Hannah Montana Tickets on Sale! Oops, They're Gone
HANNAH MONTANA has made 2007 a very bright year for various business interests, but especially for StubHub, the online ticket exchange site. — Though the year is not yet complete, StubHub announced on Dec. 5 that its concert ticket sales …
Context & Ripple Effects
The economics were flagged two months before the sellouts: Silicon Alley Insider argued in October that Hannah Montana was leaving money on the table by not charging $200 a ticket, with demand visibly outrunning supply at face value. December's near-instant sellouts are that thesis playing out in real time.
The winner so far is the resale layer, not the box office — StubHub said on Dec. 5 that its 2007 concert ticket sales were booming, driven largely by this one tour. The same quarter exposed the platform's legal fragility: in October StubHub lost a court fight and had to hand the New England Patriots the names of 13,000 of its users.
First-order effects
- Instant sellouts route Hannah Montana demand directly into the secondary market, where StubHub collects fees on each resale — the company itself credits the tour for its surge in 2007 concert ticket sales.
- Fans shut out of the on-sale now pay market rather than face prices, confirming the October argument that the tour priced its tickets well below what buyers would bear.
Second-order effects
- Ticketmaster, promoters, and venues face growing pressure over the face-value/resale gap, because every dollar of markup on a hot tour currently accrues to resellers rather than the artist or the box office.
- The Patriots ruling makes StubHub's user anonymity look legally fragile, pushing resale exchanges toward costlier compliance and identity practices just as their volumes peak.
Third-order effects
- If hit tours keep underpricing, the industry has an incentive to capture resale value upstream — through market-based face pricing or primary sellers moving into resale — eroding the boundary between box office and exchange.
- For scarce inventory, the exchange becomes the de facto primary channel, shifting pricing data and fan relationships from promoters toward platforms like StubHub.
The trend: Whenever face-value tickets sit below market-clearing prices, value migrates from the box office to resale exchanges — and 2007's Hannah Montana run is the clearest data point yet.