Billy Joel’s July concert at Shea Stadium–the final musical event at the crumbling concrete behemoth–sold out in one hour on Saturday morning, although the ticketing system used to handle the show’s ticket sales was apparently experiencing massive gridlock. (Shea’s overlords eschewed Ticketmaster for in-house site 507tixx.com, which is named after the Mets’ ticketing hotline.) As you might expect, the “secondary market” for these tickets is thriving, despite the tech snafus and speedy sellout; at present, there are 441 listings for tickets on the semi-legitimate scalping site StubHub, with the highest single-seat price $99,215. That total is up from the 209 sets of tickets on sale Thursday, when Mets season-ticket holders were allowed to buy tickets early.

As you might expect, Billy’s fans are crying foul over the number of tickets that have been made available via StubHub and other resellers (including Craigslist, although the prices there are in the slightly saner four-figure realm), even going so far as to invoke the spectre of Billy Ray Cyrus’ spawn when discussing how insanely the tickets have been marked up. And since Hannah Montana used her first go-round as a way to stoke demand for more shows, here’s some speculation: Given that the Mets have a four-game road trip on the days immediately following the concert, I wouldn’t be surprised if another date or two was added to satiate the Long Island faithful–although of course those dates would sell out as quickly as the original ones, thus bringing the whole rigamarole of getting tickets to the forefront again.

209 Billy Joel tickets at StubHub already? [decechung.com]
Billy Joel Flushing [7/16/2008] [StubHub]
Billy Joel Sells Out Shea [Earvolution]