PreferredSeat.com Blog

The BCS National Championship is set for January 7th at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, and if you don’t already have your ticket, be prepared for to open your wallet. BCS tickets are currently going for over $650 each just to get an upper end zone seat. For the best BCS tickets on the 50 yard line you’re looking at over $1200 each.

And before you shell out that kind of cash you better make sure you’re going to get the tickets you ordered and get them in time. You can try Stubhub or Ticketsnow, but they have a tough time guaranteeing the exact seats will get to you on time, if at all. Because they have to contact the season ticket holder, hope he has not already sold them, and pray he runs right down to Fedex to get them shipped to you before the game.

A better bet would be to try a ticket broker with a great Better Business Bureau record. Since Stubhub and Ticketsnow get most of their tickets from ticket brokers it only makes sense to buy direct and save the extra markup. And ticket brokers can communicate directly with other brokers and guaranteed the tickets are shipped out on time.

Some ticket brokers such as PreferredSeat.com will also email the tracking information to you so you know exactly when your tickets will arrive. You just can’t beat the customer service of a good ticket broker over the poor communication you get from large corporate ticket sellers and a good ticket broker will be familiar with the events and venues, where a salesperson at Stubhub wouldn’t have a clue.

There’s still time to order your tickets to the BCS National Championship and you can sure you are getting what you order, on time, when you buy your BCS tickets from a reliable ticket broker such as PreferredSeat.com.

It appears Irving Azoff is willing to blow off the $275 million that Ticketmaster spent to acquire Ticketsnow, the secondary ticketing company, as one of the concessions to regulators to get the Ticketmaster – Live Nation merger approved. The speculation is that the merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation could be approved if some of the other entities they own are sold off.

The first on the list would have to be Ticketsnow, but since Azoff has been blasting the company in the press for months, he’s blackballed the very company he needs to sell. Then, to seal the deal he told a group of lawyers in Los Angeles this Saturday that reselling tickets should be illegal and he would press Congress to implement more anti scalping laws. Who’s going to buy a company that the present owners have vowed to destroy it’s only means of success?

There has to be a lot more money involved in monopolizing the entire music business as Irving Azoff looks to do, than the $275 million they paid for Ticketsnow. And to say it is for the benefit of the consumer is a slap in the face to people with reason. One company controlling the tickets, from print to concert, is like Ford controlling the resell of your car after you paid for it. Or the dentist telling you that he gets a cut of the gold in your mouth, should you ever decide to sell it.

The funny thing in this is Irving Azoff’s reasoning for outlawing scalping, “I tell them that they wouldn’t allow someone on the street to scalp a gallon of gasoline when there’s an oil crisis” says Azoff. “Why would they allow someone to stand on a street corner and scalp a ticket when it’s in high demand, too?”. Well Irving, the oil companies have been scalping oil forever! Especially when there’s a crisis. Where have you been! And Ticketmaster and Azoff’s game plan to change to dynamic pricing just is built upon the idea of supply and demand. If demand is up, Ticketmaster will raise the price.

And reselling tickets has nothing to do with street corners any more, not that it makes any difference at all. Nobody should have the right to control a product once a consumer has purchased it, not for cars, gold teeth or tickets.

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.