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.

String Cheese Incidents: Cops swoop on fans

Midway between "heavy-handedness" and "shooting fish in a barrel", police targetted two Vail dates on String Cheese Incident's farewell tour, swooping up about ten drug arrests each time.

The band have chosen to distance themselves from the fans on this one:

“The String Cheese Incident does not and never has condoned any kind of illegal behavior,” said Carrie Lombardi with Madison House Publicity in Boulder. The company handles publicity for String Cheese Incident.

“The band is not responsible for fans’ behavior,” she said. “They’ve been together for 15 years without much incident, and these things are the irresponsible behavior of the few that the media always pays attention to.”

So, that's fifteen year without "much incident" - she doesn't say if there's ever been much String Cheese. It would have been nice for the band to have said something that sounded a little less like a disappointed headmaster, especially since the media has generated a response like this, from the Daily Sentinel:

String Cheese Incident was formed in 1993 in Boulder. Described as a jam band, String Cheese Incident has been compared to the Grateful Dead, because both bands toured much of the time with fans who followed them. Drug use by fans during Grateful Dead concerts has been documented.

Nice - people say this band sound like a band whose fans used drugs, ergo, the targeting of their fans is a sane response. Rather than allowing their publicist to aid this sort of media froth, shouldn't the band offer something more of a stand?