Dear Ticketmaster :

Please give me my virginity back.

Love,
Plaster Penguin

So, what's the deal with getting highly sought after tickets from ticketmaster? Is it better to be first at the door or is buying them online more reliable? My friend is highly suspicious of buying them online because she claims the website always freezes and I've never had to buy super fast sellout tickets before.

Nobody has any knowledge on this?

Department Of Justice approves diabolical Ticketmaster-Live Nation union
by Scott Tobias January 25, 2010

Lovers of overpriced big-ticket shows and outrageous service charges rejoice! Against all reason and rationality, the Department of Justice has approved the merger of dominant concert promoter Live Nation with dominant fleecing operation Ticketmaster, allowing the companies to unite into one giant Mordor-like empire that casts a shadow over the entire music industry. According to the Wall Street Journal, the move clears the way for “the creation of single entity that will be able to manage artists, book them in venues which it owns, and sell tickets to their concerts.” Gosh, how could that possibly be bad for consumers?

http://www.avclub.com/articles/department-of-justice-approves-diabolical-ticketma,37502/?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=feeds&utm_source=avclub_rss_daily

They're charging me $9 on EACH $20 ticket. I hate them so.

Yep, forget what the show was now, but at some point last year got hit with $10 service fee on $20 tickets.

This can only be good news for the consumer, right DOJ?

Oh boy, they make them sell off a few things and pretend that such a step is enough to allow for competition. Obama--middle of the road change we can believe in

http://futureofmusic.org/blog/2010/01/25/look-live-nationticketmaster-merger

I'm not going to worry about it. I mean, when a Chinese company buys the next U.S. president thanks to the Supreme Court decision last week, none of us will be able to worry about concerts!

A few venues here -- Quicken Loans Arena, notably -- have recently stopped using Ticketmaster for their ticket sales. Not that it has made concerts any cheaper, obviously. They just start their own in-house ticket sales arm and keep all that delicious "convenience charge" revenue themselves.

how on earth could this ticketmaster/live nation merger go ahead, it can mean nothing but horror for everyone but TM/LN shareholders. is this the same in the UK too?

does anyone know how to delete yr ticketmaster account? thanking u all in advance

If you would like to delete a My Ticketmaster account that contains your information, please contact customer service.

lost my ticketmaster password

Dear Ticketmaster:

Suck it. I haven't paid you any money in decades.

svend, thanks. ive tried that a bunch of times though & still havent gotten a response

gonna probably call them if i still dont hear back

http://www.yelp.com/biz/ticketmaster-los-angeles-2

Ticketmaster is a very low margin business, their profits come from volume. Of a $10 "convenience charge," TM only sees less than a third, or $2.50 of that. The rest goes to the performer and the venue. Yeah it sucks, but you should be mad at Madonna or whoever the f*** you want to go see who would rather put the burden on Ticketmaster than look like greedy fake British piglets for charging more for tickets.

It's true, I have friends who work at TicketMaster and IAC. So I'm giving 4 stars, remember life before TicketMaster? Would you rather wait on a really long line at the box office?

Um, that's probably because you couldn't buy much of anything online back then, assface. Or hell, even ten years ago. Big deal.

Everyone Hates Ticketmaster — But No One Can Take It Down

Except the masked avenger...CAEK.

"Of a $10 "convenience charge," TM only sees less than a third, or $2.50 of that. The rest goes to the performer and the venue."

Wait, if this is for the 'convenience charge', then what is the actual ticket charge going towards?

LOL

In 2008, Ticketmaster had made veteran industry shark Irving Azoff—a man so cutthroat (and so short) he is known as the Poison Dwarf—its CEO. Manager of the Eagles since the mid-’70s, Azoff is famously aggressive. He once sent a gift-wrapped boa constrictor to a manager whose wife he considered snakelike, with a note that read “Now you have two!” Seeing Live Nation’s troubles, Azoff recognized an opportunity. After several conversations, the two companies agreed to merge. In January, the US Department of Justice approved the formation of Live Nation Entertainment.

I like this, though the String Cheese Incident charging $50 for a concert ticket sort of de-Fugazifies the whole thing...

Band buys $20k worth of their own tickets from Ticketmaster and sells them back to fans at face value, eating all the ticketmaster extortion fees.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/arts/music/string-cheese-incident-takes-on-ticketmaster.html?_r=2&smid=tw-share

(via Reddit)

Man, the new breed of jamband fans must have a lot more disposable income than their 90s ancestors did. $50 to see these guys?

I got 34 vouchers in the Ticketmaster settlement lolol

Wow, I got zero. And I used to work there!

i got 17. but they're only good for selected events and the TM page that lists those didn't even load.

That's cos they put the wrong link on their own site. It's actually on LiveNation's domain but still no shows listed

uhoh

Fix it, crüt!

16 vouchers here, I think!

Got a bunch of vouchers, but yeah only good for selected events, etc.

list is out. eligible events surprisingly good. Black Sabbath included! I"m trying to get tix to the VA show.

I managed to get Def Leppard tickets for free. no additional fees. $66 worth of tickets free!

(48% of that was service fees tho lol)

tried a couple from the list and couldn't get it to go through, said the voucher numbers i tried were invalid. tickets aren't really free if i have to expend any effort figuring this shit out.

links?

Vouchers worked for me. I got a free ticket to see Black Sabbath in NJ on 8/23. It's in the cheap seats (the 400 section), but it's a free ticket to see Black Sabbath nonetheless.

lmao there isn't an eligible event w/in an 8 hour drive of me. i don't think there are any in chicago, even

http://concerts.livenation.com/microsite/settlement

One in Chicago, but most Of the close ones are in Tinley Park.

Roberto that happened to me too and I just sent a fairly angry message to Ticketmaster about it.

I tried two Sab shows following the instructions (gen admission only, limit 2 tickets), and it's not listed as sold out on the list (like some are), and....nothing.

does this thing like limit the # of miles away from where you live? I swear I ain't gonna re-sell these dammit.

theory - xenophobia against Italians

lol wtf the NJ Black Sabbath isn't even on my list. and how did you get 400 level seats and not gen admission?

Here's what I did:

1) Went to the page with list of events
2) Clicked "Location" to sort (it sorts alphabetically by city, so Albuquerque, NM is followed by Alpharetta, GA, etc.) and looked through all the events for Holmdel, NJ/PNC Bank Arts Center
3) Went through the regular "Find Tickets" procedure for the Sabbath show, chose a seat in the 300 tier, got refused, chose a seat in the 400 tier, got approved, put in the voucher # when it was time to pay...done!

hmm. i feel like trying this now.

I don't see any other shows I care about right now, but the vouchers don't expire until June 2020, so I figure by then there'll be plenty of other venues and tours where they need to paper the house - eventually I'll use up a few more (I think I've got 12 left).

the Black Sabbath show I wanted now in VA is sold out. gee is it my fault your site crashed for three hours........bleh.

maybe I'll buy a NJ one, sell it, and then buy a reg priced VA ticket

Lost about a half hour trying (and failing) to get Sabbath tickets, ended up with Sun Kil Moon/Jesu tickets when they finally updated the list of shows.

List of shows just got updated, got my free Sabbath tickets (and Kurt Vile/Ryan Adams, although I'm not much of a Ryan Adams fan).

wound up giving up on getting tix to anything I wanted to see other than the Def Leppard show, got 4 tix to 2 stupid shows I had no desire to see (Shinedown and Slipknot), sold them all, made $45, bought a Black Sabbath ticket with the money.

Probably late w/this, but had not realized TM has done away with all brick & mortar locations except on site venue box offices.

can I just say what a sterling job TM have done charging £8.50 booking fee for each nominally free Radio 1 Big Weekend ticket, then forcing me to pay £13 a head for mandatory transport to the site

salute

exemplary stuff

i still can't believe that ticketmaster own getmein, which gives them the opportunity to make money at least twice on every set of tickets they sell - just shamelessly evil

yall hear about Pearl Jam selling out to TM. fuck those sellouts

tbf to pearl jam they've only sold 60 million records and ticketmaster probably backed up the money truck so what's an eddie vedder to do rly

Dear Adam,

It's 2017 - do keep up

im modern, i'm hip. im listening to a bag of potato chips.

dang I have a couple memories about plotting to hit up ticketmaster counters at ritmo latino and the wherehouse

lol they put up more events for the vouchers. I've just bought 30 tickets to shows I have no desire to go to and am selling them at a discount on Stubhub....all profit.

Hadn't even thought of going that route. Maybe I will!

https://boingboing.net/2018/09/21/self-scalping.html

But a CBC/Toronto Star undercover investigation has revealed that Ticketmaster runs a secret, parallel system called "Tradedesk" that encourages the most prolific scalpers to create multiple accounts to circumvent the company's limits on ticket sales, and then allows them to re-list those tickets for sale in its "brokerage" market, which nominally exists to allow fans who find themselves with a spare ticket or two to sell it other fans. According to Ticketmaster reps who were unaware they were being secretly recorded, the most successful scalpers use this system to make as much as $5 million/year.

now apparently you can only contact them via email, no Live Chat, no phone call. and they don't seem to answer messages in the order they were received, seems very disorganized.

they're complaining about their staffing. FUCK YOU, pay people a decent salary.

Might as well start complaining about fees on this thread instead of individual artist threads.

I wanted to see a club show here, and the tickets were a reasonable $25 each, but the fees! They were close to $20 themselves, almost the cost of a third ticket, which is stupid. As discussed/debated elsewhere, those fees are often how the venue and basically everyone but the artist makes a lot of their money - as my industry friend puts it, "the devil has to get his due" - which I understand, but still.

It's so frustrating. I mentioned it to my wife, and she immediately shifted from "sure, I'd love to go," to "you know what, I don't like live music so much that I want to pay all those extra fees." I'm not sure what the alternative is. Maybe revert back to a "two drink minimum" policy, or something like that, where you're forced to pay more but at least get something out of it?

this is Ticketmaster's fuck you for the mega settlement of several years ago.

fees are pretty abhorrent on the smaller ticketing sites too. not quite that bad, though.

amazes me that I saw Metallica for $25 in 1997 sometimes.

thread:

Good afternoon music fans! In honor of all the chumps over 40 camping out in online Hell to score concert tickets today, a thread on all the times your (least?) favorite musician crossed paths with the omnipotent empire known as Ticketmaster/Live Nation. pic.twitter.com/Oj2M6Hi6JA

— moe tkacik (@moetkacik) January 20, 2023

Haven't read it yet, but I've been keeping this tab open a while:

https://prospect.org/power/ticketmasters-dark-history/

Oh, I see, linked in that thread!

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/live-nation-quarterly-revenues-soar-amid-ticketmaster-scrutiny-1235332845/