“No joke. My Morrissey Ticketmaster print out tickets come with a COUPON FOR A DENNY’S HAMBURGER,” former Reno 911! star Thomas Lennon Tweeted after scoring ducats to the well-known vegetarian’s upcoming Los Angeles show. The proof, after the jump. MORE »
Posts Tagged ‘TicketMaster’
bad ideas
Ticketmaster Brokers A Criminally Vulgar Tie-In With Morrissey’s Upcoming Show
shenanigans
Bruce Springsteen May Have To Apologize To Ticketmaster
A few months ago, Bruce Springsteen and his fans were in a tizzy when the best seats for a slew of hometown shows at the Izod Center in East Rutherford, N.J., showed up on ticket brokers’ sites before they were even available to the public. “Scandal!” cried the fans. “Say you’re sorry!” blogged The Boss. But months later, after the hue and cry died down, the Newark Star-Ledger got to the bottom of just how tickets for the show were disbursed… and as it turned out, most of the asses in the Izod Center’s cushiest seats had been put there by the promoters, Springsteen’s record company, and Bruce and his band. Are you shocked? (I’m not, honestly. But all those years of going to journalist/blogger/flack/employee-packed shows in the greater NYC area have probably jaded me.) The Star-Ledger breaks down the numbers after the jump. MORE »
disasters
Ticketmaster’s Legal-Scalping Site Continues To Give Bruce Springsteen Fans Headaches
Thanks to a glitch, Ticketmaster’s “secondary ticketing” site TicketsNow–which allows those people who have bought tickets to events to resell them at a premium–oversold certain seating sections for this coming Monday’s Bruce Springsteen show in Washington, D.C. As it turned out, the tickets that were oversold were in the good areas of the Verizon Center, and not the nosebleed seats. So basically, a bunch of E Street fans who paid as much as three times face value for a seat close to the stage at the city’s Verizon Center were actually buying the illusion of getting to see the Boss up close. Nice work, guys! MORE »
the biz
Live Music Business To Do As Well As Airline Business
This may be a bad time to try and stir up sympathy for concert-promoting behemoth Live Nation, what with its impending merger with Tickemtaster and Congressional hearings and all, but if ever there was a way to do it, well, this would be it: Suggest that it could stand to take some tips from the airline industry, which was, prior to the executives of car companies taking their private jets to Washington to ask for a bailout, generally regarded as the worst-run business in America. Still, this article in Billboard at least does a good job of explaining the complex intricacies of pricing seats at concerts. There are a lot of competing needs when setting ticket prices—the need to sell out the venue, the need to keep the fans happy, and nthe eed to make as much money from the ticket sales as possible. The best way to do the first and the third things, economically speaking, is called “yield management,” or allowing the price of a given ticket to fluctuate based on demand. The problem is that, as the airlines have learned, this practice tends to make customers unhappy. MORE »
the biz
Ticketmaster Is Not Having A Great Week, But Neither Are Ticket Buyers
A few weeks ago, Bruce Springsteen fans were up in arms after tickets to his hotly anticipated homecoming shows appeared on Ticketmaster’s “secondary market” site TicketsNow suspiciously close to their onsale time. But somehow, the ticketing behemoth managed to top itself, faux pas-wise, with the No Doubt reunion shows in the band’s homeland of Orange County, Calif.: Tickets to those shows were listed on TicketsNow some 24 hours before they went on sale to fan club members, and more than a week before they were available to the general public. Bet you Irving Azoff is hoping that the local Congressional representatives aren’t big Gwen Stefani fans. MORE »
the biz
Ticketmaster CEO: Concert Tickets Held Back From The Public Are “The Vast Majority Of The Best Seats In The House”
Bill Wyman’s in-depth coverage of the Congressional hearings on the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger continued today, as he live-blogged the House hearings on the merger. Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino said that he doesn’t hear complaints about high ticket prices (man, those upper-management bubbles must be pretty thick!), that $50 isn’t a high price for a concert ticket (not that he’s had to pay for any in a while), and that Ticketmaster’s service fees also get kicked back to venues and artists, causing Rep. Brad Sherman to respond, “They are forcing [Ticketmaster CEO Irving] Azoff to pretend like he’s charging a lot when it’s really coming back to you”; Azoff also said early in the hearing that “if our customers don’t like [our service] they will go somewhere else.” Like what, the movies? MORE »
the biz
Handicapping The Upcoming Ticketmaster/LiveNation Hearings
Tomorrow the Senate Judiciary Committee’s “Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights” (wshew) will hold a hearing on the proposed Ticketmaster/LiveNation merger, and Jim DeRogatis provides a preview. He notes that the committee includes Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, who has criticized Ticketmaster’s policies in the past, and Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, a music-biz advocate from Utah who may have a personal interest in the biz’s future. As the Democrats control the committee and are thus the ones who called the hearing, it is unlikely that they will be taking a particularly positive view of the proposed merger. MORE »
shenanigans
Ticketmaster Stockholders Sue For A Cut Of Those Fees
Ticketmaster shareholders don’t like the looks of the big Live Nation/Ticketmaster conjoining that went on last week, saying that Ticketmaster was bought at too bargain-basement of a price So they’re doing what all the frustrated customers who have wished at some point that they could take legal action against the ticketing giant (perhaps you’re one of them?) and filing a big class-action lawsuit in hopes that they’ll stop the deal: MORE »
