Hot Ticket

Miley Cyrus is about to embark on a 54-date concert tour. For those of you who live in a cave--or don't have children--she's the daughter of the guy who used to sing about the achey-breaky mullet, Billy Ray Cyrus, and she has her own show on the Disney Channel called Hannah Montana. On the show (yes, I've seen it) she plays high school student Miley Stewart while her father plays... her father. (Stay with me here.) He writes hit songs for Miley's alter ego, Hannah Montana, who Miley becomes by donning a blonde wig. Why? I'm not entirely sure, but apparently no one knows that the girl they sit behind in math class is a superstar recording artist. Her father disguises himself as well by pasting on a moustache. Clark Kent couldn't have found a better disguise, because no one seems to know it's the same guy.
Anyway, it's all pretty harmless fluff and my niece really likes it. But that's not the point of this post. Instead it's about tickets to the concerts, where Cyrus will appear both as herself and the Hannah Montana character.
Fans are so desperate for tickets that venues have sold out in as little as four minutes and scalpers are getting about five times the face value (which is between $50 and $70), creating a torrent of complaints from frustrated parents.
It has gotten so bad, according to one report, that the Kansas City Council is launching an investigation, suspecting scalpers of buying ticket blocks and reselling them. Well, duh. Hello Kansas. Of course that's what scalpers are doing, as they do for just about every show. But it seems that this time they've gotten especially greedy, preying on the 'tweens' for whom Cyrus/Stewart/Montana is the biggest show biz event they've ever witnessed in their young lives. And parents are desperate to please their little princesses and will do whatever it takes to score tickets.
One report said a ticket for the show in Charlotte, North Carolina, sold for $2,565.
For one ticket.
To a show featuring a fictional character.
I don't know what's worse--the fact that the scalper sold the ticket for that much or that the parent actually admitted they paid that price. That'd be something I'd want to keep on the quiet side.
Then there's this quote: "Hannah Montana has essentially exposed a lot of frustration the average, uninformed ticket buyer has," said Sean Pate, a spokesman for the San Francisco-based StubHub. "There is so much demand that ticket sellers are pricing on the high side. It's almost unreasonable."
I'm sorry, did you say almost unreasonable?
I guess we have different definitions of 'unreasonable.'