Ticketmaster: What a Scam!
I ordered some tickets for Ashley and I go to see Switchfoot in February, and I was happy to see that the tickets were only $25. I’ve never seen them live, but I dig their music, so it should be a good show. When ordering the tickets, I looked at the price breakdown: the ticket price is $25, but there’s an additional $12.70 in extra charges from Ticketmaster. That’s just over 50% of the ticket price for such dubious things as “convenience charge”, “building facility charge” and “order processing charge”. What a scam. Now I grasp why Pearl Jam went to war with Ticketmaster - they’re truly the mafia of the ticketing industry. I’m all for businesses making a buck, but there’s something very wrong when a ticketing company is charging 50% of the price of the whole damn show we’re going to see. In this era of online orders, PayPal, and other fast and easy methods of transactions, why are bands still using Ticketmaster? Are they really providing that much value? I suspect not.
Posts
January 6th, 2007 at 9:32 am
The “convenience charge” is a rip-off similar to the car undercoating charge. At least you can get out of the undercoating charge.
What I want to find out is how much %age of profit does Ticketmaster make from the actual ticket itself. I am sure out of the $25 per ticket they are getting a cut; how much is that?
Overall I dread ordering tickets from Ticketmaster, but right now this rip-off is a mandatory torture we have to go through.
January 6th, 2007 at 11:33 am
Dude, they sent the tickets for free! What are you complaining about?
This is my wife and I stopped going to concerts years ago. When tickets to costs over $50 in the grass section of Shoreline, you know it’s time to start renting the live DVD.
March 2nd, 2007 at 12:01 pm
[...] That’s a photo (nasty Treo 750 cameraphone!) from the Switchfoot concert that Ashley and I went to on February the 21st. Switchfoot is a “crossover” band in that they’re started out in the CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) scene and later made a splash in the mainstream music scene. So while they undoubtedly have a large fan base in the secular market now, a good chunk of their long-term fans are of the Christian variety. I first heard of Switchfoot a few years ago when someone I knew was doing a video project and used the song “Dare You To Move“. It’s a fantastic song with great lyrics and a killer hook. When I heard Switchfoot was coming to Calgary, I definitely wanted to go see them, so I bought some tickets (remember the Ticketmaster rant?). [...]