Dear Ticketmaster :

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/