Musicology Tickets

[carynb]

I managed to get tickets for Prince's Musiclogy tour when it hits Toronto in late July. This is very good.

I've never seen him in concert, and I spent most of my high school years completely enamoured with him. Even now, I can pull out random facts about his life up until the early 90s. I haven't listened to much of his stuff in the last, well, decade, really, but the chance to see him live was just too much to resist.

However, the $13/ticket "Convenience" charge from Ticketmaster is a bit much. It must be nice to be a monopoly...

Comments

[norabombay.livejournal.com]

I gave up on Britney. It was going from a $56 ticket, I would have paid to a $72 ticket. Which I just can't handle.

I'm not willing to pay a 9 service charge, a 4.50 order charge and a $3 facilities fee. Especially since I would hvae had to take a day off work for the concert, it was july and unairconditioned.

[carynb.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's absolutely crazy. I'm getting the cheaper tickets, and it's still going to cost $80/ticket. But, I just couldn't resist...

We have to pay a $12 "Convenience" charge (I just love the name of that - convenient for whom?) and a $1.25 Building fee for each ticket, and then $4 for the order to get the tickets mailed. The fees just keep going up and up, but there are no other options if you want to go to a concert. Eventually, they'll price themselves out of business, but I really don't think that will happen anytime soon.

I was thinking about it - this Prince concert is in a venue that holds 20,000 seats. It's almost undoubtedly going to sell out, but some of those tickets - say 10% - are freebies/promos, leaving 18,000 tickets. At $12 apiece, that's $216K for Ticketmaster before counting the mailing fee. What possible costs can they have that justify that sort of income on a single show? I'd love to see a balance sheet.

It makes me mad, it does.

[norabombay.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't mind if they would roll it into the ticket price. I mean, zillions of them go through ticket master. Call it $72 and forget about it.

Or if I could skip the fees and buy at the venue.

But this pisses me off. I'm gonna grab some on ebay maybe. I don't want to go to the unairconditioned arena in july all that much anyway- I want to see Brit indoors.

[whynotsteve.livejournal.com]

Agreed that Ticketmaster rips people off. But at least they provide a pretty good quality online system for getting tickets.

I save most of my wrath for the greedy promoters and the artists themselves. I go to a lot of concerts but not too many over $60. That, of course, is because most of the bands I go to are playing to younger audiences who cannot afford ridiculous ticket prices.

But if their audience is mostly older, look out. They will rip you off mercilessly. Below is a sampling of the top prices for upcoming shows at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto.

Incubus - $47.50
Eric Clapton - $115
Madonna - $300
Sting w/ Annie Lennox - $149.75
Van Halen - $115
Prince - $102
Phil Collins - $123.75

The only one of these shows playing to a young audience is Incubus (which I am attending), hence the significantly lower price. It does not cost that much more for those other shows, it just means the artists are pocketing a large chunk of change. And by the way, the Ticketmaster fees are proportional to the ticket prices, so these artists are helping Ticketmaster with their higher prices.

[norabombay.livejournal.com]

In this case, Britney is putting on a huge stage show with some 40 dancers, pyrotechnics and the like. I expect to pay more than I would for say, Neil Finn to sing for two hours.

But the price just jumped some psycological pricepoint.

For a ticket under $100, fees shouldn't add up to more than $5. Or at least they shouldn't have the gall to add a 4.50 order fee for my having the privledge of giving them the credit card. One or the other. Not both.

I tend to see much smaller acts who are $20-30 at the door, and no fees. I can handle that better.

[whynotsteve.livejournal.com]

Yeah, tickets for teen-pop stuff tend to be more reasonably priced (as per my argument above). $56 for Britney Spears is pretty reasonable given the type of show she puts on. It's more the artists that appeal to the baby-boomer demographic that do the gratuitous ripping off of their fans. A particular target of mine in this regard is U2.

[carynb.livejournal.com]

Like Nora, I tend to think the difference in stage show explains at least part of the cost. The cost of the tour with larger backing bands, dancers, bigger sets (so more trucks/drivers) is significantly higher than just 5 guys with 5 or 6 roadies, which is how the smaller bands tour (I think). I don't really have a problem with that - part of what I'm paying for is the show.

Actually, looking at your list, it's kind funny. I would imagine that Prince - who's the least expensive of the upper tier shows - will have a more elaborate stage show than anyone on the list outside of Madonna. And Madonna ticket prices are just insane. So, maybe the stage show isn't a huge factor in the cost *g*

The Sting and Annie Lennox tickets I'd probably look at like the Justin & Christina tickets from last year - two $75 dollar tickets that you happen to get in one package, and then they don't seem so bad, either.

I think the Convenience charges have gone up, though - I can't remember having paid more than $9 before this, and I know the cost to mail the tickets out is new. What I like there is that's it's actually more expensive to have the tickets emailed to you, where you print them out yourself. What kind of insane troll logic is that?

[whynotsteve.livejournal.com]

You are right that the TM fees have gone up a little bit recently. Maybe a dollar or two per ticket. Given how convenient it is for me to get the tickets online while at my desk at work, I don't begrudge them a few extra dollars. Maybe I should.

Some shows definitely cost more to stage than others. But I don't think Phil Collins, for example, has enough of a stage show & entourage that it costs 3 times as much as Incubus. Also, the merchandise is similarly pricier at shows with higher ticket prices. Let me know how much t-shirts are at the Prince show, as I am curious.

And sorry, I'm not trying to make you feel bad about getting tickets for Prince; his show is actually not so overpriced. And he actually has more talent than any of the other artists I listed :-)

[carynb.livejournal.com]

Given how convenient it is for me to get the tickets online while at my desk at work, I don't begrudge them a few extra dollars.

The problem is, the last time I checked, there was no way around the fees. You get charged the same amount if you walk into a ticketmaster outlet to buy the tickets. If I were paying a premium for the convenience of ordering from my desk, it wouldn't feel like such a rip-off. The fact that there's no way out of the cost (or of reducing the cost) is what irritates. Or am I wrong about that? It's been a while since I went into an outlet to buy tickets, after all.

Actually, I didn't think you were trying to make me feel bad about buying the Prince tickets, even if I did sound a little defensive. You were, after all, the one who gave me the heads-up about them going on sale (Thanks!). I'll let you know about the merchandise prices. *g*

[whynotsteve.livejournal.com]

The extra $3 per order for pickup or mail is only for online purchases (at least it used to be). The rest are the standard TM fees.