While it may seem like creating the hottest Broadway musical in, well, forever, would leave you sitting pretty and unperturbed, that isn’t always true. In fact, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s cultural movement that is Hamilton has become so popular that the very idea of snatching up tickets to see it has become sort of a running joke. Those are the hottest tickets in town and people are doing crazy things to take advantage of that, including scalpers. There are always scalpers, but now they are making money off of Broadway and not just concerts and sporting events. You see, it’s 2016 and everything is a bit classier in the realm of scalping.
Lin-Manuel Miranda is flexing his newfound cultural muscle in an attempt to shore up this strange gap in legislation that exists, says RollingStone, and he’s doing so with the support of New York senator Chuck Schumer. They’ve teamed up to push for Better On-line Ticket Sales Act of 2016 (also known as The BOTS Act), which looks to add federal restrictions on purchasing online tickets. Ironically enough, the BOTS Act targets scalpers who enlist the aid of “bots” that quickly scoop up tickets when they go on sale to then turn around and sell them at an incredible mark-up. Schumer painted a rather desolate picture of what consumers face thanks to these scalpers.
“If the starting price for a ticket to Hamilton is $189, but the bots have been selling them from anywhere from $600 to $2,000 a ticket – just think how much money the people make.”
This isn’t the first time that Miranda has voiced his frustrations with scalpers, either, with him penning an op-ed in The New York Times earlier this year about how bots were killing Broadway. Their estimates are that over the span of 100 performances of Hamilton that scalpers walked away with over $15.5 million in profits.
(Via RollingStone)
