I found out yesterday that Jon Stewart and John Mulaney were doing a few shows together near me. Seeing either of them live would be a delight, but both of them in one show? Let’s go! So I found the website, clicked through, and discovered in order to buy tickets I had to go through…
Ticketmaster.
Which of course meant bonus fees. Once I finally got to check out, I was informed that I owed an extra $40 in opaque “service fees” on my two $80 tickets, plus a $5 “order processing fee.” But by this point, I was at check out and the timer at the top of the screen told me that tickets were going fast and I only had a matter of minutes to check out before these tickets I was looking at were released back into the wild. I’d waffled before when I bought tickets to see Death Cab For Cutie and The Postal Service and ended up paying through the nose as consequence, so the stakes were clear: if you don’t decide to buy these right now you might not be able to get tickets at all, and that’s even if you’re brave enough to dare Ticketmaster’s crappy UI again. I bought them, cursing Ticketmaster under my breath.
All this has been going on for years. I remember in my teens, whenever I saw a concert’s ticket being issued through Ticketmaster or its rival-turned-merger Live Nation my stomach dropped because I knew there would be nonsense fees on top of whatever I was paying. I distinctly remember being charged a “parking fee” on each of the four Coldplay tickets I bought fourteen years ago and being particularly pissed off because we were all taking one car.
It doesn’t help that the Ticketmaster/Live Nation conglomerate has been buying up concert venues around the United States and making alternatives harder to come by — they control 70% of the American market. Doesn’t matter if you’re the performer or the audience; there’s no getting around Ticketmaster.
Plus, Ticketmaster as a platform sucks. Bots snatch up tickets and their plan to implement dynamic pricing is just gonna make it all the more obfuscating. It’s awful. John Oliver has ranted about it, California’s lawmakers are looking into it, and somehow the combined ire towards Ticketmaster has managed to garner bipartisan support in the US Congress.
Will things change? Man, I hope so. But until then, I’ll still have to pay those fees. As a friend of mine told me, they know we’ll pay because it’s the only choice we have. It’s just a really lousy choice.
Essays, Not Rants! 