The Ticketmaster and the Slave

I've already offended one friend in private email with my take on Live 8--essentially, that it's pointless, since zero money will be raised--so I won't expound on that theme any further here.

Now, the actual Live 8 concert, as opposed to the politics surrounding it, was something I had a modest interest in. I mean, I like some of the groups that are scheduled to perform. A few of them--the Barenaked Ladies in particular--hearken back to what I think of as the golden era of Canadian music, before grunge turned popular music into nihilistic noise. If it was possible to strap duct tape over the mouths of any concertgoer under the age of thirty--the better to actually hear the music--and if I didn't have prior commitments, I might have considered "buying" the free tickets.

Now I hear a rumour that this Live 8 concert will be televised--which, if true, would make it possible to watch the proceedings from the comfort of my own home, without braving the colossal traffic jams, the carnivorous crowds, and what is certain to be searing heat and humidity. An attractive proposition.

But let's say that, like many, I really, really wanted to go to Park Place in Barrie and see this concert. To do it, I would have needed to procure tickets through ticketmaster.ca. And to do that, I would have had to be extraordinarily lucky.
The tickets went on sale at 10:00 a.m. sharp the other day. It is reported there were 35000 of them. They sold out in twenty minutes. Let's do the math together: that's over 29 tickets a second.
Ticketmaster doesn't give out this information for obvious reasons, but I'd really like to know how many people tried to get tickets and failed. I'm betting it beat the number who were successful by at least an order of magnitude.
Actually, I was a tad surprised that the concert tickets lasted as long as they did. Coldplay tickets went on sale in a similar mass stampede a month or so back--the difference here being that people had to pay for these tickets, at hefty prices, too--and the supply that time lasted just a notch over three minutes.

How exactly is this fair?

You have to figure that those folks with T1 connections have a huge advantage in such ticket wars, especially over the people with dial-up. Which is really rather ironic in the case of something like Live 8, which is ostensibly being put on to help the poor.
Moreover, and quite predictably, Live 8 tickets showed up on Ebay within minutes of the sellout, and bids made it all the way up to $126.50 before Ebay got wise and yanked them. This sort of scalping is detestable; the mere attempt should be punishable by a fine of twice the highest bid.

Look, I love the Internet. I think, used properly, it's a fantastic tool. It has the potential to do more for the people of Africa than any aging ex-Boomtown Rat ever dreamed of. But there are some things that should have been left alone, among them the old way of getting concert tickets. In situations where the demand is certain to exceed the supply, it's simply wrong to incite an electronic riot. "Scrambles! Keepsies! Get your Coldplay tick---"