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Ticketmaster's ticket-vending monopoly
Bruce Springsteen and other artists fight back against the money-
grubbing organization with a monopoly on how we buy tickets

By Jay Schreiber

ave you ever been to a concert

and thought you were just a

little over-charged? Do you
ever check the price of a ticket before
buying it, only to do a double take
once you have the ticket in hand?
Ticketmaster (the premiere ticket
vending organization) is gouging prices
worse than gas pumps and taking it out
on you, the ticket-buying public.

An average concert at a large
venue nowadays costs around $65
for a decent seat (such as GM
place, lower bowl) and that’s
usually before the event sells
out. But, in order to buy a ticket,
you must pay a Ticketmaster
Convenience Charge of around
10-15 bucks (no joke!) in order
to get your ticket printed. Tag that
on top of the standard GST and
you’re paying well over $80 for
your once semi-affordable seat.

Am I the only one who
thinks that this is ridiculous? My
aunt used to tell me stories of
when she used to go see Stevie
Ray Vaughn play two full sets for
three bucks! It seems that concert
going in this day and age is more
of a racketeering operation than
anything else. If you put aside
the 80 bucks you’re paying to
step inside the door, there’s still
the $7.50 you have to cough up
to Molson for a refreshment, and
the $35 it costs for a t-shirt to
remember the night with.

This is madness! Recently,
Ticketmaster has found a way to
make even more money off of
concert-goers, by listing events as
“sold out” and then reselling set
aside tickets for an inflated price.

One of these companies
is called TicketsNow, a ticket
scalping site that sells the once
$65 ticket for upwards of $500.
This operation was first brought
to the media’s attention when
people who tried to buy tickets
for the Flight of the Concords
show in Vancouver were told that
the event was sold out and were
redirected from Ticketmaster.ca
to TicketsNow mere moments
after the tickets went on sale. It
appears that Ticketmaster would
rather set these tickets aside to
sell for more money later than to
sell the tickets at the original set
price.

Bruce Springsteen fans
had a similar experience, with
tickets to his show reaching the
thousands of dollars through
similar scalping websites. In
addition to TicketsNow, StubHub
and Ticketmaster’s Auction
websites have a similar scheme of
forcing people to buy tickets at a

substantially higher price.

So how is Ticketmaster getting
away with this? Well, scalping is not
technically illegal in British Columbia,
so they really aren’t doing anything
that is against the law. The saddest part
is that there are no other organizations
that sell tickets to these events, so
everyone is forced to go through
Ticketmaster.

With the artist only seeing about
$3-5 from each ticket, you have to
wonder where the rest of the money

money back

from these events is going, never mind
the $10 service charge. When asked
about this, Ticketmaster stated that
everything is related to building and
service fees, and that little profit is seen
on their end. Again, I find this hard to
believe.

In a statement explaining why he’s
suing Ticketmaster, Bruce Springsteen
simply put that “there’s a conflict of
interest, and Ticketmaster doesn’t seem
to care about promoting events as much
as it does collecting money.”

    

 

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