My father is fond of Bob Dylan. I suppose “fond” is a big vauge. Through the tireless efforts of my father playing endless Dylan when I was an infant, I now subliminally know the lyrics to most, if not all, of Bobbie D’s work.
And thanks to ICQ and a Doper, I learned that Bob is coming to an ampitheater near me in the end of July. Horray! Father’s Day Present!
So I go to the website. They direct me to go to another website, which lists all the events happening in the next three days nationwide. I don’t WANT to know nationwide, I want to know how to get tickets for BOB DYLAN performing at the SARATOGA PERFORMING ARTS CENTER on JULY 23. Is that too much to ask?
After 20 minutes of searching, EVENTUALLY I find a backdoor way to the info I needed. And then the bastards linked me up directly to ticketmaster.
Not ONLY were the amitheater tickets sold out, (lawn for us, AGAIN. I wanted to get Dad good seats for once.) but Ticketmaster charged me a $12 CONVIENCE fee. Oh, the irony. The tickets themselves were $30 a piece. THEN the bastards charged me 3.35 shipping and handling for 2 week delivery. Last time I checked it's .33 a stamp. What the hell was the $12 I donated to their cause for? ARG!!!
So looks like I’ll be perusing e-bay a lot in the next month, hoping someone will scalp thier tickets. Oh, well. At the very least I’ll get a road trip with Dad. The REALLY infuriating part is that I KNOW the radio station I used to work for will be giving away tickets, and I could have gotten them free. FEH.
Damn, I’d like to work at Ticketmaster. What must the payrate be if you’re the monkey who puts the little tickets in envelopes and mails them. That takes, what, 5 seconds? So I could do 720 in an hour. I’d expect ticketmaster would want a big cut of the $3.95 for overhead, stamps, etc, so let’s say they still just pay me (the monkey) $2.00 per ticket mailout. That’s over $1440 an hour. Sign me up, man!
IMO, Ticketmaster falls into the same category as record company execs. Try finding someone who has anything good to say about either of them.
SR, most venues have a walk-up ticket window that they typically don’t advertise for. Try finding a direct # for it- they’re usually open the night of a show (for walk up purchases) and will sell tickets for future shows. Its a hassle but it saves you the cost of the service and shipping charges and gives you the warm feeling inside that you didn’t give your hard-earned cash to Ticketbastard.
If I were to rant about how I really feel about Ticketmaster, my posting privileges here would probably get revoked for overuse of the word “felcher”.
FWIW, Ticketmaster are just as bad outside the US. I bought my better half tickets to see Lou Barlow in an acoustic session (not my cup of tea, but she was happy). As well as the £10 ticket price for each, there was a £1.50 booking fee on each ticket plus a £1.50 “overall” admin and credit card fee. I didn’t even want the damn things delivered, just picked up at the venue.
And for the love of Christ, avoid calling them on the phone! Use the website, folks!
I had to call them a few months ago. Not to do anything fancy, mind you. Just buy two tickets for a ball game.
It took well over thirty minutes!! The first eight to ten were waiting on hold. As irritating as that is, I can understand that.
But it took at least twenty minutes for them to get the transaction done!! The web site can show me available tickets in less than 30 seconds. This human on the phone, whom you would think would have the best possible access to this information, took forever. Take my name, address, and credit card info. How hard is that?
But then, the scripts those fuckers make their employees read to you!!! Do I want to subscribe to their magazine? Do I want to receive other promotional material? Would I like to be transferred to hear a special offer? Rules and restrictions apply to this and to that, this is the return and cancellation policy, blah, blah, blah!!
And, of course, as you all know, it cost $31.50 for $20.00 worth of tickets.
Ooh, a cause I can sink my teeth into. I also hate TicketMaster.
I hate convenience charges, and I hate how you can’t get good seats to a show in Cincinnati anymore unless you work for a corporation who has “season” tickets.
I think the real fans, the ones who are willing to sleep all night in front of the ticket window SHOULD get the front row, dammit. I’m sure the performer would rather his die-hard fans in front too, in lieu of all the pansy assed corporate types who now get the good seats. At an Elton John concert a couple years ago, the bastards in the front row wouldn’t even STAND UP. I guess they were used to the freakin’ ballet, where it would be considered bad taste to stand up. And to make matters worse, they don’t even have to pay for them.
I was just getting ready to flame about the same thing, RezDog!
I bought tickets to a Detroit Tigers game a couple of weeks ago through TicketMaster over the phone.
When the hell did they start this litany of suggestive selling? I’ve never heard anything like it. They literally go through six or eight things they try to sell you, and you just keep saying, “No, I only want the tickets, thanks.”
Not to mention the lady who took my order was a rude, brainless bitch. Kept interrupting me rudely because I was going too fast. Like going to my telephone prefix after saying my area code.
Shouldn’t you develop the ability to keep up even a little if that’s what you do for a living?
I did do the website, ** Res **. Thank god, I would have ended up biting some poor operator’s head off. And ** Mojo ** The venue is about 2.5 hours away, or I’d be there in a second. I’m the cheapest bastard you’ll ever meet, and if I can avoid $15 in fees, you canbet your sweet bippy I will!
What I don’t understand is how this kind of practice goes unlegislated. It’s a blatant monopoly. They have all the tickets, if you want the tickets, you have to go through them. Um…anti-trust laws, anyone? ARGH!!!
Yep, same experience here.
Two tickets for Nine Inch Nails at the Pepsi Center: $85
Ticketmaster fees: $24
Shipping in fewer than two weeks: $10.50.
Grand total: $119.50 for three hours of music. WTF?
A further rant: Don Henley, who’s on my laminated list BTW, is coming to town on Monday. I logged in to get tickets when they were first available . They were $75 a piece. 75 bucks! And that didn’t even include the freaking service charges. Now, I’ll admit that if I were guaranteed front row, I’d gladly pay 75 bucks. But this was the 30th row!
Sorry Don, but my budget doesn’t allow $200 for 2 1/2 hours of entertainment. Laminated list or not.
Not to mention that all the Cinci venues have been bought up by SFX, the most evil corporate conglomerate to have come along in recent times. (I know they got Riverbend and the Taft–I don’t know what else.)
My favorite example of SFX evil–at some of their venues, there are rows of seats that are not available at the box office or through Ticketmaster, nor do they even show up on the seating charts. Why, you ask? Because SFX sells those seats directly to the “ticket agencies” (that is, the scalpers). You can read all about it here.
Well I’ll be a freakin’ money’s uncle. Guess who else SFX bought up, Doc? Saratoga Performing Arts Center, the very place I bought tickets for.
I was wondering how the hell an amitheater that size gets sold out a month before the show for Dylan. I mean, I love the guy, but he’s not exactly selling statums out.
Forget the editor, I’m writing to my congressman and senators. They have Microsoft blood on their lips, Ticketmaster HAS to be next.
Just to gripe about Ticketmaster a little more, my friend tried to order tickets an upcoming Mariners-Blue Jays game from Ticketmaster’s Canadian web site (we’re in Vancouver). They wanted to charge the Canadian service charges on top of the US service charges, as well as shipping. It added up to over 50% service charges on each ticket (plus shipping)! Ordering from the US site only charged one set of obscenely high service charges. Un-fucking-believable. To top it all off, they sent the wrong tickets to his address (inside the envelope they were addressed to someone else). Bastards. Fucking-fuck-ass-fuck.
First of all, last summer, I won THIRD ROW CENTER TIX to a BNL concert. I thought, “Third row! Does it get any better?” Apparently it does. Meaning that yes I was in the front row, but still fifteen fett from the stage. Between the stage and the front row were SEVEN FUCKING ROWS OF CHAIRS for radio stations - people who won tickets. I thought I was going to be CLOSE but no. I won the tix, granted, but a lot of hardcore fans I knew via a BNL wesbite were so excited to be there, and they were a littl eupset that they were not actually in the third row, more like the tenth.
AND…
I wanted to go to an *NSYNC concert. OK, I am 19, way too old, whatever. I like them. I am normal in every other way, I swear. So I call up Ticketmaster a few days before and ask if I should call or buy tix online or wait in line. The woman tells me that I should wait in line, get there early, like 5 am (tix on sale at 9 am), because I won’t be able to get seats online or on the phone. She also mentions that if I was excellent seats, I have to get there early. So yes, I leave a club in DC and head directly to Hechts. There are approx. 500 srceaminf 13 year olds. My friend Kenny and I sit in the cold (last day of spring break, mind you) and shiever for four hours. I finally get to te ticket counter at 10 am and I get crappy seats. I’m not even on the fucking floor! The total was $120, $50 per ticket plus a $7.50 surface charage for each ticket. I watched the ladies - they hit print. Seriously. HOW FUCKING HARD IS IT TO HIT PRINT AND GET THE NEXT AVAILIBLE TICKETS? IS THAT REALLLY WORTH $15??? I THINK NOT!!
Ok, fine I think. Then I find out my friend bought tix online and got fourht row!!! FOURTH ROW!!! Ayyyyyyyyyyyyyyye I cannot believe that. TThat biTch lied to me!
They’re website fuckin’ sucks! More particularly, the search engine. If you type in the EXACT word, it will still come up with 0 results. So, instead you’ve gotta click your way through all the confusing links, and the whole process takes like 20 minutes. They really need to rehaul that fucked up site.
If I had my druthers, I would rip off the heads of anyone peripherally involved with Ticketmaster, drill a hole in their skulls, and shove their heads up their asses right before I have a busload of lifer convicts squick them prior to felching. And I would repeat this process til THEIR CUSTOMER SERVICE GETS THEIR FUCKING ACT TOGETHER!!!
I need to have my tickets for Beastie Boys/RATM (for which I paid over $30 in “service charges”)changed from Will Call to have them sent to me as I’ll be out of town on business and my friends would still like to go. Should be simple, right? I go to TM’s website to find customer service info. They do not have listings for DC. Or Maryland. Just Virginia. And only one of those is in Northern VA. And the number is disconnected. So I rack up long distance charges calling Richmond where the first two minutes of every call is wasted listening to a prerecorded message about how some fucking minor league soccer game is cancelled. And by selecting “internet order” you cannot a) talk to a real person or b)back out to the main menu. So after 15 minutes of holding, I connect with a rep who asks for my order confirmation #, which I give. She then automatically tries to connect me with a different rep- and I get a “the party you’re trying to reach is not in- please try again message”. So I have to call back. Again. Racking up 30 minutes in long distance now. After another 10 minutes of waiting, I get a rep who says “Customer Service is now closed”- And I freaked on him. Why not have the recorded message say that when you first dial in!?!?! I have now wasted 45 minutes of my time and racked up a long distance bill without achieving anything. I wish I could get my “service charge” refunded for this bullshit. I’m thinking about starting a cult a la Fight Club dedicated to bringing down the evil empire that is Ticketmaster. Anyone else in?
Mojo I’m with you. I’m a girl, though can I still join?
I really hate local clubs that still use ticketmaster at the front door. Why the fuck do I have to pay the fucking service charge at the damned door 30 seconds before I walk in? That has got to be violating some serious anti-trust laws. Just thinking about it pisses me off. GRRRRRRR!