Die Ticketmaster
Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-8th Dist.) wrote a letter yesterday to the Federal Trade Commission and the antitrust division of the Justice Department asking them to "investigate the relationship between Ticketmaster and TicketsNow to ensure that the procedure for purchasing tickets remains fair to the average consumer."
"There is a significant potential for abuse when one company is able to monopolize the primary market for a product and also directly manipulate and profit from the secondary market," he wrote. "The speed with which tickets were made available on Ticketmaster's official resale site raises questions about whether TicketsNow brokers were given preferential treatment."
I have been saying this for years, except Ticketmaster changed the game. They saw how lucrative the secondary ticket market was and decided to get in on the action themselves. This poses a tremendous conflict of interest and a morality issue. Ticketmaster controls all of the tickets available for any concert at one particular venue. (Assuming Ticketmaster is the company selling the tickets. Here ComcastTix is the seller).
Previously, everyone had a fair shot at getting tickets, but true scalpers were using computer programs and college kids to grab the advantage over the true fans. Yea, that sucks, but at least it was somewhat fair. Now, Ticketmaster is just going to take the great tickets out of the general on sale and resell them.
I wrote an article about how no concert was every sold out that had tips and tricks on how to get great tickets. It explained how scalpers got their tickets and how you can beat them. You can find the article here. But now that Ticketmaster is getting into the game of the secondary ticket market, us true fans are going to be the ones left out.
Bruce is the first one, next up is U2 and you wait for that ticket cluster fuck. You can read more about the investigation into Ticketmaster here.
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2/9/2009 11:50 AM
Blogs N' Roses wrote:
As we reported here, Bruce Springsteen is involved in a bitter dispute with Ticketmaster. Well he has received an apology from Ticketmaster.Bruce Springsteen received an apology from Ticketmaster shortly after posting an open letter blasting the company for the way it handled sales earlier this week. The Boss and his manager were upset after Ticketmaster started directing fans to its secondary site, TicketsNow, which resells concert tickets at higher prices, even though there were still tickets at the regular price available.According to Billboard.com, Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff says fans were only redirected when their specific ticket request could not be ...
There is word coming out that TicketMaster messed up the sales of tickets for a major concert in N.O. recently called the Domino Effect. Part of the concert proceeds were to go to a kids charity run by a major sports figure . It appears that when they set up the ticketing "matix' it showed that large segments of seats were sold out and at times the ticketing agents for TicketMaster were telling some that the show was sold out . In reality this computer glitch killed the show revenues inflicting a significnat loss and also a loss of revenues for the charity.
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I can't find any information on this through a quick Google search, but I am not surprised.
Any negative publicity for Ticketmaster is good. I really want this information to be true, but I can't seem to verify it.
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