Little Baby Ticketmaster Is Out On Its Own

Posted by pixie | Filed under Uncategorized

Here are some things I didn’t know:

Ticketmaster is currently owned by another company;
Ticketmaster is $750 million in debt;
The company that owns Ticketmaster, LAC/InterActiveCorp, just dumped them and now they have to run on their own.

I’d really like to know how a company that charges nearly half the face value of a ticket in fees and “convenience charges,” while having exclusive rights to all the tickets for thousands of venues, is in debt. All they do is print tickets. They even have a charge if you choose to print your own ticket, for some reason or another. I’m not a business specialist or anything, but I’d like to see their operating costs and business plan, to see if there is anything in there about employees sitting around just burning piles of cash.

According to Paste magazine, the flying solo Ticketmaster will be even more evil than the current one.

Ticketmaster says it’ll take this opportunity to change its business model. Among the ideas on the to-do list include a bigger international presence, offering ticket resales to complete with StubHub and eBay, and helping to support and market artists who are increasingly turning to ticket sales as their main source of revenue.

How the hell does a company that sells tickets… also have a ticket re-selling business?

And while I hate Ticketmaster with a glorious passion and would like to strike them down with a flaming sword, I can’t think of a company I have more vitriol towards than StubHub, home of $900 floor tickets for My Chemical Romance and home of $500 Cure tickets.  All the good seats for both band’s NYC shows sold out before I could get them, but there was an abundance of great seats on StubHub for anywhere from 3 to 12 times the face value.  Yep, Ticketmaster really needs to get involved in that.  While increasing their international presence so they can screw even more people!

I realize the price of tickets isn’t the most pressing concern in the world for most people, but I will say this: there have been shows that I wanted to see, but would have lived without seeing, that I was about to buy tickets for and at the last minute, didn’t.  When two $20 tickets end up costing $65 or $70, it really does make it easy to say, “ah, nevermind… I don’t need to go that badly.”

I’d love to see Ticketmaster go under and individual venues finding new ways to sell tickets for a reasonable fee, but in reality, I’m sure the government will bail them out or something if it really came to that.