Fun Stuff > CHATTER

Hey Ticketmaster, fuck right off

(1/10) > >>

KvP:
Dun dun dunnnnn.

So basically here's the gist of it for people who don't like reading - Bruce "The Boss" Springsteen's tour started its ticket sales today, and Ticketmaster, who handles all such sales, reserved up to 5,000 seats and sold them to Tickets Now, a subsidiary of theirs. While regular old Ticketmaster charges you for the cost of your ticket plus a heavy (at our) "convenience" charge, Tickets Now's purpose is to sell tickets at "market-sensitive value", ie scalping prices. Tickets from Tickets Now are up to several hundred dollars more expensive than normal. So basically what Ticketmaster is doing is creating an artificial shortage and inflating prices.

Also Ticketmaster is reportedly in talks to merge with Live Nation. If such a deal went through we'd have a single massive company that handled ticket sales for a vast swath of the music world, managed a large number of high-profile artists, and handled concert promotion for most any venue you can beat with a stick.

Our only real hope as consumers not to get brutally exploited by such a syndicate comes from the fact that the Obama administration is in office now and the FCC might be more inclined than it was over the last 8 years to bust up monopolies. We'll see.

TheFuriousWombat:
Man, thank god almost all the shows I go to sell through ticketweb. They actually have really reasonable charges. Like...a couple bucks. Shocking!

est:
Holy shit that is fucked

0bsessions:
I wouldn't count on it ever going away. This bullshit has been going on for as far back as I've been going to concerts and I'd venture much further back than even that. Ticketmaster doesn't legally have a monopoly, they just happen to be the only game in town due to their heavy advertising. It's pretty much the same as how most towns only have one cable or phone provider.

tania:
during tronnocon, tommy had gotten a few of us some tickets to go see nina nastasia but the show ended up being cancelled. we later spent something like an hour on the ticketmaster website and on the phone with them trying to get our money back and there was just absolutely no way. we went in circles hundreds of times and never figured out how to talk to a real person or get a refund.

their "convenience" fee - which is really just their "we're a monopoly so give us some extra money for no real reason other than that you don't have a choice" fee - is pretty bullshit too. i really fucking hate ticketmaster.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page