Ticketmaster, oh how I hate thee

I woke up this morning thinking about one of the most awesome shows I have seen in along time, Mew with Toronto's the D'Ubervilles at the mod club on December 6. The show was for sure a memorable one. The D'Ubervilles set the stage with their post-punk, dance-able, less is more sound. Mew proceeded to blow away the audience with psychedelic sounds, songs from all three of their albums and amazing visuals that were played on a screen behind them. I had a friend that was so choked up by Mew's performance that he shed a few tears(according to his girl friend).

I'm looking back at the ticket now when I noticed something:



A $10.25 Convenience charge?
How does Ticketmaster have the balls to charge 50% of the original ticket price.
The answer is simple: People are willing to pay for it.

My main reason for using Ticketmaster is that their isn't a better alternative. If I lived in Toronto I would simply go down to rotate this! and buy the tickets there. But that isn't an option.

Ticketmaster knows that the average person can't buy tickets anywhere else. According to Wikipedia this is how they do it:

"Ticketmaster frequently obtains agreements to become the sole provider of tickets for large venues, in keeping with a business strategy it has used since the 1980s when it consolidated regional ticketing services into a single entity. In many cases, acquiring this exclusivity requires Ticketmaster to pay substantial "signing bonuses" to venues, sometimes millions of dollars. Although this practice can significantly reduce the profitability to Ticketmaster of these exclusive relationships, to date using these bonuses has enabled them to maintain venue exclusivity as a competitive strategy, though the future viability of this strategy is unclear as the Internet as the primary sales channel for tickets makes exclusivity a less attractive option for venues."

Well it seems like Ticketmaster is already dealing with that "exclusivity" part by merging with LiveNation.

Does anybody out there have any solutions or alternatives to dealing with ticketmaster?

In the meantime here is some Mew and The D'Ubervilles.





Guelph Marketing