As we noted yesterday, the String Cheese Incident recently announced that they would be selling service fee free tickets to shows on their upcoming summer tour. An article in the New York Times reported that the group was able to accomplish this by advancing money to fans who purchased tickets without service charges at box offices and then handed them over them to SCI for resale. The group first contemplated such a plan nearly a decade ago after Ticketmaster announced it would limit the number of seats that the group could sell through its own ticketing service. The conflict led to a lawsuit that the String Cheese Incident filed against Ticketmaster in 2003 that ultimately resulted in an out of court settlement in the group’s favor.

The book Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped by Dean Budnick and Josh Baron, devotes an entire chapter to this event. An excerpt from that chapter, entitled “A Quiet Victory” has just been posted to Relix.com. A new expanded paperback edition of Ticket Masters has just been published. To learn more, visit Ticketmastersthebook.com.