Everyone has a take one way or the other, but the question I think we have to ask is “what did we really learn from the piece that ran in The New York Times on Sunday?”
Friday, April 06, 2018
Opinion: Did We Really Learn Anything From The Ticketmaster article in the NY Times?
Everyone has a take one way or the other, but the question I think we have to ask is “what did we really learn from the piece that ran in The New York Times on Sunday?”
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3 comments:
This is a very interesting article. I did not read/ hear of the NY Times article but once I started reading this I then went and read that article. It seems that ticketmaaster is in quite a predicament. I did not know that live nation owned ticketmaster but this does make sense now. I have never been a fan of buying tickets online for shows just because the ticketing fees are always so high. Why do they need to be over 10-15 dollars per ticket in fees? I think most people are getting scammed. I think the companies need to figure out a better way to sell tickets. There have been multiple cases this year about ticketing robots and all of that. I think the whole system needs to be fixed and many problems will be solved by that. Hopefully in the future there will be more options of where to buy tickets that will not be crazy expensive
I think online ticketing via direct or indirect purchasing has become problematic. Even if you are buying directly from the organization, there are often hefty fees associated with the purchase that simply did not exist before this type of sales platform. Especially when buying from a resale site, where the prices are usually substantially increased from the original advertised prices. I think this has become a big problem because it is preventing people that otherwise might have been able to afford to see a show from buying tickets. I know plenty of people for which fifteen to twenty dollars is a make or break amount when deciding to buy tickets for something. I think finding a better way to present ticket sales online is an overdue improvement that I hope to see in the near future. I think buying tickets online could be a simple efficient way of buying tickets, but the system definitely needs to be improved.
Online ticket sources like Ticket Master are almost the only way to buy tickets for shows these days, especially for people who may not be able to count on standing room or lottery, and the Ticketmaster prices almost always seem wildly inflated. Reading this, it just makes it seem more stupid and monopolistic that they have so many fees piled up on top of the prices that they payed for it. Related to this, I also have a huge issue with sites like TicketMaster and StubHub that use this monopoly and bots to grab up tickets and make it almost impossible to afford live events. For me, I can't afford those tickets a majority of the time, while I could afford mezzanine and nosebleeds normally through the box office at a theater. That's why I generally use rush tickets straight from the theaters, which are somewhat unreliable depending on the popularity of a show and the performance but cheaper overall. The fact that these companies take advantage of people who can't use rush tickets and pile fees and extra charges is just unfair to the theater going community as a whole.
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