Ticket Price: Left Testicle
TicketMaster Processing Fee: 1/2 Right Testicle
Handling Charge: 2" of Penis
Printing Fee: 1.7 oz. Scrotal Tissue
You forgot the Convenience Fee.
'Taint happening.
Okay, all the time I’ve wasted on the internet in the last decade is totally worth it now, just because I got to see that post.
My roommate and I decided to see Springsteen in KC, a long time ago.
He went to stand in line, I was assigned the phone. Being a high-tech, early adopter, my phone had a redial button.
Dial. Busy. Redial. Busy. Redial. Busy. Redial. Voice! “Hey, I need 4 tickets to Springsteen.” at the same time the voice is saying “Hey, I need 4 tickets to Springsteen”.
The volume of calls was so high the phone company switch was cross-connecting people (I assume - I guess it could have been a problem at TicketTron (or whoever it was back in the day). I never got through, but did get to talk to other people a few more times.
Roomie scored the tickets. Great show.
I feel your pain, I go to a ton of shows in Denver, everything sells out instantly and pops up on stubhub in half a second. I know lots of tricks by now because of all of it, some I can give you is that when online, you only have to type in one of the captcha words, and recently I have been calling while using my Livenation or Ticketmaster app at the same time, the app has worked way better than the website this past year. The fact that everyone goes online now frees the phones up, and suddenly you can get tickets by calling again as well.
As someone said above, always keep trying at least 10-30 minutes after the hour, people’s times run out or there credit cards get declined. I bought a bunch of tickets this summer at venues that sold their own tickets, and every single one of the small businesses websites crashed at the onsale, so they aren’t any better than Ticketmaster in that regard. I’m a big fan of 2 ticket limits to help with scalping.
All tickets printed with an uploaded pic, full name and address on it. ID required to attend. If something comes up, tickets sent back for refund. Drastic, but worthwhile.
They could adjust pricing to reduce demand. That’s precisely what the scalpers are doing.
The perfect situation for a concert would be that every seat in the house is sold, and nobody who would have bought a ticket at the asking price misses out. If there are empty seats, the price was too high. If there are people left in the queue, cash in hand, then it was too low. If, by coincidence, the price was exactly right, there would be no one willing to buy a scalpers’ tickets (they’d buy only at face value).
TM could manage that by dynamically adjusting prices over time based on demand. Or estimate a model for demand and use seat position as a proxy for time - sell front row tickets at scalper’s prices, and the next best seats at progressively lower prices. Or ebay-style proxy bidding: buyers nominate how much they’re willing to pay for tickets, and TM assigns them the best available seats at that price. Or, even act as their own scalpers - hold certain tickets back and sell them at a premium.
I suspect the problems would not be technical, but in convincing fans that it’s better.
Rod Steart is the one and only time I lined up for concert tickets. I had just moved from Halifax where nobody good ever came and if they did you bought the tickets at the record store…to Toronto. At 15 I thought Rod was pretty cool so I lined up for about 8 hours and ended up with the very last row of Maple Leaf Gardens (that’s Loblaws for you young’uns). I never lined up again. Luckily late in life hubby’s company had a box so I got to see a few good bands over the years.
Going back to what someone said about bands selling tickets on their own websites, I bought Simply Red tickets for their final final concert ever ( yeah right) in London from their website and got first row…so yeah that method’s not bad.
Football (that’s soccer to you newworlders) has started using an e-mail based lottery-system here: For the really big matches, you indicate your interest by sending an e-mail some weeks in advance (there is also some identity-verification going on, although I can’t remember exactly how that worked, only did it once).
Then they run a lottery, and if your number comes up, you get to buy up to 4 tickets. It’s actually become a bit of a social thing: if a big group wants to go, everyone agrees in advance who gets the other 3 tickets if your number comes up, and people get their non-sports fan friends and family to try to get tickets also and so on and so forth. It seems to reduce scalping to a minimum.
Some tickets are also sold through the fan-clubs of the actual teams playing, otherwise there’d be a riot, I think 
I’m pretty glad that I’ve never tried to buy a ticket to a concert that sold out on the opening day. Even seeing Dashboard Confessional, twice, at a venue that holds 100 people if that. (They did sell out eventually both times, though.) I do think there was a no-scalpers clause, though, which prohibited transfer of tickets.
Well, it’s a policy that ensures a healthy mix of the rich and the ignorant