Feisty Underdog TicketMaster To Beat Scalpers At Own Game!

I just got confirmation from the Beacon Theater this morning that Ticketmaster processed a refund request I made several months ago by taking back the ticket and NEVER refunding any money for it. Wow, Ticketmaster you piece of shit, you really find sleazy new ways to make money!

Seriously, if you processed any refund requests with them, double check your credit card statements, and if nothing shows up, contact the venue. (I was also told by the venue not to contact Ticketmaster, contact them when requesting or checking on refunds. Venues should have a guest services or customer service number you can use.)

Wow... 18 years ago

Gone will be the days of camping outside a ticket booth in -40 C weather with a group of hard-core fans who are all hoping to get first crack at those tickets to the World Series, the Stanley Cup playoffs or Bruce Springsteen.

LOL

Hey Lil' Wayne at the Apollo! I mean, how can you not want to see Wayne at the Apollo?
https://www.ticketmaster.com/lil-wayne-new-york-new-york-04-16-2023/event/00005E3B08DA9760
Tickets start at $540 and go up to $3800 (with an inclusive $700 fee)

imagine paying $700 for the right to spend $3100 for one ticket

i would not pay that to see a resurrected Prince
okay i probably would but that's about it

That's it, I'm totally taking my business elsewhere.

well i'm certainly not seeing Wayne at the Apollo!

god i'm thankful i mostly go to smaller shows.

Madonna this summer i had to take an Affirm loan out on

Bob Lefsetz keeps insisting the performers can dictate to Ticketmaster re prices and fees . Now in his email Lefsetz has gotten onetime Jeff Beck manager Harvey Goldsmith to agree with him:

I read Jack Antonoff’s comment about ticketing issues, made at The Grammys over the weekend

"it’s not ‘cause of Artists" he says.

How wrong he is.

The Artists, through their representatives, totally control every aspect of Live Touring. From what is on stage, backstage and indeed the ticket price.

Promoters may recommend ticket prices, but the Artist always makes the final decision.

Ticketing Companies will suggest a whole tariff of ways to fleece the fans.
However the Artist always has the final say.
Those Artists that always blame everyone else are the same ones that sanction the problem.

It is totally in the Artist's remit to say whether ticket prices should be "as printed" on the ticket or not.

The Promoter can negotiate the Ticket Commission, but often the artist will demand its share if there are surplus profits.
The exception being if the Promoter has its own separate deal with the Ticketing Company.

At the end of the day only the Artists can stop the madness that besets us.

Some already do, but not nearly enough.

Harvey Goldsmith

I don't know about the added fees, but didn't Springsteen say something like - "I used to find out what our peers were charging, and said 'let's charge a little less'... but for this tour, I said, 'We're in our '70s, let's charge the same as our peers'," etc.

let's relegate lefsetz matters to the lefsetz thred plz

oh no it's the greedy artists that are ruining the music biz!

tho in this case, they def appreciate having ticketmaster around as a shield

I think if some artists told Ticketmaster no variable pricing, limit the fees to x, limit the price to y, that Ticketmaster would say that can’t be done unless you the artist work for free

oh hey, here's West Coast pop punk band The Garden playing two nights at Irving Plaza, popular enough that they can book more than one show but obscure enough that I'm sure tickets via livenation can't be too much aaaaaand GA for a punk show is $83 with seated tickets running up to $330

who the fuck is buying at these prices?

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/6-ways-to-fix-the-broken-concert-ticketing-system/

Pitchfork contributor on how to fix Ticketmaster mess

Well to comment on two of those suggestions...

Artists already can opt out of dynamic pricing. Every decision on how each tour is sold is a collaboration between agent/manager and their contact at TM. If artists care enough about the fans, they will be involved in that process and opt out - and some do. I think most artists selling through TM just remain wilfully ignorant of that process and leave it to their people to sort it out.

Similarly, artists also have the option of blocking resale - its been done by some massive artists already. Many don't because they take a cut of the higher resale prices, or actively get their people involved in doing the higher-priced reselling themselves (Metallica management got caught out on this).

Of course Ticketmaster have always been fine taking the blame for this stuff, they act as a convenient shield between the artist and the ripped off fans... who will never want to think the artist could have some responsibility in flushing out their bank accounts.

Springsteen claimed that if he blocked dynamic pricing that non- Ticketmaster approved ticket scalpers would up the prices and make money that Springsteen said should go to he and his band. I dunno.

Unwinding the Ticketmaster and Live Nation merger is definitely essential. That relationship alone makes it extremely difficult to fight price inflation - there would still be a lot of things that need to be done after a split, but they would be virtually impossible to pull off (at least effectively) with that merger intact.

“Make ticket scalping illegal, level the playing field, and get back to where it’s just normal fans competing for the same Taylor Swift tickets,”

Ticket scalping should be legal-ish but you should have to pay cash to a weird guy in a dirty San Jose Sharks Starter jacket for two tickets a block away from the venue like the good old days.

More ideas not broached in Hogan's piece (I don't think):

(Further) limit the number of tickets people can buy.

Sell tickets directly.

Cap the bullshit fees, or make them flat. Why the fuck should the *fees* be dynamic as well?

Anyway, the problem with that Fork piece and ones like that is that they all begin from the position that Ticketmaster actually provides a real service. But of course TM doesn't do shit, especially in this digital era. They've embedded themselves in the process like parasites.

Even if there were no Ticketmaster, i imagine most venues would still choose to contract with ticketing services, rather than try to set up and manage their own software…?

I mean, part of the problem is that many of these big venues aren't just partnered but are *owned* by Live Nation/Ticketmaster! But yeah, the venues - as individuals or as collectives - would need to have their own ticketing systems, though that would also mean (I assume) keeping more of the money, which might be an incentive.

Springsteen claimed that if he blocked dynamic pricing that non- Ticketmaster approved ticket scalpers would up the prices and make money that Springsteen said should go to he and his band. I dunno.

― curmudgeon, Friday, March 10, 2023 12:33 AM (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

there's no reason to regard springsteen in this matter as anything else but a full of shit rich guy

That's more or less the exact argument the Eagles made back in 1994 or whenever when they smashed through the ticket price ceiling.

The Eagles were the first rock band to shatter the $100 ceiling for tickets. Azoff pointed out at the time that the only people who complained were journo types who got their tickets for free, and it’s true that fans didn’t balk, with Hell Freezes Over selling out every show.

Twenty-two years later, Azoff stands behind that pricing strategy. “Tickets should be priced at what the fans are willing to pay to see the performer,” Azoff explains. “The key element in breaking the $100 ceiling was that it changed the dynamic of resale (by) having the revenue generated by tickets going back to the business — promoters, artists, venues, etc.” Clearly, demand to see the Eagles live after 14 years was sky high, but, “it wasn’t just about making more money,” Azoff says. “It was also about sending the message that Eagles were America’s biggest band, and perhaps one of the biggest in the world — charging like it influenced both fans and media that we were the biggest ever.”

many of these big venues aren't just partnered but are *owned* by Live Nation/Ticketmaster!

So they’re “direct ticketing” already… haha

Statement from the Cure (#onethread):

"We want the tour to be affordable for all fans, and we have a very wide (and we think very fair) range of pricing at every show. Our ticketing partners have agreed to help us stop scalpers from getting in the way; to help minimise resale and keep prices at face value, tickets for this tour will not be transferable. If something comes up that prevents a fan from being able to use a ticket they have purchased, they will be able resell it on a face value ticket exchange."

"Unfortunately, despite our desire to protect our low ticket prices for fans, the states of NY, IL and CO make this very difficult. They actually have laws in place that protect scalpers! For shows in these states we urge fans to buy or sell tickets to one another on face value exchanges like twickets.live and cashortrade.org. Fans should avoid buying tickets that are being resold at inflated prices by scalpers, and the sites that host these scalpers should refrain from reselling tickets for our shows."

Restricting re-sale, but allowing face-value transfers, totally makes sense. More artists should do that!

When I saw the Death tribute in 2021, Tix were $50, but if you needed to sell one, you'd input your buyer's name and email on the ticketers site, which would give them a link to pay, and would void/refund your original transaction, so you broke even. I had to use it and it was a crude system but it was great.

Reselling Tix you can't use now and getting face value is very difficult otherwise, esp if you use a service that takes a cut. And Craigslist is so filled with scams, people just don't want to use it

Yeah, if you're not doing it with someone you semi-trust, like a co-worker ("Ok, the Venmo went through... I'll transfer the tickets now"), you need some kind of digital escrow system.

My best friend and I once got scammed for Lightning tickets during the Eastern Conference Finals. He seemed legit and she had actually chatted with him for a bit, I sent the money via CashApp, nothing. Since you can't mark Goods/Service, they refused to refund. She was in tears.

I decided to use a credit card and pay a majorly marked up price to acquire resale Tix on Ticketmaster. Something like $150 each. It was an expensive day but the look on her face during the game made up for it.

So yeah fuck tickets

We need to go back to the early 2000s, where I would physically meet up with some dude in an In-N-Out, and hand him a wad of cash for Strokes tickets.

Saw this going around re: The Cure (fees for each ticket exceeding the ticket price):

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FrREw7YWwAAu9Nx.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Guillotine%2C_Mus%C3%A9e_de_la_R%C3%A9volution_fran%C3%A7aise.jpg

^^ rejected alternate cover for Carnage Visors

(not really)

When I got the Ticketmaster email that said I had been *waitlisted* to be a "Verified Fan," my immediate reaction was, fuck that, I'm not going to be their dancing monkey, and didn't even bother trying for tickets.

But hey, I can go on Stubhub right now, and pay $150 a pop (before fees) for nosebleed tickets for a show in June that literally only went on (pre)sale this morning.

Sounds like the Drake presale was another clusterfuck.

And Drake tickets were apparently super expensive even without fees

Not playing this three-card-monte game again. Spending my money on new bands that could use it...

it wasn’t just about making more money,” Azoff says. “It was also about sending the message that Eagles were America’s biggest band

god, what a piece of shit

Robert Smith of the Cure got Ticketmaster to offer a $10 refund on service fees to verified fan Cure ticket buyers who bought those cheapest Cure tickets ; and $5 to other verified fan ticket buyers

https://consequence.net/2023/03/robert-smith-the-cure-ticketmaster-refund/

I seem to recall that sort of outcome being the straw that broke Pearl Jam's back, that after months of fighting they were only able to shave off something like $5.

i'm not even invested in this specific instance with the cure personally, but it's very emblematic of why i stopped making big live shows a priority in life. when i think of the main "general amorphous villains" of my life, along with concepts like `people who steal` and `people who are rude to service workers`, i always think of the entity "TICKETMASTER" itself as a manifested evildoer. yes i can attend shows with no affiliations, but man. it's been over the line for years.

pure speculative pontification from this point forward, feel free to skip

wondering about 2 things:

1- rs wasn't given details about how much "fees" would be, saw results and threatened to cancel or something. that's why he referred to the refund as being done in "good faith." i'm hoping the refund will be a simple debit back to the customer's card/account. knowing those assholes, it may end up coming back to everyone in the form of like an arby's gift card that you need to take a day off from in order to simply acquire the fucking thing.
2- the whole thing's a ruse to get the crowd on the band's side, i.e. buy more tickets. tickmaster know they're heels anyway. wouldn't put it past them.

I think Robert Smith got out ahead of this early enough that no one blamed him or the band. The bigger question is, if Robert Smith of the Cure can sway Ticketmaster, even $10/$5, why can't Taylor Fucking Swift or Bruce Springsteen?

I assume they could if they wanted to

That's my assumption.

Robert still roasting them today over some other ticket screwup. You love to see it.