PreferredSeat.com Blog

You can find something for everyone on sale this week  including tickets for the New York Giants and Minnesota Wild. If you’re looking for comedy tickets for Jeff Dunham and Dane Cook will fill the bill.

Most of the events on sale this week are for concerts. Here is a partial list of the most popular concert tickets on sale this week.

• Arcade Fire
• The Australian Pink Floyd Show
• Dave Koz
• The Eagles
• The Goo Goo Dolls
• Jason Bonham and the Led Zeppelin Experience
• Rascal Flatts
• Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper
• Stone Temple Pilots
• Sugarland

Billboard.com is reporting the  number of albums sold the week ending May 31 was the fewest albums sold in a week since the 1970′s. Less than 5 mil albums were sold for a particularly slow album release week, but it is also part of a trend that has decimated the music industry as they fight the pirating of their music.

Since the music is being pirated the artists are not getting paid as well and are now forced to tour year after year to pay for things. The younger generation that has done most of the pirating on the web still have the most reasonably priced concert tickets for the most part, with the exception of Lady Gaga’s ticket prices.

One of the reasons given by Live Nation for raising the ticket prices recently was to counter the loss of income from album sales. But the concerts that have been jacked up the most are the older artists such as The Eagles, Roger Waters, Rush, etc.  I can’t imagine a huge number of their fans are trolling the web to pirate songs.

Most of the older artists have been receiving royalties for decades for their best work and don’t need to jack up their fans with high ticket prices. Not only that, the quality of the music is suffering a little with the age, and even old ears can tell the difference.

I would suggest to the artists that maybe they need to cut their budgets a bit to help out the fans and keep the concert ticket prices down so the fans don’t have to sacrifice so much to attend a concert. The music business has changed dramatically the last few years, just as the ticket business, and the money just isn’t there right now.

Live Nation and Ticketmaster are going to forgo service fees for the month of June on all concerts, at all the amphitheaters they operate, in order to stem the flow of criticism and sell some tickets. Concert tours have been flopping left and right lately including the cancellation of Christina Aguilera’s tour and several tour dates by the Eagles, the Country Throwdown tour and others.

It may be that the Live Nation and Ticketmasters idea to jack up all the ticket prices to scalper prices isn’t going to fly with concert fans as the market gets flooded with acts trying to get in on the act.

Michael Rapino of Live Nation was quoted recently “Our fundamental belief at Ticketmaster/Live Nation,” he said, “is [that] the answer to grow our business is less about trying to make $5 or $6 million in service fees off secondaries and much more important to figure out how to capture that $1 billion in up-sell on the face value of tickets.”

In other words, we don’t need to have service fees if we’ve already jacked up the price of tickets high enough and hidden all the fees into the face value of the ticket. The Aerosmith tour is going on sale this week and with a face value of $190 a ticket before service charges, it appears the service fees are may have already been included in the price of the ticket.

So now they are trying to pull a public relations move by eliminating the service fees, that they may have already starting including in the face value of the already overpriced tickets. With the outrageous face values of concert tickets today, you cannnot tell.

The Jonas Brothers are selling tickets 14 rows from the stage for $276 per ticket, and Nick Jonas said they are going to help out, “With the tough economy, my brothers and I wanted to do something,” Nick Jonas says. “We have a close relationship with our fans, and this is one way to help them out.” (USA Today)  Try selling your tickets cheaper!

In the same article they mention that 40% of amphitheater tickets go unsold. So doesn’t it make sense that Live Nation and Ticketmaster don’t see that they have an overpriced product when  a large number of their fans are bitching about the cost to attend a concert, and showing it by not attending.

I say send them all to Vegas and buy your concert tickets from Preferred Seating Tickets!