Ticketmaster/Scalpers article

[Six String]

It's worse than you even thought.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/arti ... cketmaster

[Bent Fabric]

Thanks for posting. VERY good read.

[Six String]

I swore off big shows after the Stones Steel Wheels Tour in Oakland. No more, and that was pre internet. It was rigged then but only by paying people to stand in line to buy tickets.

[bobzilla77]

I've had varying luck trying to get good seats for Neil Young & the Who via their fan club presales. The only fan club that seemed to work was Prince's NPG Music Club. If you were a member you could buy seats at face value, but they wouldn't tell you where they were - just generally, "close to the stage." And you wouldn;t find out til you got to the window on the night of. That made it impossible to scalp them. If you were willing to take a gamble you'd probably end up in the first fifteen rows (I got 14th row center for a show that sold out in minutes) and front-row reports were common. But he abandoned it in 2005 & replaced it with a more expensive and crappier system. I guess at some point, they want to do nice stuff for the fans, but only just so much.

[sloopjohnc]

Yeah, that was a really good article. I spent an hour and a half waiting online to get Coachella tixs for my daughter but was kicked out when they sold out. Now, I know why.

[bobzilla77]

Sloop, here's my advice: Wait until days before Coachella weekend 2 actually happens. I can virtually guarantee you will find tickets below face value. That big old Desert Trip last year with the Stones and McCartney also sold out immediately. Day of the show, I could have got a reserved seat in the pit for around $400 for the whole weekend - 25% of the face value. (While a hotel room in Palm Desert area would still be like $600 a night but that's another story...)

That's the other side of the secondary market, and that's when I use it. You just have to have faith, and it's almost always rewarded. I got Stubhub seats for Brian Wilson and Kraftwerk at the Bowl last year for around $20, half the face value, both supposedly sold out shows.

[Six String]

It's one thing to have scalpers workng the system. The galling thing is how the Ticketmasters collude with the scalpers so they made their money regardless of who it is. Screw the fans. That's the part that makes me a little pissy. At this point in my life I could give a rat's ass to be honest. Big shows have become big turnoffs and seeing pieces on tv doesn't make me want to get involved. It's more a been there done that thing.

[trans-chigley express]

There must have been lots of this going on when the Kate Bush tickets were for sale. I couldn't get one online despite having others also trying on my behalf but the scalpers seem to have no problem in acquiring thousands.

[...]

Thanks for sharing that. A very informative read.

The other thing that pisses me off is the absurdly inflated ticket limits some venues place on the number of tickets you can buy. When I recently went online to get Alice Cooper TX for his show at Dublin's Olympia Theatre (a lovely 1,200-seat venue holding one would imagine a max of 1,800 people with downstairs seating removed), each applicant could buy 8 tickets. Surely it's time the permissible number should be capped at 4 or better still 2?