Am I being cynical if I wonder if Ticketmaster just cancelled a number of tickets randomly, just so they can resell those at its new “market price.” Normally I would just assume incompetence or a mistake, but this is Ticketmaster.
Well, you are, but not as cynical as ticketmaster who might have done exactly that.
If there’s a financial incentive for them to do it, then that’s why they did it. Follow the money. There are no ramifications for Ticketmaster to do this sort of abhorrent behavior. They just don’t care.
This is almost certainly the case. I also know Airbnb hosts do that all the time.
You are, and you’re probably right.
Maybe you are, but it’s what I thought too.
She initially thought the email was fake, but after realising it was from Ticketmaster she said she does not intend to buy tickets from the company in the future, despite being a loyal customer.
Loyal customer pretty much means the same as regular concert goer.
I go to quite a few concerts and all of my tickets are bought from Ticketmaster in some form. I wouldn’t call myself loyal to them as I’m forced to choose between Ticketmaster or no concert.
I have a season MLS ticket to my local team directly through the team, and everything is controlled and processed through Ticketmaster anyways. Have to log in to ticket Master through a special portal to access anything
Exactly. Is it really loyalty when you only have one option?
It sounds better than monopoly. Image is everything.
100% right and I don’t doubt the woman from the article feels the same but if you want to add weight to informing a company they fucking suck you use terms like loyal or committed or something similar that adds the red flag to corporate that their actions are affecting their customer retention bottom line.
Edit: I feel I need to add, “in most cases.” Kinda hard for this to affect companies who are aloud to have monopolies over an industry because it throws customer retention concerns out the window. But I stand by my comment because I still think the verbiage used in the email is just the standard way of addressing corporate ran entities.
How can be legal? Bot detection should apply almost immediately, not after six months.
It smells like “we sold too many tickets, we need a plausible excuse to refund people”
And there’s a simple trick to stop bots: make tickets non transferable. But that would hurt their secondary sales on that other reselling site operated by themselves, and shows wouldn’t be sold out immediately due to FOMO (if tickets can be resold even at a higher price, people would buy them even if they’re not 100% sure they can attend the show)
make tickets non transferable
This sounds sensible, but in practice ID checking however many tens of thousands of people on their way into a venue would take forever. (Not to mention now having to deal with the portion of genuine customers who’ve forgotten to bring Id etc)
It would be easier to not allow resales above the original purchase price.
Without ID on the ticket you don’t know it’s been resold. All a venue sees is someone presenting a valid QR code (or whatever)
Could they just allow the account holder to void the old ticket code and issue a new one? Then you’d have to trust resellers to not yoink your ticket after they walk away with your money.
It doesn’t matter if it’s resold. If tickets can’t be resold with markup prices, scalpers won’t have any incentive to hoard and resell (assuming there are no fees for reselling, in an ideal scenario), therefore reducing the resale market to people who actually have a legit reason to sell their tickets.
Oh I see, you mean ban legit reselling?.. could do. no chance of stopping unofficial reselling though (gumtree whatever). It’s a terms of service thing not a legal thing. So gumtree, eBay etc are not obliged to take down such things. And of course they would never stop touts doing it in person on approaches to a venue…
Ticketmaster can easily prevent out-of-band reselling by only allowing resales on their site. So anyone selling their tickets on ebay or wherever will still have to transfer the tickets and get paid through ticketmaster, which should only allow you to sell at original purchase price with no extra fees. This would also help prevent scams and fraud because all transactions would be via their system and they already implement that rotating code technology to prevent screenshots from working.
Of course ticketmaster doesn’t do that because they charge a fee on resales, which gets them more money.
How could it actually work though? Without checking ID at the gate you have no idea if the ticketholder is the original or has bought from a scalper?
It should say “bots not approved and distributed by Ticketmaster to scalpers”.
Former touring musician here. The larger acts are contractually bound to whatever their label decides on venues and ticketing in most cases. But there’s no reason to roll over and accept these assholes at Ticketmaster as our defacto option to have live music. Support local artists and local venues if possible. I’m out in the fucking sticks, but I will drive an hour to catch a show from time to time.
Some venues can also only be booked if you use Ticketmaster. So like at. A certain scale it’s impossible for even the labels to avoid it if they wanted.
Good point. I’m an eternal optimist for an artist first movement where parasitic corps fuck right off. One day… one day…
They should be grateful for Ticketmaster sparing them that torture.
Wow, strong take. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like Oasis, but I’m sure other people listen to them on purpose.
I don’t actually mind their music, I just like shitting on Oasis because the Gallaghers are assholes.
I refuse to look up if the Gallaghers are the last names of the singers. Instead, I like to imagine you’re blaming a completely different set of famous Gallagher brothers
To be honest, “assholes” fits in either case.
Hi, it’s me, here to ruin the fun as usual.
Noel and Liam Gallagher are the Gallaghers in question, and their band has been successfully sued for plagiarism on three different occasions.
I’m with Squid on this one.
How dare you educate me!? Now this stupid rainbow-shooting star won’t leave me alone!
It’s definitely just me, but I think every event like this is just for consumers that don’t know any better.
It’s sad watching fully-grown adults get googly-eyed over things like this, but here we are.
What a dreary existence your life must be.
Mom’s basement has all of life’s accoutrements already.
It’s definitely just me, but I think every event like this is just for consumers that don’t know any better.
You’re against performing arts/live shows and think people who enjoy them are suckers? That truly is a wild take.
