String Cheese Incident outplays Ticketmaster

String Cheese Incident have a long history of battling Ticketmaster, having taken legal action against the company back in 2003 when the corporation tried to stop the band selling tickets direct to their fans.

That case had lead to a truce, but one which expired in 2009; now, once again, Ticketmaster is trying to force a claim that it has sole rights to sell tickets to events at some venues.

So what did The String Cheese Incident do?

They came up with an elegant workaround. The New York Times reports:

One Friday afternoon recently, about 50 fans and friends of the band String Cheese Incident took $20,000 in cash to the Greek Theater in Los Angeles to take a small stand against the system — in this case, Ticketmaster.

With money advanced by the band, each person had enough to buy eight tickets at $49.95 apiece for the group’s show in July. Once all tickets were in hand, almost 400 of them, they were carried back to String Cheese headquarters in Colorado and put on sale again through the group’s Web site — for $49.95.

Yes, the band are scalping their own tickets, at a loss. They're taking a hit, but making a rather elegant point in the process.