Once again, I lost the Ticketmaster war. What I thought would be a quick in and out turned into the most frustrating three hours of my life (at 10:00 a.m. on a Tuesday nonetheless). I didn’t secure the Ariana Grande tickets because I didn’t have several hundred dollars to drop on a single ticket, let alone for each person in the group. I’ve had this experience with almost every concert I’ve attended and seem to only be able to get tickets for a concert if luck is on my side that day.
What I want to know most is what exactly is the point of a pre-sale when everybody and their mother has access to it? While people who actually intend to buy tickets fight for a spot in the queue, hundreds of thousands of nosy people are just going in to look at the prices and leave. Then we have the scalpers who buy tickets just to immediately resell them for five times the original price. What was once a $75 ticket becomes a $600 ticket. Who can afford that? Ticketmaster allows sellers to essentially hold tickets hostage.
Ticketmaster fees are the most outrageous fees I have ever encountered. The more a ticket costs, the higher the fees will be, which is probably why Ticketmaster allows resellers to quadruple the original price. The fees are also entirely unpredictable, varying significantly by event and venue.
This phenomenon used to only be a problem for huge artists and highly anticipated tours, but it has become nearly impossible to get tickets for any show. The only concerts I was able to go to over the summer were ones that I either won tickets to or for artists that didn’t have a very large fanbase. I tried to get tickets to see Lorde and Tate McRae, who are big artists, but not nearly to the same capacity as Taylor Swift or Ariana Grande. It was impossible to find any ticket below $500. Even the nosebleed seats were in the five and six hundreds.
I find this especially ridiculous for artists who have younger fan bases. When ticket prices are that high, the teens and young adults who are working minimum wage have to sell an arm and a leg just to get a spot in the venue their favorite artist is performing at. I also believe that when the ticket prices are so high, the audience is expecting a high-end experience. So when an artist comes out on stage and lip syncs or shows up an hour late, it feels almost offensive.
But the high-end experiences aren’t even reaching the correct audience anymore. I thought back to a video I saw of Chappell Roan last year, where she called the front couple rows out for being boring and not doing the “HOT TO GO!” dance at the show she was performing at. Ticket prices dictate the kind of audience an artist is going to have, so when the prices are so non-accessible, there’s bound to be a disconnect between the artist and the audience. I’m not really a Benson Boone fan, but I can also recall the Coachella crowd not caring at all when he brought out Brian May, the legendary guitarist from Queen. Sabrina Carpenter had to gentle-parent the audience into caring about Earth Wind and Fire being on stage at her concert this year.
All I ask is for Ticketmaster to stop allowing users to resell tickets for whatever price their heart desires. It’s making it harder for regular people to buy tickets and making the presale and general sale queues a nightmare.
