PreferredSeat.com Blog

The Eagles along with Ticketmaster are testing the waters to find the best way to squeeze  every dollar than can get out of the concert experience. And the fans are paying the price. With vastly different face values for tickets in different markets, Platinum Seats, Auctions and Fan Packages, the fans are soon to learn what the new cost of attending a concert will be.

Several pricing structures are currently being tested with  concerts by the Eagles at Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, CA, US Airways Center in Phoenix, AZ, the Honda Center Anaheim, Ca, the Arco Arena in Sacramento, Ca and the Hp Pavilion in San Jose, CA.

The biggest difference is the price being charged by the different arenas. At the US Airways Center, Honda Center and Hp Pavilion the face value of the tickets is $180 – $190. In comparison, at the Hollywood Bowl and Arco Arena the face value of the tickets are $275 each. Someone must have forgotten to tell the Eagles that their fans in Sacramento face an unemployment rate well above the national average and there are 81,000 state workers that are furloughed three days a month. That’s the way to stick it to them. And I guarantee you, the women who work for the State of California, are some of the Eagles biggest fans.

For those venues with the lower face value tickets the other option is Platinum Seats that are overpriced and often of poor quality. Ticketmaster has a lot to learn about pricing tickets and the quality of the seats they choose to sell as Platinum seats. If your venue is lucky enough to be paying over 50% more per ticket, $275 as opposed to $180, then you have the choice of buying seats on an auction and compete for the best seats.

And that’s not all. If you want a seat on an aisle to see the Eagles at the Arco Arena, you will pay $25  more per seat. Just to sit on an aisle. And where do you think they came up with that idea. Maybe from the airlines charging for baggage?

They did make sure they set aside a number of seats, in the top rows of the arena at a cheap $32 per ticket. And those are the only tickets that are paperless tickets requiring an id at the door on the night of the show. They wouldn’t want a fan to take advantage of them and sell those on Ebay or Craigslist, so they made sure they could not be resold.

And you don’t have to worry about those hated Ticketmaster service charges everyone has been bitching about for years. They’ve included them into the price of the ticket, including the fee for you to print your own tickets. Now you cannot get a break at the box office on the ticket price. It’s the same at the box office as on Ticketmaster, now everyone pays. And you don’t have the slightest idea of how much the face value was, and how much the “convenience fee” is. Nice of them to do that for the fans.

What’s next? For years they blamed the ticket brokers for scalping their tickets, overcharging they would say. Well who’s scalping now? What will they do when they find the fans say screw you, I’m staying home. Sell them a cd?

It was passed on to me today that Taylor Swift’s tour page on her website, Taylorswift.com, is sending her fans to a ticket broker site when they click to buy tickets to the Philadelphia Taylor Swift concerts at the Wachovia Center. The link should be going to Comcast Tix, the original seller of Wachovia Center events, but instead is taking Taylor Swift fans to a website that has an address that matches a large ticket brokerage.

Taylor better be sitting down for this!

I cannot imagine that Taylor Swift would have allowed this to happen and I would assume that the webmaster for Taylorswift.com made a critical mistake and set the link for the Wachovia Center tickets to the ticket broker, rather than to the Comcast tix link for the Wachovia Center.

And it happens to fans quite often as well. They will go online looking for the official site to buy tickets from, and end up choosing one of the first ads that appear, rather than searching for the one they’re looking for.

So, someone is in a bunch of trouble because right now a lot of Taylor Swift fans are going to her website and being redirected to the ticket broker site, and thinking that Taylor is scalping her own tickets. I’m not sure how long this has been going on, but it won’t much longer I imagine.

The Bon Jovi tour was recently announced and tickets are on sale now at the face value of $1725 each! And yes there are some cheaper seats for $1275, $575, and $365, and the price list goes on and on. The common ingredient in these ticket “packages” is a seat in the first few rows, or lower level seating, and a bunch of crap! And I do mean crap.

Souvenirs, messenger bags, and tour programs for customers that are somewhere in their mid 40′s to early 50′s and could care less about all the fluff tossed into a package designed to jack up the price of a ticket. What am I going to do with a Bon Jovi messenger bag? I couldn’t even admit I went to the show, much less carry around a bag with Jon Bon Jovi’s mug all over it!

No offense to the band, but your taking your fans for a ride with those prices. Forget the economy, that’s still a crazy price for any band to charge their fans with a straight face.

And I thought Jon Bon Jovi was against scalping and taking advantage of the fans as he was quoted in spinner.com. “The singer is also steamed that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has refused to stop the third-party sales. “We have always had the best interest in the fans at heart and repeatedly … tried to educate [show sponsor] MLB [Major League Baseball] and New York City about the fairest and easiest distribution of tickets,” Bon Jovi posted to his band’s official Web site before the heated observations were later removed.

“As I said before, ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’” the rocker added. “There are reports in the media about tickets being scalped for the free concert. I for one am not surprised, but our organization is disappointed.”.”

But that was after Ticketnews reported Bon Jovi had been scalping his tickets for the “Lost Highway” tour in 2007. It’s hard for a fan of music to understand a band that cries out about reselling tickets on one hand, then sell $1725 tickets with a bunch of crap thrown in to try to justify the price.

Find and buy cheaper ticket broker tickets for Bon Jovi.