The landlord had told them he wanted to raise the rent to $3,500 and when they complained he decided to raise it to $9,500.
“We know that our building is not rent controlled and this was something we were always worried about happening and there is no way we can afford $9,500 per month," Yumna Farooq said.
As I’ve heard it explained, LiveNation gives a big commission to the organisers to resell their tickets, to the point where they’re really just taking a cut for reselling it under a different name, for marketing purposes. I guess the existence of the old-style in-person scalpers kind of undermines that, I honestly never really understood how those guys existed.
In-person reselling sometimes has legit reasons like person can’t or don’t want to participate anymore. But in that case people are ready to sell under nominal price.