy. It won't be cheap.