PreferredSeat.com Blog

A small number of artists, venues and a few sports teams and management companies have put together a group which they claim is to put an end to ticket scalping sports and concert tickets. But the real reason behind the coalition is to monopolize the ticket industry so they can charge whatever they want without any competition.

One of the main goals of the group is to keep paperless tickets legal after several states have started coming out with laws to keep an open market for the resell of tickets. Paperless tickets are being used to prevent the resell of tickets on the open market and give an monopoly to Ticketmaster by not allowing fans to transfer them to anyone else.

The paperless tickets really only jack up the price of secondary market tickets for these events rather than eliminating the reselling altogether and gives Ticketmaster,Live Nation, the promoter and the artist a monopoly on selling and reselling the tickets.

Now that Live Nation etc are employing “dynamic pricing” this will give them the opportunity to raise prices at will, without worrying about someone, including fans, reselling the tickets for less.

As an example you can buy tickets for the  Identity Festival on August 24th at the 1-800 Ask Gary Amphitheatre directly from Ticketmaster for $62.85 each. At the same time you can buy the same general admission ticket from PreferredSeat.com for $52 each. And this is because at one time they were selling for much less but Live Nation, Ticketmaster, the promoter and the artist jacked up the price of the tickets with the new “dynamic pricing” program.

And with paperless tickets you cannot buy tickets for someone else without going to the show yourselves. And if you get sick, or cannot make the show, you’re out of luck.

And then there’s the irony of Ticketmaster belonging to the coalition at the same time they own one of the largest resellers of secondary tickets in the country. As if one monopoly was not enough for them.