Oops! Ticketmaster is sold out of tickets for your event!

The New York Times had a very enlightening story

this weekend about ticket sales through Ticketmaster. Have you ever tried to order tickets for a concert right after they went on sale, only to find out that event was immediately sold out?

Well there's a very simple explanation for that. Ticket brokers snap up as many tickets as they can, as quickly as possible. Their targets are high-demand events like the Hannah Montana tour.

The brokers then turn around and mark up the tickets and offer them for sale on StubHub, a site owned by eBay. Hannah Montana tickets have a face value of $21 to $66, but are being sold on StubHub for an average of $258 each.