I just bought tickets for a Rangers-Leafs game in MSG. The face price of the seats is $29.25, but Tickmaster adds its "convenience charge" of $7.25. 25% for printing out and mailing me tickets??? What a racket, when will there ever be some competition in this field? I can't imagine how anyone could justify a fee of over 5% a ticket unless the face price is under $20. Elliot Spitzer is out harassing brokers and Wall Street, I want him to put himself to good use and hit these thieves!!!
WB, It's only going to get worse, here is an article I read yesterday. Looks like greed can be found at many different levels.
Ticketmaster's online auction service will boost prices to what market can bear
Tuesday, September 09, 2003
Lining up for concert tickets may be a thing of the past under new online service by Ticketmaster. If tickets for Shania Twain's sold-out show at the Pacific Coliseum Dec. 7 are going for $500 on the Internet, was the original price of $50 too cheap?
Ticketmaster thinks so, and it has a plan to see that ticket prices better reflect what people are willing to pay -- not to mention take business back from scalpers and online resellers.
By the end of the year, the ticket giant is to start selling concert and event tickets to the highest bidder through an online auction service.
The new system would push aside fans who line up for hours to get the best seats and instead award those seats to the person who ponies up the most cash.
"It has the ability to make [prices] what the market will bear," said Patti Babin, spokeswoman for Ticketmaster Canada. "We developed this because the artists and promoters asked us to. They are the ones who are losing out on the money in the secondary market."
Ticketmaster said it is offering the auction system -- similar to eBay or Yahoo! Auctions -- in order to stop the circulation of counterfeit tickets and to curb scalping.
The auction service will be made available to music artists and promoters who choose to sell off some, or all, of their tickets at premium prices. Those who don't want to auction tickets will still be able to stick to the fixed-price system.
Vancouver talent manager Bruce Allen applauds the proposal, noting that boxing promoters already sell ringside seats by online auction.
"I don't think they're going to put a whole building up for auction," he said. He sees bands choosing to sell only front-row-centre seats this way. For the fans, it means average people without connections have a shot at the best seats.
"People aren't averse to price if they want to go see it," Allen said.
And of course, auctions could boost the payday for the artists and bands, who are usually paid a percentage of the gate.
"There's so much discretionary pricing right now in concerts. Most people know that scalpers get all the good tickets at concerts, so they buy them from scalpers and they end up paying double or half again as much," Allen said. "This can eliminate that."
Other observers warn the auction plan may deter fans.
"There will be a huge backlash if people can't go to concerts they want to see because scalpers, or people who can pay the most, are getting first access to all the tickets," said Adam Cooper, a consultant with retail analyst firm J.C. Williams Group in Toronto. "Really, they are not in the business of trying to maximize profits by selling the tickets for as much as they possibly can."
Dennis Ruffo, an Ottawa concert promoter, was equally cautious.
"From a fan's point of view, I don't think this would be fair," he said. "Obviously, everyone should have equal access to tickets, especially if you're a fan that lines up overnight. It should be fair and equitable."
Don Simpson, president of the House of Blues Concerts Canada, likes the idea, but doesn't see it being used to sell large quantities of tickets.
"I'm sure that everybody is going to walk before they run on this system," He said. "We all know the demand is not 4,000 people at $400. There may only be six people that would pay that kind of money."
Ticketmaster is an arm of Interactive Corp., an Internet services company that owns Expedia, an Internet travel agent, and the Home Shopping Network.
The company sold 24 million tickets worth $1.2 billion around the world between April and June -- an increase of five per cent over the same period last year.
Bands like Pearl Jam have refused to allow Ticketmaster to sell tickets for their concerts, saying the company's service charges on tickets are far too high. But the protests, for the most part, have fizzled because many consumers are willing to pay for the convenience of ordering tickets online or by phone.
Ticketmaster's online auction service will boost prices to what market can bear
Tuesday, September 09, 2003
Lining up for concert tickets may be a thing of the past under new online service by Ticketmaster. If tickets for Shania Twain's sold-out show at the Pacific Coliseum Dec. 7 are going for $500 on the Internet, was the original price of $50 too cheap?
Ticketmaster thinks so, and it has a plan to see that ticket prices better reflect what people are willing to pay -- not to mention take business back from scalpers and online resellers.
By the end of the year, the ticket giant is to start selling concert and event tickets to the highest bidder through an online auction service.
The new system would push aside fans who line up for hours to get the best seats and instead award those seats to the person who ponies up the most cash.
"It has the ability to make [prices] what the market will bear," said Patti Babin, spokeswoman for Ticketmaster Canada. "We developed this because the artists and promoters asked us to. They are the ones who are losing out on the money in the secondary market."
Ticketmaster said it is offering the auction system -- similar to eBay or Yahoo! Auctions -- in order to stop the circulation of counterfeit tickets and to curb scalping.
The auction service will be made available to music artists and promoters who choose to sell off some, or all, of their tickets at premium prices. Those who don't want to auction tickets will still be able to stick to the fixed-price system.
Vancouver talent manager Bruce Allen applauds the proposal, noting that boxing promoters already sell ringside seats by online auction.
"I don't think they're going to put a whole building up for auction," he said. He sees bands choosing to sell only front-row-centre seats this way. For the fans, it means average people without connections have a shot at the best seats.
"People aren't averse to price if they want to go see it," Allen said.
And of course, auctions could boost the payday for the artists and bands, who are usually paid a percentage of the gate.
"There's so much discretionary pricing right now in concerts. Most people know that scalpers get all the good tickets at concerts, so they buy them from scalpers and they end up paying double or half again as much," Allen said. "This can eliminate that."
Other observers warn the auction plan may deter fans.
"There will be a huge backlash if people can't go to concerts they want to see because scalpers, or people who can pay the most, are getting first access to all the tickets," said Adam Cooper, a consultant with retail analyst firm J.C. Williams Group in Toronto. "Really, they are not in the business of trying to maximize profits by selling the tickets for as much as they possibly can."
Dennis Ruffo, an Ottawa concert promoter, was equally cautious.
"From a fan's point of view, I don't think this would be fair," he said. "Obviously, everyone should have equal access to tickets, especially if you're a fan that lines up overnight. It should be fair and equitable."
Don Simpson, president of the House of Blues Concerts Canada, likes the idea, but doesn't see it being used to sell large quantities of tickets.
"I'm sure that everybody is going to walk before they run on this system," He said. "We all know the demand is not 4,000 people at $400. There may only be six people that would pay that kind of money."
Ticketmaster is an arm of Interactive Corp., an Internet services company that owns Expedia, an Internet travel agent, and the Home Shopping Network.
The company sold 24 million tickets worth $1.2 billion around the world between April and June -- an increase of five per cent over the same period last year.
Bands like Pearl Jam have refused to allow Ticketmaster to sell tickets for their concerts, saying the company's service charges on tickets are far too high. But the protests, for the most part, have fizzled because many consumers are willing to pay for the convenience of ordering tickets online or by phone.
Well the prices are so high for most regular season games, I can't blame them. If they jack up the good seats, least they can do is give the cheap seats better prices. Problem here is that the team doesn't care about its fans and how they get screwed. As a coworker pointed out, they love these high fees. If you go to the team's box office you get the tickets no fee and they are happy since they don't pay a commission so high fees drive more people to them and they cut out the middleman. Anyways $30 for a bad seat at a hockey game, that is pretty ridiculous in itself. It just adds major insult when I get surcharged another almost $20 just because I don't live anywhere near New York and all that is just pure profit for Ticketmaster.
Wildbill- Ticketmaster has been f**king people for a long time because they can and they know it. They have a controlled monopoly which in the case of ticketing means you can get tickets in other ways but you're pretty much stuck with using them most of the time. They symbolize corporate greed at its best. I haven't used them in ages. When there's a local event I want to go to, I will drive to the venue to buy tickets to beat Ticketmaster's larcenous surcharge. I don't care if it's 115 degrees outside. I will do pretty much anything to avoid doing business with those crooks.
I used to know a guy that worked for Ticketmaster and he told me that 90% of the people in the company are crooked. What they do from the higher up execs right down to the ticket sellers themselves is they hold back loads of prime seats. Even if you camped out for days and were first at the window, you will only get the best of whats left. And that's usually just average seats because the best seats never see public sale. At least not at face value.
Workers and execs at Ticketmaster then sell them in large blocks to the scalpers who in turn get whatever they can from whatever the public is willing to pay. Have you ever wondered how the scalpers get so many prime seats? That's how.
I used to know a guy that worked for Ticketmaster and he told me that 90% of the people in the company are crooked. What they do from the higher up execs right down to the ticket sellers themselves is they hold back loads of prime seats. Even if you camped out for days and were first at the window, you will only get the best of whats left. And that's usually just average seats because the best seats never see public sale. At least not at face value.
Workers and execs at Ticketmaster then sell them in large blocks to the scalpers who in turn get whatever they can from whatever the public is willing to pay. Have you ever wondered how the scalpers get so many prime seats? That's how.
Wildbill, you are right, but we Europeans are used to this kind of corruption by now. There's price fixing at head-of-state level in oil and gas, airlines, automobile and telecom industries, and many others I'm sure. European cars cost 50-100% more in Europe than the EXACT SAME CAR bought in the USA. You'd think it'd be the other way around because of the shipping costs, but no. European governments have been corrupt for a long, long time and so prices are artificially high over here. And it's by a larger amount than those ticketmaster service charges.
America is starting to centralize itself as it discovers the joys of oligopolies and price fixing. It's turning into the very thing the founding fathers worked so hard to escape from. Go figure.
America is starting to centralize itself as it discovers the joys of oligopolies and price fixing. It's turning into the very thing the founding fathers worked so hard to escape from. Go figure.
Precisely the reason I bit the bullet and bought these tickets. If they were playing some lousy team that was no draw I would have gone and hoped to get better tickets for cheap. I certainly know how to play the game with the scalpers as well when its necessary to go that route, I used to work the street with two buddies in Seattle during my college years when Sonics tickets were the hottest thing in town and only 14,000 seats back then. But since this is a marquee opponent and probably a national TV game I figured buy them this way and avoid that hassle on "foreign" turf.
The oligopoly is terrible. There are competitors, but they don't compete on a game by game basis. Tickets.com is doing good business in some parts, but the contract to sell tickets requires them or ticketmaster. An obvious price fixing situation if you ask me, that is why I wonder why bulldogs like Elliot Spitzer haven't gone after these thugs. Wall Street was a popular target, but if you want to be a populist politician I can think of no easier or more hated enemy than Ticketmaster and their ilk.
And yes Bob, I certainly would go out of my way to buy tickets at the box office, but lets be reasonable here. New York isn't exactly a "driveable" distance from Nevada.
The oligopoly is terrible. There are competitors, but they don't compete on a game by game basis. Tickets.com is doing good business in some parts, but the contract to sell tickets requires them or ticketmaster. An obvious price fixing situation if you ask me, that is why I wonder why bulldogs like Elliot Spitzer haven't gone after these thugs. Wall Street was a popular target, but if you want to be a populist politician I can think of no easier or more hated enemy than Ticketmaster and their ilk.
And yes Bob, I certainly would go out of my way to buy tickets at the box office, but lets be reasonable here. New York isn't exactly a "driveable" distance from Nevada.
The president of the League of American Theaters and Producers has called New York's anti ticket scalping law "unrealistic." Rocco Landesman, president of the Jujamcyn chain of Broadway theaters, has complained that the law does not stop the scalping of tickets to New York events, but just forces it out of state. Big venues like Madison Square Garden are most concerned about rampant street scalping and have pushed for increasing the no scalp zone from 1,000 to 1,500 feet. Attorney General Eliot Spitzer says the root of the ticket problem is "ice," a slang term for bribes given in exchange for tickets at the box office, and fraudulent promoters who divert the best seats to networks of connected brokers. He favors cracking down on this big time corruption but letting the free market dictate prices for scalped tickets.
Big venues like Madison Square Garden are most concerned about rampant street scalping and have pushed for increasing the no scalp zone from 1,000 to 1,500 feet.
They ought to increase it to 15,000 feet and shoot all ticket scalpers on sight. Professional ticketscalpers are scum. They are controlled by the Mafia and are leading to the downfall of our country. Kids are having to sell crack on the streets to go see Disney on Ice due to ticketscalpers charging unfair prices. Without ticketscalpers our country wouldn't have a drug problem. In fact, all organized crime can be traced to ticketscalping. Along with homosexuality and pedophilia, according to the AMA.
They ought to increase it to 15,000 feet and shoot all ticket scalpers on sight. Professional ticketscalpers are scum. They are controlled by the Mafia and are leading to the downfall of our country. Kids are having to sell crack on the streets to go see Disney on Ice due to ticketscalpers charging unfair prices. Without ticketscalpers our country wouldn't have a drug problem. In fact, all organized crime can be traced to ticketscalping. Along with homosexuality and pedophilia, according to the AMA.
lol - Spitzer wants the 'free market' to determine the price for those tickets. Uh huh. Well, then, if a ticket is a commodity, so are groceries - why not have the local grocery store put up the high-price items like lobsters up for bid? Someone is surely willing to pay more than someone else, right?
The libertarian in me has no problem with ticket prices being high as long as they are the same high price for EVERYONE willing to pay for them. But when you start down a slippery slope like this where you alter that price based on demand, you are inherently freezing out a large segment of the fans who can't possibly afford the best tickets. Happens now, too, it's just that the acts want a piece of the pie, too. But I live in KC where we don't get the really big acts, but usually the same fuc-king bands every 2 years or so - exactly how many times are we supposed to pay for Aerosmith??? I've given up on the big concerts out here, I have no clue how you can score great seats on Ticketmaster and you sure as shit can't do it otherwise unless you win a radio station contest or pay a scalper's fee at the LEGAL ticket 'brokers' squatting in the suburban malls (Ace Tickets in the Oak Park Mall is one of them).
If this works, which it probably will because money talks, I wouldn't be surprised to see Ticketmaster expand this concept to gradually include more and more tickets, and add Ebay-like 'pre-auctions' that might run for a week prior to the general ticket sales at a fixed price - shit, some long-suffering fan might be willing to pay $30 for a $15 nose-bleed ticket for a primo sure-to-be-SRO concert, why not stick the knife in as many as you can?
I've seen a lot of concerts and for me there is a threshold past where I no longer think that 2 hours plus a short and sweet encore is worth my money - and we're almost there. Screw that, I'll spend that money on local bands and other entertainment, there is no law saying I must shovel out shitloads of cash to bands whose members are old enough to be my father.
p.s. Why not expand this concept to the primo MOVIES?
The libertarian in me has no problem with ticket prices being high as long as they are the same high price for EVERYONE willing to pay for them. But when you start down a slippery slope like this where you alter that price based on demand, you are inherently freezing out a large segment of the fans who can't possibly afford the best tickets. Happens now, too, it's just that the acts want a piece of the pie, too. But I live in KC where we don't get the really big acts, but usually the same fuc-king bands every 2 years or so - exactly how many times are we supposed to pay for Aerosmith??? I've given up on the big concerts out here, I have no clue how you can score great seats on Ticketmaster and you sure as shit can't do it otherwise unless you win a radio station contest or pay a scalper's fee at the LEGAL ticket 'brokers' squatting in the suburban malls (Ace Tickets in the Oak Park Mall is one of them).
If this works, which it probably will because money talks, I wouldn't be surprised to see Ticketmaster expand this concept to gradually include more and more tickets, and add Ebay-like 'pre-auctions' that might run for a week prior to the general ticket sales at a fixed price - shit, some long-suffering fan might be willing to pay $30 for a $15 nose-bleed ticket for a primo sure-to-be-SRO concert, why not stick the knife in as many as you can?
I've seen a lot of concerts and for me there is a threshold past where I no longer think that 2 hours plus a short and sweet encore is worth my money - and we're almost there. Screw that, I'll spend that money on local bands and other entertainment, there is no law saying I must shovel out shitloads of cash to bands whose members are old enough to be my father.
p.s. Why not expand this concept to the primo MOVIES?
My question is just how much would these guys charge as a "convenience fee" if they had 3 competing ticketing services that you could buy tickets from, including the box office. With technology today what it is, I would think there would be services that could offer the tickets for $1 or less and require you to print out the tickets. Many stadiums now use that bar code reader anyways, some startup could make bank just getting into the business and telling the teams they will save their fans a lot of money if they allow them to sell tickets instead of or along with Ticketmaster. To only give people one outlet to buy tickets is the problem here.
