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In February 2005, after the band won its third Grammy of the night, U2 drummer Larry Mullen Jr. stepped to the microphone and made an announcement about the band's upcoming Vertigo tour: "Due to circumstances beyond our control, a lot of our long-suffering fans didn't get tickets," he said. "And I'd like to take this opportunity on behalf of the band to apologize for that."
There was a very specific reason die-hard fans couldn't buy tickets. Ken Lowson, the most successful and notorious ticket scalper in history, had bought nearly all of the 500 general admission tickets that were made available to the band's fan club for each show.
"When the sale dropped, we took 496 in New York, 492 in Boston, 496 in LA," Lowson, the former CEO of Wiseguy Tickets, told me in one of our many phone calls over the course of the last six months. "They apologized on the Grammys because of us, and then they had a second round of sales to make up for it. We took all the good tickets in that second round, too."
U2 is one of dozens of artists that has addressed the fact that their tickets weren't being sold directly to fans. For more than a decade, Wiseguy was the biggest name in ticket scalping. The company fundamentally broke Ticketmaster, using one of the first ever automated "ticket bots" to buy and flip millions of tickets between 1999 and Lowson's eventual arrest on wire fraud charges in 2010.
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