Occasionally those of us considered “blahging superstars” or “infanet celebrity blahgers” or “general badasses” are required to buy our own tickets to events. Not very often, but occasionally.
Normally we’re flooded with tickets, back stage passes and laminated VIP cards to more concerts and sporting events that we can handle, but every once in a while we like to dirty our hands and purchase the tickets like the common man, Johnny Everyman if you will.
Today was such an occasion for our boy Mac G. And look at the bullshit he stumbled across.
If you take a look at the picture, you’ll see that Ticketmaster returned zero tickets for the event Mac was attempting to buy tickets to attend. This is at 10:01am on the day tickets were made available. For those of you who are new around here, ticket sales begin at 10:00am on the day of sale. So 1 minute into the sale, they are out of tickets.
This isn’t new or uncommon.
Highly sought after shows will often sell out quickly due to high demand from fans and a high number of scalpers buying their maximum limit so they can jack up the prices on Ebay or your local street corner the day of the show.
What is new and uncommon here is that Ticketmaster, after the search returned zero tickets for the event, offered Mac the “opportunity” to purchase his tickets from a third party ticket broker, TicketNow.
The rub? TicketNow is owned by Ticketmaster.
So, why would Ticketmaster want to sell you tickets for “face value” when they can send you to TicketNow where you’ll pay possibly two or three times more?
Who in the hell is regulating this? How is this not a conflict of interest?
This is just another in the long list of reasons why Ticketmaster is among the worst companies ever created on American soil. I’m sure those two dudes at Arizona State back in 1978 had great intentions, but their company has turned into an unstoppable force of nature. I would like to call it an monopoly, but somehow in 1999 they managed to keep that label from being applied to them. Later that week all US Supreme Court justices were seen courtside at a Lakers game next to the Victoria Secret girls and Will Smith.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Ticketmaster is an evil corporation. I would like to kick the CEO square in the testicles. That is all.
While I agree it sucks for the consumer, the claim from TM is that they don’t sell any tickets on TN, nor do they sell any tickets to TN brokers – rather, all tickets listed on TN are from 3rd party brokers. How can they list tickets for sale long before the tickets have gone on sale (e.g., Phish summer tour?) – they do so on speculation (e.g., brokers assume from past experience that they will get 15 tickets to event X, so list them before they have them). The real rub is in the fine print – on most scalping sites, they can at any time refund your money no questions ask and not give you the ticket. What would be worth getting up in arms about is seeing whether or not scalpers are selling tickets multiple times over on speculation, and then when the actual product comes in, refunding all but the most expensive orders.
That said, TM sucks horribly, and Live Nation isn’t much better. Unfortunately, in our “free market” (read: nepotism) competition in media quickly turns to a “you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours” – and once again, the consumer is shafted.
The reason this sort of thing exists is because the consumer continues to pay for it. Consumers are willing and able to pay higher, secondary market prices. Because of that, these brokers offer higher prices than if you bought direct from an arena or team. If you don’t like it, don’t buy tickets to the event, other people don’t have a problem with it and will pay for it.
“*Please note that on occasion tickets may be placed for sale on TicketsNow by Ticketmaster for example when a transaction on Ticketmaster’s TicketExchange is subsequently cancelled and Ticketmaster resells the ticket to mitigate a loss it has incurred.”
In other words, you never had a chance.
fuck ticketmaster
they are fucking bitches
FUCK THE MAN!!
I am still perplexed at the legality of this scam. Great Post Brah.