Why Hannah Montana Should Sell $200 Tickets
The WSJ reports on the fascinating court battle between IAC's Ticketmaster and RMG Technologies, a Pittsburgh company that runs TicketBrokerTools.com, a scalping/reselling service. IAC says RMG has created bots that can outsmart Ticketmaster's …
Context & Ripple Effects
Silicon Alley Insider is riffing on the Wall Street Journal's same-day report ('Hannah Montana Battles the Bots') of IAC's Ticketmaster taking Pittsburgh-based RMG Technologies to court over TicketBrokerTools.com, software alleged to run bots that outsmart Ticketmaster's purchase defenses so brokers can grab hot inventory at face value. The piece's own argument cuts against the lawsuit: with Hannah Montana dates vanishing instantly, selling $200 face-value tickets would drain the arbitrage that makes bot tooling profitable in the first place.
It matters because this is the first visible courtroom collision between a primary ticketer and the resale-automation ecosystem built on top of it — and it lands while IAC is otherwise in expansion mode, having pushed into the Bay Area earlier in 2007 and bought Insider Pages through Citysearch in March.
First-order effects
- RMG's TicketBrokerTools.com business is directly threatened: if IAC's bot allegations hold up, the product's core function — defeating Ticketmaster's defenses — becomes a litigation liability for RMG and its broker customers.
- Ticketmaster's anti-bot weaknesses are now public via the WSJ report, forcing IAC to harden its purchase defenses while the case plays out.
Second-order effects
- Other broker-tool vendors face copycat-suit risk if Ticketmaster prevails, while a win for RMG pushes Ticketmaster toward costlier technical countermeasures — either way an arms race between resale automation and primary-ticketing controls.
- Venues and promoters keep capturing none of the resale markup on underpriced shows like Hannah Montana's, strengthening the internal case at Ticketmaster clients for higher or dynamically priced face values.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, live-event pricing moves structurally toward market-clearing face values — the 'sell $200 tickets' logic — shrinking the independent scalping layer, while automated-buying practices become a recurring target for both platform enforcement and eventual regulatory attention.
The trend: Primary ticketing is entering an arms race between automated resale software and the platforms controlling distribution, with face values set below what fans will pay guaranteeing the reseller market persists.