VERNON, CT. (By Christine Paluf/ TicketNews.com) -
Tom Petty may have started a new career: as a scalper for his own shows. Petty's June 25 and 26 concert at the ExCel Center is one of a number of his shows that released tickets pre-sale on the TomPetty.com fan club site, which were later cancelled. The problem started when many of the tickets that were made available for fans showed up on secondary resale sites, which violated the club's rules.
Petty's management and Ticketmaster cancelled around 500 tickets that were originally released pre-sale, forcing fans to gain a refund from the secondary seller.
"This issue occurred around the Petty presale specifically and they worked to rectify it, using some of the methods Pearl Jam uses for their fan club presales," said Pearl Jam's Publicist Nicole Vandenberg. "It did not occur around the Pearl Jam presale which was done the way PJ normally does its fan club presales."
However, tickets to Petty's shows can be found on another site, www.fanfire.com. The site lists tickets to each of Petty's performances, as "special ticket packages" that range from $200 to $250.
Tom Petty Publicist Julie Arkenstone said that the Petty camp is aware of the ticket packages. "Pearl Jam had nothing to do with it. It's a sanctioned Website, and the tickets there are sanctioned by Tom Petty people," Arkenstone said.
ExCel box office management believes the tickets are legit, according to representative Kathy Ross. "None of us were specifically aware of it," Ross said. "It's probably something his management was working on and didn't let us know. They just tell us what holds they need for tickets, and we help them with that. We don't ask too many questions."
Fans that purchase the special package tickets are placed within the first 15 rows, given a club membership for a year, a copy of his new CD and access to streaming of it before release, as well as $100 off merchandise at the Tom Petty store.
Seemingly, the issue Petty's management had with the resale of tickets to his shows was not that they didn't allow fans to get the best pricing, it was that the money wasn't going to him.
Pearl Jam has long held a strong stance against high prices on tickets, and has spoken out publicly about making tickets to their shows available at an affordable price.
"The irony is that the ticket brokers were scalping tickets for less than the Tom Petty camp was selling them for," said Don Vaccaro, CEO of TicketNetwork.com. "The biggest surprise is Pearl Jam's silence on the issue. They went as far as going to Capitol Hill to protest $5 to $6 service charges, now they're seemingly endorsing a $110 charge when they share benefit in it."
"[Fanfire.com] is a third-party site, so most likely the tickets got on there either through Tom Petty or Pearl Jam, either through their management or some other way," Ross said.
Calls were not returned concerning the band promoter's knowledge of the resale of the tickets to the joint show with Petty.
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