So I log on to Ticketmaster to get Great American Beer Festival tickets this year.
For starters the sale is supposed to start at ten mountain time. The page isn’t availble until ten after ten, so I’m sitting here refreshing every few seconds.
Then when I go through all the rigamarole to purchase my tickets, authorizing the “service fees” typing in the captcha that now includes pictures of numbers as well as oddly fonted words, the message comes up that no exact matches can be found.
Fuck.
Try again, changing parameters like number of tickets and nights available, still no luck.
So I call. The friendly robot voice tells me to press one to avoid waiting on hold, and access their automatic system. I punch one. After a couple of beeps, I’m right back on hold with the same music and oddly mechanical voice telling me the average wait time is 10-15 minutes.
When I finally talk to a person, she goes through my entire purchase before telling me at the end that there are no more tickets available for any day.
I realize pitting Ticketmaster is on par with pitting Hitler or Lucifer himself, bu Ihave no idea how these meat sacks have managed to stay a viable company for so long.
I was going to try to make you feel better by telling you about the last time I went to the Great American Beer Festival, and a woman ran up to me and Mr. Athena in the parking lot, asked if we were planning on buying tickets, and when we said “Yes”, she just gave us a pair of VIP tickets that she wasn’t able to use. But then, I thought, that probably wouldn’t make you feel better.
That was back when you could just walk in and buy tickets, so TicketMaster wasn’t even a concern. I bet that wouldn’t make you feel better, either.
It’s apparently a very popular event that sells out fast. As with any event like that, tickets can be hard to come by and you have to be one of the lucky ones that get through. That’s not Ticketmaster’s fault, it’s just the way it works w/ those kinds of events.
I don’t know if Ticketmaster is to blame, but I was really pissed off that “VIP” seats for the Quadrophenia tour were only sold in pairs. I’m okay with paying an arm and a leg to be in front, but having to buy two tickets is a huge pain logistically and financially speaking. I think they made some adjustments after people complained, but the prime seats were already gone by then.
The sheer crappiness of service with Ticketmaster has made professional scalpers working on Stub Hub seem respectable. For the sporting events I want to go see, if I don’t have a guy I know, I usually go straight to kijiji.
I wish they could be made to reveal how many tickets will actually be available when the sale starts, and how many have already been parceled out to vendors, organizers, radio stations and the like.
I work in the music biz and my frustration with Live Nation/Ticketmaster is huge. They own House of Blues and a ton of other venues so they lock bands out of other venues, in short they are our Evil Overlords. They did lose about 100 million $ last year IIRC. There is hope.
The Louis CK method is looking better and better all the time. He’s selling all tickets for the next tour only on his own website. He had to settle for less than prime venues in some cities, but that’s a compromise he and the fans can live with.
The big artists today have their own websites, and they do “exclusive fan sales” too, but many are powered by some company that’s in bed with Ticketmaster or Live Nation.
I don’t really understand why Ticketmaster and Live Nation are even necessary anymore. Can’t venues just get their own shopping cart software and sell the tickets themselves? There must be some benefit to using TM &LN (bandwidth to deal with supply?), but I think most people would be happy not having to pay all those bullshit fees.
This is what happened when I bought my Steely Dan concert tickets.
I was on the website literally the minute the tickets went on sale. Clicked on the “best available” button and was offered seats that were right-center and way back.
I was told here in Doperland that I should have been looking out for the pre-sale which is what most fans take advantage of. Turns out most of these “fans” are the secondary market resellers who apparently scoop up all of the truly “best availables” and reoffer them for thrice the face value. Bastards.
I hate Ticketbastard as much as the next guy, but I don’t think you can blame them for high demand on tickets. I’ve bought shows through Ticketweb and a few other locally based services (Chicago) and if a show is a hot ticket, the servers get overloaded, and this same problem happens.
I tried to get tickets sold directly by a small venue here, Lincoln Hall, and could have written your OP based on the experience.
When I get the “This item is sold out” message more than three times, it’s time to quit and get back to work. The nice lady on the phone told me they were sold out at 1015 this morning.
This is why I’m pitting Ticketmaster, not because of the popularity of the event, but because they have created a bottle neck where one has never existed before, and they can’t seem to handle the traffic.
Thanks for the tips on how to buy tickets, could you be a little more condescending? I’m really not angry enough about this whole thing yet.
I feel for you, I hate not getting tickets to something I really want to go to. An event like this, with 49k tickets sold, will probably have a fairly soft secondary market. If you wait until a week or so before the event, you should be able to get tickets from someone for face value or even under face. People’s plans change and they need to get rid of their tickets.
While ticketmaster sucks, in this case, I’ll reserve my vitriol for the scalpers. They create a shortage, then use the shortage to wring money from the very people they prevented from buying tickets in the first place. The ultimate in parasitic business models, they earn money by making the world a less pleasant place to live.
So, out of curiosity, I have to ask: what was ticket buying like before Ticketmaster went online? I’m a youngin’ and by the time I was buying my own tickets and not getting my older brother to stand in line for the Backstreet Boys ( ) everyone did it online.
So instead of tens of thousands of people hitting the Ticketmaster website at a certain time, people stood in line at the Ticketmaster office for 2 days for NKOTB ;)? And y’all liked that better than online buying? I guess having to actually stand in line discourages casual scalpers, but the sheer convenience of online purchasing cancels that out for me.
