Fail
Last night Ariel and I tried to go to the Raphael Saddiq show at the Showbox. We haven’t been going out the last few years much. I usually find myself fairly uninterested in clubs or bars these days, but both Ariel and I are big Saddiq fans, so we decided to go. When I went to go buy tickets online, Ticketmaster was charging $8.50 per ticket on a $20 ticket. That’s almost half again as much! What the hell? I actually balked at that and got all worked up (’monopoly’, ‘gauging’, ‘evil’, etc) and didn’t buy the ticket. We didn’t think the show would sell out anyway, and that we’d just go down there early and get tickets. We got all dressed up fancy for the show, drove down, parked the car, walked up to the Showbox in the cold, only to find a big ‘SOLD OUT’ sign on the door. Bummer. Seriously though, something about Ticketmaster is just wrong. How can they charge almost half again as much as the full ticket price? Of course, me getting worked up about it meant that I didn’t get see the show, so I sort of shot myself in the foot, but it still irks me. We need a revolution.
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March 6th, 2009 at 11:07 am
Now that I work in town, I almost never buy tickets online anymore (with the rare exception of the ones, like, say, Salon Of Shame, that sell out in minutes).
I usually buy for a bunch of people at once, but even in single-ticket cases, it’s really just the principle of the thing – I don’t want that evil company to have even a single one of my dollars, much less 1/3 to 1/2 of the price shared by EVERY SINGLE OTHER PERSON INVOLVED IN THE PROCESS OF PRODUCING THE SHOW just for having created a website that can keep track of tickets.
It’s bad enough that they essentially “hold hostage” all tickets to any remotely popular show – if you don’t buy from them, you don’t get in – hardly a “convenience fee”… but their intent is to give even MORE preference to the rich by converting more popular shows to an “auction” system. For shows like this, I’ll literally go Craigslist or hang out outside a venue before the show to buy from random people with extras…
Then again, I’m weird like that.
March 6th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
I have skipped many shows lately for the same reason. The “convenience fee” has become onerous. I really hope the merger between Live Nation and TicketBastard is stopped.
March 6th, 2009 at 10:26 pm
Dre, I love this post for so many reasons, one of which is that I can just hear you saying the last part. The other is that I’ve sort of had this nagging feeling that this is so wrong, and yet acquiesced to it or schlepped to box offices at inopportune times uncomplainingly.
But yeah, you’re right. It’s so wrong. Who gets the money? Not the artists. Not the venues that have to clean up after our miserable asses. No, just some stockholders of some virtual process of printing out some paper and running some transactions. Well, I suppose they have to hire web teams and evil masterminds to figure out how to then sell your email to marketing companies, *that* costs money.
Now I’m pissed. Sheesh.
October 20th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
There is a revolution called Brown Paper Tickets. They’re small and sane. Right now I can buy a few local shows and maybe some roller derby tickets, but I hope someday they do get big enough to give Ticketmaster a run for their money…