There’s a lot of juicy and knowledgeable stuff on the TicketNews site about the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger. The proprietors seem to know the business and have been filing extravagantly detailed looks at some of the issues coming from the merger.

I’ve just been absorbing a series of reports the site did on a meeting Ticketmaster and its scalping subsidiary, TicketsNow, held for other ticket scalpers, who call themselves “ticket brokers,” in Las Vegas last June.

This is the scalping world’s equivalent of the Apalachin meeting.

Here’s the key graf, emphasis added:

The two companies’ CEOs, Sean Moriarty of Ticketmaster and Cheryl Rosner of TicketsNow, addressed many of the concerns that brokers have concerning how the two industry giants will behave in the marketplace, but on at least the issue of how premium tickets are ending up on TicketsNow or Ticketmaster’s TicketExchange before the public had a chance to purchase them, questions remain. TicketNews obtained a recording of the May meeting in Las Vegas, and in this story, the second part of an in-depth series on the results of the meeting, Moriarty essentially said that artists are to blame for how premium tickets are sold before the public has a chance to buy them. While he did not say that Ticketmaster itself is placing tickets on those two websites, the practice of tickets turning up on those sites before they go on sale to the public will continue, but he refused to disclose the specific sources of those tickets.

“Tickets get onto TicketExchange a bunch of different ways. Members of the general public, in some cases, I’m sure the ticket brokers, and in some cases artists want to sell tickets directly to the public,” Moriarty said. “It’s a platform.”

“Artists want to sell tickets directly to the public.” If only there were some method to do that!

He continues:

Artists are have begun to negotiate with “every player” in the ticketing in the business, Moriarty said, whether it’s “Ticketmaster or StubHub or individual and local brokers,” and he believes that more artists will begin placing tickets directly on secondary ticket websites to maximize revenue.