Rage against Ticketmaster

This post will not change anything but I need to write it so I have somewhere to direct my rage against Ticketmaster (aka THE WORST). Sure, they charge absurd service charges for no apparent reason and that's annoying, but I've dealt with it for years and at this point, I am resigned to it. My complaint now is about how I can no longer even reach the point to pay those crazy fees, because I CAN'T GET ANY TICKETS. To anything!

Three times in the past month, I've tried to buy concert tickets off of Ticketmaster, and all three times, the available tickets have sold out as soon as the shows are on sale. This morning, apparently Fiona Apple tickets sold out in about 8 seconds...if any were actually even available, because right now, Twitter looks like this:

Apparently, no one got tickets. My boyfriend, friend and I attempted to buy tickets for three different shows (hoping that one of them would work out for us) exactly when they went on sale, and nothing. Sure, I get it - the venues Fiona is playing only hold a couple hundred people and a lot of fans want tickets. I would be disappointed but accepting of it if other fans had bought all the tickets up and I couldn't get one. At least people who appreciate her got the tickets. But that's not the case. Let's talk about how many tickets are already available on StubHub from scalpers:

116 tickets for one venue are already available on StubHub, and the cheapest one costs over four times the original price. Not to mention, there was supposedly a limit of four tickets per person, yet some scalpers are offering up to 16 tickets. Craigslist is no better.

As if this weren't frustrating enough, this happened the last time I went to buy tickets on Ticketmaster as well, for Florence and the Machine. For that show, tickets had been "on sale" (aka sold out) for five minutes and there were already four pages of tickets available on StubHub. My friend went to buy tickets for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the same thing happened.

This is not fair to the fans, but it's also not fair to the artists. I don't know the process of how the tickets go from Ticketmaster to being snuck over to StubHub, but the artists cannot be making the extra profit. Other people must be making a lot more money off of Fiona and Florence's shows than they are. Shouldn't their management teams be upset about this?

I don't know what the answer is. I wish it were easy enough to just boycott Ticketmaster and LiveNation, but they've got the monopoly and I certainly won't stop going to concerts. All I know is that musicians and promoters are constantly complaining about poor ticket sales, so maybe they should figure out a way to fix this flawed system.

In the words of Fiona herself: "This world is bullshit!!" Seriously, if I don't end up with tickets to this show, I'm going to have my own Fiona-style breakdown. Ticketmaster, you are the worst.

UPDATE [2/28/12 5:50PM]: Today, I received a kind email from the creator of the Facebook group, "Scalpers Took My Fiona Apple Tickets." The group is growing steadily and has received some media attention. Best of all, some of the people are actually working productively to help the situation, including contacting Fiona's agency to make them aware of the situation, and signing a petition. So if you want to help out or if you just need a place to vent all your anger, be sure to check out that page.