www.ticketnews.com: Dan Auerback and Patrick Carney are The Black Keys, an American garage, blues and indie rock band which has not toured for the past six years. Dan handles guitar and vocal while Patrick plays the drums. Although their band is essentially two people, they are known for making a lot of noise. They sure did last week.
4 comments:
There is nothing that frustrates me more than ticket resale. Big resale firms which have a bunch of people working for less than minimum wage just to buy all the tickets to an event as soon as they're released to resell them for a higher price infuriate me. One time, I heard about a concert from an artist I liked, and looked at ticket prices. They were only $20-25 or so. I discussed it with a couple friends, and a day later, we went back to purchase tickets. The tickets were sold out and we were linked to a resale site where the same tickets were now going for $80-$90. We ended up not attending the concert due to the now exorbitant prices, marked up over 400%. Because of this and similar experiences I have faced in the past, I like that the ticket transfer between the initial and subsequent buyer can be disabled. In cases like these, where tickets are purchased purely for the purpose of resale, without any actual desire to attend the event, this feature will make this exceedingly difficult. However, for people who purchased tickets with the intention of seeing the show, but no longer can and want to sell their ticket to someone else who genuinely wants to see the show, this feature makes that impossible. If it weren’t for these damn ticket resellers, this feature would not be necessary. Such a shame.
I understand where the Black Keys were coming from with the prohibition on resale tickets, because as almost anyone who has bought resale tickets can tell you, people will profit insanely off of just nosebleed seats that cost maybe 20% of their resale price. This happened to me with bands like Twenty One Pilots, Modern Baseball (when they were still together), and even Billy Joel; the tickets just cost way too much to justify purchasing, even if I desperately wanted to see the bands.
I most definitely concur with the statement at the end of the article as well, describing how there needs to be a balance between resale and first-come, first-serve ticket buyers. The work of profiteering off of a typical business sale is obviously difficult to regulate, as it’s rather regular in the world of live music and performances too (theatre included). However, I think if bands and performers continue to regulate tickets to first-sold tickets only, it may even just leave a dent in the issue, which is enough to spark something larger and more effective.
This article actually hits home for me quite well! I bought tickets to see the Black Keys on October 7 at PPG Arena when they first went on sale back in early summer. My tickets were roughly $20 each at the time. Unfortunately, my schedule doesn't quite line up so I had to sell my tickets. I tried to put them back up for sale on the website I bought them from (TicketMaster), but I wasn't allowed to sell them for the price I bought them for! It was weird. The minimum I could sell each ticket for was $43, which meant whoever bought them off me would be paying more than double what I got them for. My intention was never to profit off the sale, so I was a little confused on why I had a price floor on it.
I think it's just awful that people take advantage of the transfer feature and try to profit off of ticket flipping. It's a malicious industry, in my opinion, and though it's not illegal, I think many can agree it's immoral. At the same time, I'm a little confused as to why the band would direct TicketMaster to invalidate resell tickets without any notice. Isn't that just punishing the innocent fan that was trying to see the show? I agree with the overall message they were trying to send to resellers, but I'm still trying to understand the logistics behind how they went about it.
This article presented an intriguing aspect of the concert industry I hadn’t really thought about in depth before. I do believe that the initial intent of the Black Keys was a good one, they wanted to provide their fans the ability to see their concert without all of the second-hand ticket sales expense for this concert in particular. However I think that this event became the chaotic mess it was from a lack of knowledge of the restriction on ticket sales. If the Black Keys we’re public about their intentions then it was fair to assume that ticket sales would go through the typical venues and despite best intentions you can’t expect people to know and adjust their behavior if they haven’t had changes brought to their attention. Now it could’ve been public information within the relevant communities and in that case that is just re-sale sites being irresponsible and having a complete disregard for the happiness of their customers along side the validity of their product. In regards to the greater argument at hand about the practice of re-selling tickets I have mixed feelings about the issue. I would hate to see an entire industry be practically destroyed because of this new technology but I also don’t really go to concerts because of the high cost associated with them.
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