The Tragically Hips' Man Machine Poem tour was notoriously hard to get tickets to. The cross-country tour seemed to sell out almost instantly, with tickets popping up on re-sale sites for hundreds, and even thousands, of dollars. But who was really buying all of these tickets?

As CBC reports, it was probably bots (and brokers). "Probably a third of the tickets went to bots, another third went to brokers who were just like fans, pounding away at the keyboard, but better trained, more aggressive at it, and maybe a third of them went to fans," said Joe Berchtold, chief operating officer of Live Nation to CBC.

While fans were eventually able to get tickets, they usually had to pay much more than face value to attend one of the concerts, including the three in Toronto.

CBC notes that the province will likely introduce legislation next spring in order to ban bots and avoid these unfortunate situations.

Photo by Stephen Gardiner via the blogTO Flickr pool.