House of Blues Acts to Stem Ticket Scalping

Hoping to quiet allegations of ticket scalping, Hollywood-based House of Blues said it would limit future sales of house seats. House of Blues said “several hundred” of the prime tickets it directly controlled before a Backstreet Boys concert at Denver’s Pepsi Center “inadvertently” fell into the hands of brokers who resold them. Some fans paid up to $350 to see the Oct. 31 show, about 10 times the tickets’ face value. House of Blues, the show’s promoter, said it had sold the tickets to business clients and didn’t know how they wound up in the brokers’ possession. The pop act said it was “infuriated” by the incident and asked House of Blues to contribute $75,000 to a charity established to help students of Colorado’s Columbine High School, where gun-toting teens went on a rampage earlier this year. House of Blues said that it would make the $75,000 donation to the charity on behalf of Backstreet Boys. Mark Norman, senior vice president of House of Blues Concerts, said the new policy “ensures there will be availability to popular events for all of our customers, and tickets will not indirectly be channeled to ticket brokers.”