I went to buy tickets for an upcoming show in Oakland.
Sale started at 10 a.m.
Logged on and started refreshing a couple minutes beforehand.
Clicked in at 10:00 and one tenth of a second.
Clicked for tickets, and got redirected to a secondary market website owned by Ticketmaster, where tickets that went on sale less than one second earlier were now marked up to 10-15 times the face value. It was as if buyers had had the time to buy their tickets and then amazingly all price them in similar fashion and arrange the listings as fast as Santa travels house to house.
All Congress has to do is check the timing of these 'secondary market' listings to know what's really going on.
Let's see...
Company owns the rights to sell all tickets at pretty much all the venues in an area.
Company also owns the secondary sales marketplace that a buyer is automatically linked to when trying to buy a ticket.
Before the tickets are actually on the market, the ticket agency has already set aside all the tickets in order to mark them up even further.
Oh, well. Free market and all, but it does piss me off.
Maybe they should just make every concert an auction and then we wouldn't have to hurry to try and log in early.
___________________
On a related note, I used to work at UCLA in a lab with a fellow music lover who, inexplicably, was a Morrisey fan.
When Ticketmaster listed those tickets, we had reprogrammed the office phone and when he tried to speed dial Ticketmaster, it kept dialing 911.
I know, I probably caused 456,785 deaths, but it was funny to hear him yell at the operator to quit picking up his Ticketmaster calls.
I went to buy tickets for an upcoming show in Oakland.
Sale started at 10 a.m.
Logged on and started refreshing a couple minutes beforehand.
Clicked in at 10:00 and one tenth of a second.
Clicked for tickets, and got redirected to a secondary market website owned by Ticketmaster, where tickets that went on sale less than one second earlier were now marked up to 10-15 times the face value. It was as if buyers had had the time to buy their tickets and then amazingly all price them in similar fashion and arrange the listings as fast as Santa travels house to house.
All Congress has to do is check the timing of these 'secondary market' listings to know what's really going on.
Let's see...
Company owns the rights to sell all tickets at pretty much all the venues in an area.
Company also owns the secondary sales marketplace that a buyer is automatically linked to when trying to buy a ticket.
Before the tickets are actually on the market, the ticket agency has already set aside all the tickets in order to mark them up even further.
Oh, well. Free market and all, but it does piss me off.
Maybe they should just make every concert an auction and then we wouldn't have to hurry to try and log in early.
___________________
On a related note, I used to work at UCLA in a lab with a fellow music lover who, inexplicably, was a Morrisey fan.
When Ticketmaster listed those tickets, we had reprogrammed the office phone and when he tried to speed dial Ticketmaster, it kept dialing 911.
I know, I probably caused 456,785 deaths, but it was funny to hear him yell at the operator to quit picking up his Ticketmaster calls.