I am half-over the hype surrounding Arcade Fire. When I first heard about them, they were ok, and a change from the typical rock music that’s out there. I didn’t think they were revolutionary or incredibly great, but I bought their album, their EP, and listened to them regularly on my iPod. Their sophomore album is coming out, and I was not overly impressed when I gave Neon Bible a listen. But they are supposed to be great live, and when I heard that they scheduled two dates in Toronto, I was reasonably interested in getting tickets to the show.

The only problem is that those two shows are probably the hottest ticket in town the continent. You may have heard that their five shows in NYC sold out right away. To make matters worse, they’ve enforced a new anti-scalping policy whereby the credit card and person who bought the tickets must goto the show. This has led to interesting forms of bartering in order to go see the Arcade Fire.

Tickets went on sale at noon today, at my most favorite site in the world…Ticketmaster. At least the show itself was reasonably priced, $35-$39. I signed in and got ready. At 11:59, I started refreshing every few seconds. Then it was noon. Still the site wouldn’t let anyone in to buy tickets. Finally at something like 12:01, I was able to pick my tickets. I chose 4 tickets (the maximum) with the best possible seats, and lucky for me, I got them! The bill came out to $175.50, which included: a $2.50 facility charge per ticket, a $5.50 convenience charge per ticket, and a $3.50 processing fee…

Anyways, what I didn’t do was figure out who wanted to go with me. I’m undecided whether I want to keep 2 of the tickets (who wants to go with me??) and sell 2 of them, or try and sell all of them (if I can — see anti-scalping policy above). To keep things in perspective, tickets for the NYC show were going for $1000 each! That would sure take the bite out of Ticketmaster.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: music, ticketmaster