LearnHub

Here’s a great article I found by Sarah Schmidt. It explains a lot of the issues, including the idea that artists are also to blame. You can find it here.

Looks like this debate isn’t that big yet.

Here are some updates though:

Bruce Springsteen fans who were unable to buy tickets at normal prices reached a settlement with Ticketmaster- the site had a draw for 200 tickets, and other buyers received a gift card as compensation. I think that while some fans will undoubtedly be disappointing, it’s nice to see Ticketmaster doing something to please customers.

Sadly, similar reports on tickets being offered at higher prices at TicketsNow (a Ticketmaster-owned resale site) before they actually go on sale to both a Leonard Cohen concert in Canada and a recent No Doubt concert are making suspicions rise. Ticketmaster claims it’ll remove all ties between the main site and Ticketsnow, and the CEO claims that if was in charge at the time he wouldn’t have bought TicketsNow.

This raises the simple question- why not close TicketsNow? It’s clearly a secondary market that’s hurting customers overall. At least block it or disallow the resale of tickets to concerts in those locations (including Ontario Canada and other states and provinces in North America) where scalping is illegal. This will help Ticketmaster avoid any legal claims and will support music fans.

The litigation against Ticketmaster is undergoing review at the moment, and so is the proposed merger. In the meanwhile, Liva Nation reports losses, which raises the possibility that without a merger, it would collapse and the tickets industry will still be a monopoly under Ticketmaster’s rule.

So hey, who knows what’s going to go down? There’s hope things will get better for fans. But there’s also the possibility that they’ll get a lot worse. In the meanwhile, I’m still buying concert tickets online.

A new article discusses more views and gives an interesting insight.

Turns out yes, artists are to blame. Neil Diamond have sold some tickets directly to Ticketsnow, as revealed by the Wall Street Journal. Greedy greedy! But does that even fall under scalping, seeing as it’s a primary sell? Whatever you call it, it’s definitely not honest. Joining him on the evil front is (drum roll) Michael Jackson, yeah, that nut with the fake face. He’s allegedly done the same thing with a different site, which would explain why his 50 comeback shows all sold out so fast.

But not everyone’s evil. Trent Reznor of NIN posted a great essay explaining why exactly you pay so much for tickets, and proclaiming that his own mantra is to do everything possible to avoid that. That’s good news to all Nine Inch Nails fans, and I’m suggesting many artists can learn a lesson here.

Like Bono. When he was asked about the merger and the ticketing situation, he just said it’s big, but he didn’t have the time to really think about this. I’m highly disappointing- for such a big voice and advocate of so many righteous causes, Bono fails his very own fans.

Here’s a personal experience. I just bought a couple of Coldplay tickets. I bought them half an hour after they came up, so that’s good, nothing was sold out or redirected (though these weren’t the best tickets in the house). Each ticket supposedly costs $40, but I ended up paying an extra $30 with all those convenience and extra charges. So yeah, the charges can add up to the price of an extra ticket almost. That’s just not right!

Anybody? Comments? Hello?

Woo and Hoo!

According to the Canadian Press, McGuinty and the Ontario government are planning legislation to stop Ticketmaster form selling tickets on TicketsNow. Thank you Dalton! Of course, it’s much too early to celebrate (sadly I doubt this’ll pass before the upcoming U2 concert), and there aren’t any details on what the legislation will actually mean.

What it should mean, if our politicians are smart (big if?), is that TicketsNow should not be allowed to sell any tickets to any Ontario events (unless they’re priced as advertised on the tickets). Since scalping is illegal in Ontario, doing anything less than this will have no effect on anything.

I just took a look at that Coldplay concert on TicketsNow. They’ve got a whole lot of tickets going from $50 to over $5000. Yeah. And in some instances 8 or 16 tickets are offered- and I think it’s pretty clear no actual concert goer would buy 8 tickets, so it’s obvious these are scalpers. No other way about it. TicketsNow should be renamed to ScalpNow.

Let’s all hope legislation passes by fine and maybe, just maybe, there’ll be a stop to this.

See, now I’m mad.

In Manitoba, the Ticketmaster lawyer actually had the nerve to try and encourage the province to drop anti scalping laws. He claims they can’t be enforced.

Sure, there’ll always be scalpers and we can’t stop them all. But there’ll also always be thieves and other criminals, that’s what the law is for, to catch them and stop them one by one until everyone gets the message. Scalping is wrong because it’s unfair to consumers. I’m ok with auctions on tickets, those are fair, and I’m very pro-ballots (using a random draw for a chance to buy tickets, like they did with the Led Zepp reunion), but when you’re doing it first-come-first-serve and sometimes selling it directly to redistributers it’s just not right.

And they’ve got a monopoly, we can’t do anything! If we boycott ticketmaster we won’t be able to go to concerts. Any ideas?

More news coming up.

First of all, Sean Moriarty, a top executive of Ticketmaster, just resigned. Rumours say it’s because he expects to lose his position anyway once the merger comes along, but maybe it’s got something to do with all the possibly-shady business going on at Ticketmaster? Who knows.

But on better news- there’s a new system in town. It’s still running on Ticketmaster, but it solves resales. It’s called Paperless Ticketing, which means that instead of showing your ticket stub at the door, you’ll just need a piece of ID to get in, and when you buy the ticket you’ll have to give your name and details. This eliminates resale because you need to actually identify yourself. And that’s awesome. Metallica is on board with this idea for some concerts, and hopefully more bands join in. It doesn’t solve the extra charges, and it might decrease demand for tickets a bit (but demand is so high these days who cares?) but overall I like the idea.

No news on any of the legal developments as of yet by the way.

Interesting…Ticketmaster is always so shady. Sometimes when I search for tickets on their online system it’ll say it found one for me..then I’ll search again and no results will show. I wish they would just show what tickets are available and let everyone have a chance at them equally….bah

Although I am happy, I got tickets to the Ray Lamontagne concert for April 15th :)