By Dirty Dan
A few days ago, I read that Bruce Springsteen fans were making some noise about Ticketmaster, and how they tried to buy tickets to his concerts, only to be redirected to another ticket site that cost more than double face value. Not only that, but the website that they were directed to was owned by Ticketmaster. Why did it take so long for anyone to raise this issue? Ticketmaster has been doing dirty business like this for years. It’s never been easy to get tickets to popular events through ticketmaster. If you try to get them online, it sells out in 30 seconds, sometimes less. Nobody bothers using the phone system anymore, but that was horrible too. Even their multiple presales through various sponsors such as American Express sell out ridiculously fast. Then, the only way to get tickets is to buy them off of one of their other, more expensive sites, or find some scalper on ebay or craigslist. Sometimes, you can manage to get lucky and find someone who genuinely bought tickets to go to the show, but then something came up and they resell them for face value. I’ve done that before myself.
I understand the concept of Capitalism, and that there is a market for high interest tickets. I even understand the motives of a scalper. I mean, if you’re lucky enough to get tickets to a popular event, you should be entitled to sell the tickets for profit. Why not? My problem is that Ticketmaster blatantly does this. Tickets are already overpriced due to bullshit fees and convenience charges. If a ticket is on sale for $35, it ends up being closer to $45-50 when Ticketmaster is done with them. With that said, where do they get off dumping most of their tickets to another site that they can then turn them around for more money. That doesn’t seem legit. And why did it take Springsteen Fans in 2009, 20+ years past his prime to discover and complain about this scam? When Pearl Jam complained about this same bullshit in the early 90’s, they were beat down like a nerd with a retainer.
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