Coldplay is coming to town this summer, and their tickets went on sale a couple weeks ago at noon on Monday. I just happened to have a meeting then, and totally forgot about buying tickets until 1 something. I went on Ticketmaster and all the decent+ lower bowl tickets were gone. So I looked at the upper bowl – those tickets were cheaper anyways, being less than $40. There were actually good seats available and I thought about buying them, but didn’t. Why? Because Ticketmaster wanted to charge a $10 convenience charge PER TICKET. That’s more than 25% the face value. Add on to that the service charge, and taxes = NO THANKS!
If a 25% markup isn’t enough for providing online middle man services, Ticketmaster now wants to make even more money! They already have a monopoly on ticket selling, but they’re going to stretch their arm into concert promotions and venues by merging with Live Nation. This makes me angry and makes me hate the music industry even more. Why should I bother going to concerts if I have to put up with this rip off?
Even if the artists want to evade the system, like Trent Razor of the NIN, they can’t thanks to the monopoly. And now he is especially mad that Ticketmaster is branching into scalping:
Here’s the rub: TicketMaster has essentially been a monopoly for many years – certainly up until Live Nation’s exclusive deal ran out. They could have (and can right now) stop the secondary market dead in its tracks by doing the following: limit the amount of sales per customer, print names on the tickets and require ID / ticket matches at the venue. We know this works because we do it for our pre-sales. Why don’t THEY do it? It’s obvious – they make a lot of money fueling the secondary market. TicketMaster even bought a re-seller site and often bounces you over to that site to buy tickets (TicketsNow.com)!
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