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 Eagles have landed at Arco Arena and they can pack up and leave before they open their bags. With ticket prices that scare off even ticket brokers from buying Eagles tickets at the Arco, the fans are surely being screwed.

Though the face value of the seats are listed in the range of $32 to $275 per ticket, the Eagles are scalping their own tickets through their Eagles Fan Packages for $995 per seat, with parking and dinner.  Rather outrageous prices for a band most fans have seen a half a dozen times. And who wants to pay that kind of money to eat at Arco Arena or any arena food for that matter. At that price you can get a comparable ticket from a ticket broker,  a limo and a gourmet dinner at the best restaurant in town. And still save hundreds of $$!

This is what you will get from now on with the Live Nation and Ticketmaster merger. A few years back you could count on two different prices for a concert ticket. The lower level and floor price and the upper level price. For the Eagles there are at least 11 different priced tickets. And they’ll bump it up even higher as Ticketmaster and Live Nation fine tune their new model to squeeze every dollar from the “fans”.

They say they will be modeling their new system after the airline industry. But that is an entirely different world. We use the airlines because we have to in most cases, for work or pleasure. With tickets it’s different. For a few die hard fans, they want to see the artist each time he comes to town. For the rest of us, price will be a factor. No matter how much money we make. We have choices, and a weekend out of town beats 2 1/2 hours with a bunch of old fools any day.

So the Eagles, Ticketmaster and Live Nation should think long and hard as to how long they can keep the acts touring year after year, trying to jack the fans for every dollar, every tour.  Average “fans” can only afford so much, and at your prices only the well-to-do can actually see you from their seats, the rest might as well stay home and listen to old records.

Now that Ticketmaster and Live Nation have priced the best seats so high, they’ve made the cheapest $32 seats paperless, so they cannot be resold. This is the new model, overprice the best seats and block the resell of the cheap seats, even for “fans” that find after waiting 6 months for the concert, they cannot make it.  Then their stuck, just as Ticketmaster and Live Nation would have them. And do you really believe the Eagles demanded that only the $32 seats be sold as paperless as Ticketmaster would have you believe?

And that’s where the dynamic pricing will come in. Just like Bon Jovi and dozens of other acts recently, Ticketmaster will be sending out those 2 for 1 offers, and the fans that bought first will be screwed again. Then there’s the free ticket offers and you just have to pay the service charges. What will Ticketmaster and Live Nation do if everyone holds out and waits for the 2 for 1 special?

They killed the revenue stream by overpricing cd’s, now they’re going to kill the concert business with overpriced seats and packages that cannot be sustained over years of touring. And the next generation will not stand for these prices, they have too many other choices. Ticket brokers were blamed for years for their high prices and now the artist, promoter and Ticketmaster are selling tickets for even higher prices. Now who’s the ticket scalper?

Bruce Springsteen it turns out withholds hundreds of tickets for his concerts, as do most artists apparently, but in his case the BOSS ACT was brought forth because of his complaining that ticket scalping was keeping the best seats out of the hands of fans at exhorbitant prices.

Yet as reported in the Wall Street Journal Blog, “Now comes word, courtesy of an Open Public Records Act request from the Newark Star-Ledger, that the biggest reason fans couldn’t find good seats had nothing to do with Ticketmaster, TicketsNow, or scalpers.
In reality, almost none were ever actually, y’know, on sale. Instead, 90% of the best seats were reserved for friends and family of the band, venue employees, record-label executives and their guests.”.

And NJ.com reported “But an examination of ticket sale data from the May 21 concert shows Springsteen himself may be part of the problem. The best seats in the house that night were the 1,126 seats in the four sections closest to the stage, but only 108 of those tickets were ever for sale to the public, according to new ticket data obtained through the Open Public Records Act.”

Now I may not be an expert in this, but I’ve seen a lot of “comp” (free) tickets in my 22 years as one of the owners of Preferred Seating Tickets and all of these were from friends, family, employees, radio station, etc who were given the prime tickets, for free, but that’s not what they sold them to us for. And I would assume that when an artist such as Bruce Springsteen prepares to go on tour and determine the face value of the tickets for the tour, that they must take into account the 1200 tickets given to these friends, family, employees, etc because they will get no revenue from them and someone else must cover that cost. So my question is, are ticket prices adjusted higher to make up for the 1200 tickets given to friends, family, etc so they may have the pleasure of sitting up front, and those fans that helped pay for those “comp” (free) prime up front seats, can watch from the rear of the concert venue or stand on the floor the entire show?

For the record I’ve been a big fan of Bruce Springsteen since the early 70′s. I have ticket stubs from the Born in the USA tour signed by the now deceased promoter Bill Graham, who had an equal hatred of scalpers or ticket resellers, but who I still admired and respected for his work, just as I do for Bruce Springsteen. But like most people who complain about the ticket resell business and ticket brokers, they have hidden profit motives or interests that they fail to disclose.