PreferredSeat.com Blog

Live Nation has been caught in the act, scalping tickets for a July 31 Drake concert at the Molson Amphitheatre in Canada. Somehow around 100 tickets that had a face value of $94 each for Drake’s July 31st concert were found and released through Ticketmaster at $300 each as VIP tickets.

Apparently the show had been selling well on the secondary market because Drake is from Canada, so Live Nation decided to release the tickets as VIP tickets to take advantage of the fans and earn some extra cash. At the time of the ticket release ticket brokers were selling similar seats for around $200 each.

Unfortunately for the fans this will be the standard for many concert tours. Tickets for good seats will be held back and scalped when the market is right by Live Nation and Ticketmaster for the artist and promoter. And this is one of the reasons that paperless tickets should be transferable, to help keep the scalpers in line.

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.

Concert ticket prices were supposed to be cheaper as we were told early in the year by Live Nation but the instead concert ticket prices are up 10% this year according to Pollstar. Tickets have increased by an average of $6.25 per ticket after hundreds of press releases touting the cheap concert ticket prices for 2011.

It looks like the promoters have the artists scalping their own tickets more this year and cutting back concerts at poor selling venues and cities to bring the average concert ticket price up. The only bargains are for the cheap general admission lawn seating at the outdoor amphitheaters and the upper decks in arenas.

When the concerts are overpriced, concert ticket brokers such as PreferredSeat.com have been offering concert tickets below face value as sellers try to unload the overpriced tickets to keep from losing too much money. At some point the concert ticket prices will come down as promoters find the old acts just can’t pull them in like they used to.