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Ticketmaster has been convincing more and more artists to scalp their own tickets by offering Gold and Silver packages that give the fan access to the first 10 to 20 rows from the stage, at a steep premium. After years of blasting ticket brokers for reselling tickets, Ticketmaster is selling these seats for many times the original face value and passing on most of the profits to the artist.

Take Rob Thomas at the Tucson Music Hall; you can purchase a face value ticket for $56 plus service charges at the time of this post, that will seat you in the Orchestra, Row V, or you can buy a Silver Package, which seats you in Orchestra, Row L, 10 rows closer to the stage, for a whopping $350 each. Or, you can go all out and buy the Gold package, with 2nd row seats at $450 each. Rob Thomas, $450? Even most ticket brokers would agree that $450 is an over-the-top price for an artist such as Rob Thomas.

This isn’t an isolated case either. There are a whole slew of artists looking for big bucks at a time many of their fans are hurting financially. Kanye West and Lady Gaga just started selling Fame Kills GA VIP Packages through Ticketmaster, with a $500 price tag for a standing room only, general admission ticket! Have they lost their minds! Many of today’s artists have no idea how to treat their fans. Rather than cut prices during the worst recession since the great depression, they come up with these outrageous promotions with prices fans cannot afford, and honestly, these guys aren’t worth it.

And this is only the beginning. More than just a few artists have jumped on the program to scrape as much money out of the fans as possible, using the excuse that this is how they earn their living to support their lavish lifestyles. At some point soon, they will break the bank and fans will start staying away in droves and find other ways to spend their entertainment dollars.

Tickets went on sale this past weekend at Ticketmaster for Miley Cyrus’s 2009 Concert Tour and reports out indicate that her tickets aren’t as hot as they used to be, and the reselling is way off due to the new paperless ticketing system. Some of the concert venues still had lower level seats available as of Sunday and only a few venues may have sold out.

Of course this could be in part due to the high face value of her ticket with the service charges topping out at about $100 per ticket, almost double her previous prices, and the fact that the best seats had a $290 face value, hardly cheap in today’s economy.

The reselling of Miley Cyrus’s tickets appears to be way off as well with only anywhere from a few to several hundred listings showing up on ticket reselling sites PreferredSeat.com, Stubhub and Ticketsnow. Even with the paperless ticketing you can still get a Miley Cyrus concert ticket from the secondary market, just be prepared to get your ticket at the door.
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