Miley-Mania Puts Heat On Ticket Brokers

Miley-Mania Puts Heat On Ticket Brokers

Rep. Dan Gelber To Crackdown On Ticket Brokers

Gelber Introducing Bill To Ban 'Automated Ticket Purchasing Software'

MIAMI (CBS4) ― South Florida tweens are suffering from "Miley-Mania" as actress and singer Miley Cyrus brings her highly-anticipated and sold out concert to the BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise on Tuesday night.

The Disney Channel show "Hannah Montana", starring Miley Cyrus, has exploded into a phenomenon and when tickets for her "Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour" went on sale, it instantly became South Florida's hottest concert ticket this year.

The tickets were so hot that ticket brokers snatched most of them up and have been re-selling them at "obscenely high prices", according to Representative Dan Gelber, a state lawmaker who wants to crack down on people who buy concert tickets and resell them for hundreds of dollars more than face value.

The "Hannah Montana" concerts have been selling out in as little as four minutes and scalpers are charging four or five times the face value.

Gelber, who has two daughters, ages 7 and 9, plans to unveil his proposed legislation Tuesday at North Beach Elementary School Tuesday afternoon. He even invited Miley Cyrus to attend Tuesday's news conference in order to help him in his quest to outlaw ticket brokers from using automated "ticket purchasing software" to obtain tickets from a website.

The legislation would also require companies that resell tickets to register with the state and post a $50,000 bond. Those who break the law could be fined three times the amount of the scalped ticket.

The ticket scalping frenzy surrounding the Hannah Montana concerts have led to investigations in three states. Last week, a lawsuit was also filed against Montana's fan club, alleging that those who paid for a membership would get first priority for concert tickets.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of a New Jersey woman and anyone else who joined the Miley Cyrus Fan Club based on its promise that joining would make it easier to get concert tickets from the teen star's Web site.

The class-action lawsuit names Interactive Media Marketing Inc. and Smiley Miley Inc. as defendants and seeks triple damages for all members of the lawsuit and attorneys' fees. The plaintiff doesn't yet know the size of the class, but based on the popularity of the Web site, it could number tens of thousands of people, according to the lawsuit.

The fan club costs $29.95 a year to join, according to the lawsuit, which alleges that the defendants should have known that the site's membership vastly exceeded the number of tickets.

Cyrus' publicist, Meghan Prophet, said in a statement that fan club members had an opportunity to buy pre-sale tickets, and more than 70,000 club members obtained them as a result of their membership.

"The Mileyworld Web site expressly states that Mileyworld does not guarantee every member a concert ticket," Prophet said. "Mileyworld members had far greater access to concert tickets than the general public and other fan clubs, and the claim that the vast majority of Mileyworld members were unable to obtain concert tickets is simply false."

On TV, Cyrus plays high school student Miley Stewart, who lives a secret double life as a famous pop star, Hannah Montana. Her show reaches 5 million viewers a week.

In the "Best of Both Worlds Concert", Cyrus performs as a double bill, appearing first as her Disney Channel character Hannah Montana and then closes the show with material from her new solo album, 'Meet Miley Cyrus'.

For Hannah Montana fans who don't make it to the concert, they may be able to catch Miley Cyrus on the big screen.

The "Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour" will hit select movie theaters in February next year as a special Disney Digital 3-D presentation. The filmed version of the concert tour will be shot in state-of-the-art 3-D at several venues. It will show in theaters in the U.S. and Canada from February 1 to 7 in 2008, and will open in several international markets that spring. It's not known if it'll show in South Florida theaters.