What A Racket Ticketmaster's Got Going

Filed in archive Buying Stuff on September 22, 2006

Remember when Pearl Jam tried to take on Ticketmaster about 10 years back because of Ticketmaster's outrageous service charges on tickets it sells? Pearl Jam lost, and the "convenience charges" only got worse.

I actually wanted to see Pearl Jam last time around, but I was late getting tickets and when I saw that buying from Ticketmaster was going to add 16 bucks for nosebleed seats I couldn't justify it.

Now it is true that in many cases you can just go to the box office and buy tickets without the Ticketmaster service charge, so to complain about their service charge is a little disingenuous--you chose not to go to the venue and buy the tickets there, and you're paying extra for the luxury of buying from home. Hey, convenience has its price.

But here's why I'm anti-Ticketmaster today. There's a show coming up nearby with ticket prices around $38. Now this is a venue I can get to in 5 minutes, so I'm happy to stop by and pick up tickets. But guess what? No box office sales at all! And guess what else? Ticketmaster jacks up the service fee even higher for this concert that I can't get tickets to any other way. To be specific, they're putting an $8.75 charge on a $37.50 ticket, which comes out to 23.3% extra on every single ticket. And there's no other way to buy a ticket except through them. That's a pretty awesome business to be in, huh?

Some of our recent shows have been ticketed via Tickets.com. They're only slightly better.

How can I get a chunk of this business? Looks like a gold mine.

UPDATE: One more thing I forgot. I read all the time about sagging concert ticket sales. Did it ever occur to anyone who promotes these concerts that these extra ticket fees might be keeping people away? When your $38 ticket becomes a $46 ticket, then you're doing a different price/value equation in your head as to whether you really want to go to the concert--"It would have been fun at $38, but it's not worth $46."