The diabolical nature of Ticketmaster

1) TM marks up the price of concert tickets as much as 100% for their events because of miscellaneous “convenience” charges, venue charges, and other charges. This mark-up assumes that you choose to get your tickets by mail and do not pay extra to have them messenger. For example, for a ticket to a recent show, the face value of one ticket was $12. When all was said and done, it cost $22 and change. If I had wanted to print my tickets out myself (on my own paper, using my own printer and ink), it was have cost me an additional $2.50. Sorry, but if it’s on my dime, it’s on your paper . . .

2) In the event that a concert is cancelled, all of these extra charges are nonrefundable. So Whether or not a show happens, TM makes their money, and if the show I bought my $22 ticket for is called off, I’m still out $10.

3) TM has what they call “artist alerts.” What this means is that if an artist you like is going to be in your area, TM will send you an email telling you about it before tickets go on-sale. Sounds good right? Wrong. When these alerts do go out, it’s usually on the day before tickets go on sale. Since most tickets go on sale Saturday AM, the alerts usually go out sometime Friday. If you don’t live on-line you might miss them. Even if you do live on-line, there’s no guarantee that the alert will actually go out before the tickets go on sale, so in effect the alerts may well lure you into a false sense of security. This recently happened to me. Now, as it turns out I had tickets to another show on the night in question anyway, but the point is that tickets went on sale on Thursday for an event the following Friday. I have an artist alert for this event, so I should have been notified. I wasn’t. In fact, I still haven’t been notified, and the concert is now over. Had I known that TM sometimes falls asleep on the job, I would have been more vigilant.

4) TM is stupid. This last point might seem unduly harsh, but hear me out. At one of the local venues, tickets apparently went on sale last week for a band called “Aqualung.” (If you haven’t heard him, he’s good and you should check him out, but that’s beside the point.) I went to the TM site to see about getting a ticket for Aqualung, and it’s not listed. There is an event listed at the same venue for the same night for a band called Aqualong. Hmm. So I email TM and ask about it, because the aqualung website doesn’t mention a Los Angeles show, and I don’t know if there is a band called Aqualong. I certainly don’t want to buy a ticket if it’s the wrong band. Not only does TM, not know which is which, it didn’t even understand my email. I’ve now emailed them twice and have still not gotten a straight answer from them. I guess I’ll have to call the venue on Monday and see if anyone there knows what the Hell is going on. But I also goggled aqualong and did a few other internet searches, and to the best of my knowledge, no such band exists . . . so it looks like someone at TM made a spelling error and is just too clueless to fix it. I think I’ll be dealing with the venue from here on out.

5) TM sells tickets to scalpers. They have a program set up to prevent automated sales, but at the same time, I know for a fact that when the hot bands come to town and sell out in a short time that a good number of those tickets are going to show up on ebay before the show. I’m not talking about the “I had to go out of town on business so can’t make this concert” single user sort of thing—that I have no problem with. What I’m talking about are the vendors who buy tickets for the sole purpose of scalping them on the internet for profit. It’s not hard to figure out who these people are: they usually have usernames like “tix4sale” or something . . . What makes this so objectionable is the pretense that TM sells only to individuals. I could go on about the evils of scalping, but I’ll save that for another time.

The thing of it is that for a lot of the shows I go to, there’s not another option. One venue in particular will only accept faxes. So if you have no fax machine (like me!), you have to use TM. This vendor only accepts faxes between 1-5, and tickets usually go on sale at 10 or 11. . . so there have been occasions when the event has sold out before you could even send your fax if you’re lucky enough to have a fax to send. The one benefit is, however, with TM, if you purchase your ticket in advance, you’re most likely able to avoid the will call line the night of the show . . . that’s a plus—but I’m not sure if it’s an $8 plus . . .