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.

The cost of shipping tickets has risen faster in the last few weeks than ticket brokers have ever seen. The same is probably true for everyone that uses Fedex to ship as they raise their rates to more than cover the additional cost of gas. And if it doesn’t go down soon the cost to ship may be passed on to consumers as well.

Fedex has a policy in place to adjust the cost to ship a package depending on the current cost of gasoline. With gas prices rising almost daily Fedex has automatically raised rates and the shipper only finds out the new prices at the time he generates the FedEx air bill.

Most ticket brokers were probably breaking even or making a few bucks off of shipping tickets in the past but when the prices go up this fast they don’t usually pass the increase on to the customer so now they are often losing money on the shipping portion of the ticket sale.  Meanwhile Fedex has themselves covered and may even come out ahead.

Concert ticket buyers have known for years that Ticketmaster has lost touch or were never in touch with their customer’s concerns and that is no more evident then when Live Nation CEO Irving Azoff proudly touted Ticketmaster’s 180 million name database. Azoff brought in up in defense of the competition from Outbox Technology which looks to put the ticketing back with the venue and out of Ticketmaster’s hands.

And Azoff couldn’t be more wrong. Instead of millions of satisfied customers Ticketmaster has fans looking to buy directly from the venue and avoid the middle man. As long as Ticketmaster has been a monopoly they have not cared what the customer thought or what they went through to get a ticket as long as they made their service charges.

And it’s too late now. They still make it impossible for the average fan to get a good ticket with all the pre-sales and lousy seats that seem to be sold first. This has forced fans looking for the best concert tickets to turn to ticket brokers if for no other reason than because it is easier than trying to get them from Ticketmaster.

So the fans are looking forward to Ticketmaster having competition and Live Nation better start working on the cost of tickets and service fees before they count on their database of customers.