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Ticketmaster to Start Online Ticket Auction
Jason1729 writes "According to the NY Times, ticketmaster is going to begin auctioning off the best tickets to events online. They claim it's to eliminate scalping, but in truth it guarantees every seat will be scalped for the highest price with all the money going to ticketmaster. It also eliminates the possibility of getting a decent seat by waiting in line or being lucky."
This is such a great thing!! ...Because Ticketmaster's monopoly and average $10 per ticket fee (half paid by promoter, half paid by customer) is not enough profit. Plus, they even make you pay $2.50 extra when you want to print out tickets on your own printer since they just scan in the barcodes anyway. Sometimes Ticketmaster charges up to 35% of the face value of the ticket.
When was the last time you have been to a major ticketed event where Ticketmaster didn't control everything? Ticketmaster is the primary ticket seller for 27 of the 30 NHL teams and 28 of 30 NBA teams. An anti-trust case has been brought against them in the past, but it was unsuccessful. Ticketmaster has even been accused of signing you up for services you never ordered.
The end-user has really very little choice in matters like this, aside from not going to ticketed events.
Ok, first of all, as many people have already pointed out (but few seem to notice), this article is from September, 2003.
In any case, their auctions are not replacing their current ticket selling system, it is just a way for them to make some extra money, and people to be able to score a few last minute tickets at prices that they would be paying scalpers anyways (so basically it is just a way for ticketmaster to make more money). For certain big-name concerts they apparently hold a few sets of tickets and auction them off after the rest of the tickets have sold out. I regularly get concert updates from ticketmaster and it seems like once every month or so there is one of these auctions (the last few I remember are Roger Waters, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Madonna...), and they have rarely been of any interest to me... for one thing, these are the kinds of concerts which often have face value prices of $100+ to begin with.
I think most everyone here agrees that ticketmaster has way too much of a monopoly over ticket sales, and their fees are ridiculous. But this whole auction thing is nothing new, and it just moves some money from money-grubbing scalpers to money-grubbing ticketmaster executives, and hardly changes anything. The fact that nobody here seemed to notice that this auction thing has already been going on for some time pretty much proves my point.