Live Nation Looking To Sever Ties With Ticketmaster?
The Chicago Sun-Times reports: So you want to see a concert this summer. You’re daunted by the prices, but you decide to take the plunge and buy tickets online for a favorite artist. Just before committing to pay on your credit card, you discover the total is 25 percent higher than what you expected to pay. What gives?
The biggest extra charge is the “convenience fee” added by Ticketmaster: The cost averages $10 per ticket, but can climb much higher. For years, consumers have complained about the big jump in the cost of tickets purchased from Ticketmaster during a two-minute transaction online or by phone. But given the lock the ticketing giant has on many venues in the Chicago area, concertgoers had no choice: They had to buy from Ticketmaster or not at all, since many venues didn’t have box offices where tickets could be purchased in person without fees.
The big news for frustrated consumers is that a major change could be in the works: The concert industry has been buzzing for months that Live Nation may begin selling tickets for all of its concerts itself. It is currently Ticketmaster’s single largest client, but that contract expires next year, and Live Nation owns a stake in two major independent companies, Next Ticketing and MusicToday.com, which both rival Ticketmaster’s capabilities for selling tickets online.
If Live Nation cuts Ticketmaster out of the transaction and sells tickets direct to concertgoers, industry experts say that it will be able to keep more of the ticketing revenue for itself — and hopefully reduce service fees for concertgoers.
You can read more online here.
(+75 rating, 15 votes)
hopefully people stop dealing with ticketmaster
nice!!!
I try to buy from box offices/at the door as much as possible, but it always sucks when you have no choice but to buy from ticketmaster, they are such a rip off. this is good news, hopefully live nation respects consumers enough to not pull the same shit.
the obvious fact is that if you want the good seats online is the way to go and you just have to pretty much bend over for what ever charges ticketmaster gives or be ok with the back row or not go at all which sucks so i do hope that does go through
Convenience charges are the best when they’re charged on an e-ticket. While I’m sure that the pseudo-paper hard copy tickets aren’t free to produce, I’m quite sure that having patrons print out their own tickets doesn’t cost Ticketmaster one red cent.
The e-ticket is one of the worst inventions EVER.
Ticketmaster charges you 1.25 to get an e-ticket. To create a PDF of tickets is as easy as File -> Print As -> PDF.
Also the consumer wastes at least two pages printing because of the diclaimer policies and full page advertisements.