Is there any way Ticketmaster could become any more Monopolyesque?

Yes, yes there is.

As if the Ticketmaster behemoth hadn't rolled over enough of the music industry, they're teaming up with similar monolithic control block Facebook:

“At Ticketmaster, we’re continuing to build our platforms to make it easier to get tickets into the hands of fans. Ticketmaster integrates with key partners that make the buying experience simpler for fans and are complimentary to our artist and venue clients,” said the Live Nation-owned company.

“We recognise that Facebook delivers on scale and discovery. At Ticketmaster, we have the security and convenience of mobile verified ticket transaction technology. Together we are able to provide a seamless experience allowing the fan to purchase at the point of event discovery.

“Fans can discover an event and purchase a ticket within one experience.”

In future iterations, Facebook will just bill you and deliver the tickets without waiting for any interaction because IT KNOWS BETTER THAN YOU WHAT YOU WILL LIKE.

By 2019, Facebook/Ticketmaster will have the process down to a point where it will remove money from your bank account in return for automatically posting a message about how much you would have enjoyed the concert, without the need for you to be involved. A ten per cent fee will be levied on top for this service.

Shh... it's a Jesus And Mary Chain secret

An email comes from a server with exciting news:

SECRET JESUS AND MARY CHAIN DUBLIN SHOW

It's not actually a secret show if you're sending an email (to a list not BCCed), is it? Perhaps wind it in a bit for the email body:

Now in Dublin rehearsing for their upcoming festival and tour dates - and loving it - the Jesus and Mary Chain will play a low key date.

"Low key date" is a bit more accurate.

It's at Vicar Street, Dublin on July 31st. Ticketmaster are doing the ticketing, I'm afraid, so be prepared to pay unacceptable fees so that the costs of doing business don't have to eat into Ticketmaster's lovely, lovely profit base.

Consumers Association about to kick ticket agencies' asses

Long-running complaints about ticket agencies are going to come to a head this week, with the Consumer Association telling them to justify their add-on costs or face a formal referral to the Competition & Markets Authority:

"Consumers can often feel ripped-off with widely varying and often high ticket fees, so we've put companies on notice to step up and Play Fair on Ticket Fees," said Which? executive director, Richard Lloyd, quoting the name of the consumer body's ongoing ticket fee campaign. "They need to justify their fees and treat their customers fairly, or we will take our evidence to the Competition and Markets Authority."

The weasel-livered explanation offered for charging people to print out their own tickets on their own printers in their own homes is, apparently, the agencies need to check the tickets when they're presented at the venue. Righto.

Ticketmaster captcha the front page

Ticketmaster are dropping recaptcha captchas in favour of Solve Media captchas instead. Sure, Solve ones are easier to, erm, solve, but they're basically intended as a way of making captchas into advertising. (Getting site visitors to type marketing slogans, in short.)

So why is this change being treated by BBC News not only as a news story, but one that is...

... worthy of a front page slot?

A less-than-welcoming Coldplay experience

Samantha wanted to go to the Coldplay gig. Let's not judge her for that, a lot of people like Coldplay.

Trouble is, Samantha needed accessible tickets. And that's where things get bad. Very bad indeed.

She's tried to get tickets for London - where tickets for disabled people have to be ordered through the post, take a third of a year to arrive, and are tossed out without any regard to what the requirements of the gig-goer are (it seems the assumption is that you'll use a wheelchair, not that you might have vision problems, for example.)

So she tried for Manchester, and things were even worse, where the website does at least have a number for "ambulant disabled" [their term] gig-goers to call - not that anyone on that number can help, or appears to even be expecting the calls.

It's a pretty shabby tale from start to finish. I don't think any of us have much in the way of expectations of Ticketmaster or gigsandtours, but this is a new level of misery creation.

String Cheese Incident outplays Ticketmaster

String Cheese Incident have a long history of battling Ticketmaster, having taken legal action against the company back in 2003 when the corporation tried to stop the band selling tickets direct to their fans.

That case had lead to a truce, but one which expired in 2009; now, once again, Ticketmaster is trying to force a claim that it has sole rights to sell tickets to events at some venues.

So what did The String Cheese Incident do?

They came up with an elegant workaround. The New York Times reports:

One Friday afternoon recently, about 50 fans and friends of the band String Cheese Incident took $20,000 in cash to the Greek Theater in Los Angeles to take a small stand against the system — in this case, Ticketmaster.

With money advanced by the band, each person had enough to buy eight tickets at $49.95 apiece for the group’s show in July. Once all tickets were in hand, almost 400 of them, they were carried back to String Cheese headquarters in Colorado and put on sale again through the group’s Web site — for $49.95.

Yes, the band are scalping their own tickets, at a loss. They're taking a hit, but making a rather elegant point in the process.

Will an end to unfair credit and debit card fees make concerts cheaper?

Good festive news: the government is proposing a ban on made-up credit card processing fees. Companies like Ticketmaster will still be able to charge credit card fees, but not the silly, made-up mark-ups they currently do.

Bad festive news: this won't stop Ticketmaster making up other fees, and slapping arbitrary sums onto those.

In effect, then: from the end of 2012, you'll be ripped off on a different line of your gig ticket bill.

One Direction fans claim premature ejaculation

If Twitter is to be believed, Ticketmaster put the sale of One Direction tickets live a couple of minutes before the advertised time of 10am, which meant the tour sold out before it was supposed to be on sale.

It's more likely that the tickets went on sale at 10am, Ticketmaster time, and the people who logged on at the stroke of what they thought was 10 were actually coming to the party too late, but once again the question is: with tours you know are going to sell out, why persist in pretending you can recreate a queuing system online?

Ticketmaster announce plans to make buying tickets even more miserable

The live music cash cow fell over and died last year, with bands and promoters and ticket agencies getting greedy and managing to kill off demand for the bit of the music industry that had been buoyant.

Clearly, something must be done.

Rather than reducing ticket prices back to a sensible level, or cutting the egregious made-up 'service' charges, Ticketmaster have decided to have a go at dynamic pricing.

Oh, yes, knowing that you'll pay £30 to see Spiggy And The Spocks clearly doesn't work any more:

The world’s largest purveyor of live-event tickets said Monday that it had partnered with MarketShare to help adjust ticket prices for its shows. Ticketmaster will begin rolling out the “dynamic pricing” sometime this year, initially for major sporting events and concerts, and for arts and theater at a later date.

Now, in theory, this could mean that gigs which are selling slowly will see their prices go down. The bit that Ticketmaster will be interested in, though, is that if a concert is doing well in sales, it can jack the price up.

For years, the only worry about a big gig has been if you'll be able to buy your tickets before the system selling them goes down. Now, you're going to need to factor in whether you're buying them at the right price or not.

Yes, make buying tickets an even more unpleasant experience, with the chance you wind up paying way over what everyone else in the room is paying. That'll bring the crowds back, Ticketmaster.

Axl Rose instructs his lawyers

Axl Rose has launched a lawsuit which, besides much else, seems to construct a conspiracy theory claiming his ex-manager has tried to force Guns N Roses to reunite. How would that work?

What [Irving] Azoff wanted, the rocker says, was the reunion of Guns N' Roses. To execute this, he would sabotage Rose and his new band so that Rose would have no option but to reunite.

According to the filing, "Upon realizing that he couldn't bully Rose and accomplish his scheme, Azoff resigned and abandoned Guns N' Roses on the eve of a major tour, filing suit for commissions he didn't earn and had no right to receive."

Further, Axl says the botched tour cost him money in production startup and rehearsal expenses. Claiming breach of fiduciary duty, constructive fraud and breach of contract, the singer wants at least $5 million in damages.

The Rose lawsuit is a riposte to Irving's good-luck-with-that attempt to claim a large slice of the earnings from a tour - Irving claims Axl violated an oral agreement to shovel over 15% of the take from it.

You'd have to wonder at the business skillz of a man who hangs his potential two million dollar payday on an oral agreement, wouldn't you?

Rose brings the Ticketmaster merger into the expensively-staffed row as well:

Azoff, is CEO, director and majority shareholder of Front Line, whose roster of artists include the Eagles, Neil Diamond, Jimmy Buffett, Christina Aguilera and John Mayer. In 2008, Front Line was acquired by Ticketmaster.

You've got to love the way people will now throw Ticketmaster into the mix as there's just an aura of evil clinging to them.

The good news for lawyers is that both sides have so much money they can probably keep this battle going for years.

[Thanks to Mike E for the story]

Ticket 'scammers' facing slammer

Since a CAPTCHA only exists to decide if the entity which is looking at it is capable of decoding it, is there anything morally wrong with using a machine which can solve them?

We ask as four men behind a company trading as Wiseguy Tickets in the US are charged with an alleged scam:

Federal prosecutors in New Jersey said on Monday that four men operating under the name Wiseguys Tickets had hacked into online sites, buying more than 1 million tickets to some of the country’s most popular musical and sporting events and then reselling them for more than $25 million in profit.

In its 43-count indictment, the prosecutors say the men built a computer network that created thousands of fake accounts and built a program that could outsmart the ticketing software that creates those odd-shaped letters designed to require human verification.

I'm not sure, even if the claims are true, that anyone has hacked into anything - they've worked out how to game the system; they've written or obtained software that perform the same function as a person but much, much more quickly - but if you were hacking in, you wouldn't be bothering to solve CAPTCHAS in the first place, would you?

Keeping supplies of tickets out of the hands of fans and selling them on later at a massive mark-up, though, is clearly wrong and criminal. Except when Ticketmaster is doing is it, apparently.

Ticketmaster/Live Nation: Go on, do it

The age of pretend choice in major live events ticketing is drawing to a close, as America follows Britian in indicated governmental relaxity with a Ticketmaster/LiveNation merger.

The Justice Department have pretended to be all strict and pretend to insist on countermeasures:

Under the proposed settlement, Ticketmaster must sell its Paciolan ticketing unit to Comcast-Spectacor which has already signed a letter of intent, or to another company approved by the Justice Department, the agency said.

Additionally, the merged company would be barred from retaliating against any venue owner that uses another company's ticketing or promotional services and must license its primary ticketing software to Anschutz Entertainment Group, the Justice Department said.

Ticketmaster are said to be happy to do this, just as soon as they've jacked up the mysterious booking fee to maximum.

Ticketmaster: Competition Commission smile

It's the most wonderful time of the year; the time when people slip out unpopular announcements in the hope that nobody notices.

Like the Competition Commission's decision that, actually, the creation of a Ticketmaster/LiveNation behemoth won't crush the customers under its weight:

[A]fter lobbying from the two companies which argued that critics had overstated their influence in the music industry, the commission dropped its opposition. Christopher Clarke, deputy chair of the commission, admitted it was "unusual" for the competition watchdog to change its mind in this way.

A key plank in the commission's ruling was the damage that could be caused to German ticketing firm CTS Eventim, which signed a deal with Live Nation to expand into the UK in 2007. Now, though, the commission has accepted Live Nation's argument that CTS will not lose out, and that it would be complicated and unfair to force the merged entity to sell off its UK ticketing arm.

Oh, it would be complicated, would it? Oh, how frightfully rotten that would be. You wouldn't want to make the otherwise completely zipless union of two totally separate companies to become a little complicated, would you? Not if the only thing it would do would be to stop a massive corporation stitching up the live music market in the UK.

Ticketmaster/Live Nation - not so fast...

Given that, working on their own, Ticketmaster and LiveNation hardly work in the consumer's interest, it's perhaps unsurprising that the Competition Commission has come out against them uniting into one near-Monopoly.

Bruce Springsteen: Man of the people

Springsteen, of course, has made his career out of his blue collar, man-of-the-people image. It's been picked at in the past - older readers will recall the NME's story about how he treated his staff and his canoe - but who would have thought Bruce would withhold the good tickets from the ordinary folk of New Jersey?

But an examination of ticket sale data from the May 21 concert shows Springsteen himself may be part of the problem. The best seats in the house that night were the 1,126 seats in the four sections closest to the stage, but only 108 of those tickets were ever for sale to the public, according to new ticket data obtained through the Open Public Records Act.

It's not only shitty to keep all the good seats for your chums, but it's actually against New Jersey law to keep back more than 5%.

This gig was the one where Ticketmaster had problems with their computers when the tickets went on sale.

Springsteen's manager Jon Landau has responded that this new story about Springsteen keeping tickets back is little more than Ticketmaster trying to shift back blame for that failure, somehow:

Yes, we do hold significant numbers of tickets when we play New Jersey, New York and Los Angeles, as does every arena headliner. These holds are used by Bruce, his band members, and longtime members of his extended organization, their families and close relations; by the record label for their staff, for reviewers, and for radio stations; by charities who are provided with tickets for fund raising purposes, such as special auctions; for service people who help us on a year-round basis; and for other similar purposes. Unlike some Ticketmaster managed artists, no tickets are held for high dollar resale on TicketsNow, or through any other means.

Where are the Bruce holds? The 2,000 to 3,500 tickets closest to the stage are on the floor and more than 95% of them go to the public, making the basic premise of the Star Ledger headline inaccurate. Secondly, with regard to seats held in the best sections on either side, we always blend guest seats with fan seats so that there are never any sections consisting entirely of guest seats.

In addition, it is well known that we sometimes release a significant number of excellent tickets on the day of the show at the box office, which can only be bought with direct entrance to the venue. It's known as the "drop." Many think that is done on purpose to help combat the scalpers who prey on fans at the last minute. That is a good thought.

I'm sure Landau hasn't deliberately written the piece to sound as opaque as possible, but it doesn't really explain exactly what number of ticket holds there are: is it 5% of the 2,000 to 3,500? Or are all of those holds, but 95% find their way through promotions of some sort to the "public"?

And isn't the question of if guests sit in a single block, or with some paying punters between them, something of a red herring when the question is over numbers?

Most irritatingly, what's that last two sentences about? If you're doing it to beat the scalpers, then say so. If you're not, don't try an "aaah!" to make people think that you are.

Perhaps it's not Landau's fault that his riposte is written in such a way as to obscure the facts. But the allegations against him in the New Jersey Star-Ledger are simple to follow; you would have thought that it would equally simple to disprove them.

Green Day, grey minutes

Thanks to @Electroweb for news of how quickly the Green Day ticket sale turned in to a tout payday:

wow, touts are quick! Green Day tix on GetMeIn 10 mins after sale starts for mere 3 x value... good old Ticketmaster...

Of course, it helps when the official sales outlet are also the official home of touting, doesn't it?

Ticketmaster go Phishing

More misery constructed by Ticketmaster - apparently the world's clumsiest company - as they sell Phish tickets to a delighted audience, only to then snatch them back. Phish issued a statement:

Last night we learned Ticketmaster mistakenly put on sale a substantial number of four-day passes to Phish's concerts this summer at Red Rocks Amphitheater, giving some fans an unfair advantage to purchase tickets ahead of the March 26th publicly announced on sale date. Ticketmaster has fully acknowledged this significant error, and to make sure that all of our fans have the same, fair opportunity to purchase tickets to this event, they have cancelled all of these orders with all charges being refunded.

We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause our fans. We are in active dialogue with Ticketmaster to push them to address the inconvenience their error has caused.

Phish takes this and all ticketing matters extremely seriously. We will seek assurances this type of error will not happen again in the future. The high demand for the tickets on Phish's return has overwhelmed the prevailing ticketing systems and revealed their flaws. We are putting pressure on the ticketing providers to improve their systems. We are focused on the ticket broker activity in our tickets and the inability of the existing ticket systems to stop this. We are actively seeking options to limit this.

As a reminder, the public on sale date for Red Rocks is Thursday, March 26th at 12:00 Noon Mountain time and additionally Phish's ticket request period will remain open until 11:59PM eastern time this Sunday the 22nd. Please visit http://phish.portals.musictoday.com/ to request tickets.

Phish are pushing Ticketmaster to "address the inconvenience"? How are Ticketmaster going to do that, exactly?

By handing out fifty dollars. Sort of:

Dear Phish fan:
Unfortunately, the tickets that you ordered from Ticketmaster for performances of Phish scheduled at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre between the dates of July 30th and August 2nd, 2009 were put on sale inadvertently, allowing you to order tickets before they were supposed to have been released for sale to the general public. The sale of these tickets prior to the scheduled onsale date was the result of an inadvertent error on the part of Ticketmaster. While we strive to be perfect, errors do occur, albeit rarely. Per our stated policy and our practice Ticketmaster refunds purchases in such situations and cancels the tickets. In this case, while we asked the credit card companies for an authorization code at order time, we did not and will not charge your card for the purchase price and have canceled your order for tickets.

In addition, we'd like to show our sincere regret for this error by providing you with a gift certificate in the amount of $50.00 that is redeemable for any purchase for tickets to qualifying events on Ticketmaster.com or through our call centers as long as your order was in accordance with our standard order guidelines. You should receive this gift certificate in the next two weeks.

We are sorry that we were not able to provide you with the tickets you ordered and hope that we will have the chance to serve you better in the future. We encourage you to visit Ticketmaster at the scheduled onsale for Phish at Red Rocks currently scheduled for Thursday March 26, 2009 at 12:00 pm MT.

Sincerely,
David Butler
President
Ticketmaster North America

Ticketmaster "strive to be perfect"? Ticketmaster actually giving a credit for one its errors? Wow, it's almost like they're striving to convince the Department Of Justice that they're a reasonable, great-to-do-business-with type of company rather than some sort of evil corporation.

And who will pay for those vouchers? Will it come out of profits, or simply slapped back on ticket prices as some sort of handling fee?

Department of Justice wants a closer look at Ticketmaster-LiveNation

If Ticketmaster and LiveNation were hoping to be given an easy ride into a merger, they're going to be disappointed. The tie-up is being given a closer eye, with the Department of Justice calling for more details.

Meanwhile, Ticketmaster is suffering from, oh, too much success:

Ticketmaster chairman Barry Diller repeated his denial of that practice late Thursday. He also said the complaints that fans were shut out of Phish and Michael Jackson concerts were due to the tickets selling out in seconds.

"Oddly, the better we sell tickets, the more unpopular we become," Diller said.

Equally oddly, the more clumsy and clunky your systems are, the more people who get booted out, or dumped back at the log-in screen, or can't even get on in the first place, the more unpopular you become. Oddly, the more obscure mark-ups to ticket prices you come up with, the more unpopular you become. The more you try to form a large, monopoly-tang behemoth, the more unpopular you become. It's like you can't get an even break, innit?

Ticketmaster can't hear you if you ask for a refund

Over on Consumerist: an until-now happy customer of Ticketmaster who, when trying to find out details about a canceled event, finds that TM company TicketsNow disconnect the call everytime he mentions the word "refund".

Who's scalping who? Artists tout their own tickets

Something to remember the next time you see artists and promoters getting upset about people flogging tickets on at inflated prices: some artists are doing the scalping themselves:

Less than a minute after tickets for last August's Neil Diamond concerts at New York's Madison Square Garden went on sale, more than 100 seats were available for hundreds of dollars more than their normal face value on premium-ticket site TicketExchange.com. The seller? Neil Diamond.

Ticket reselling -- also known as scalping -- is an estimated $3 billion-a-year business in which professional brokers buy seats with the hope of flipping them to the public at a hefty markup.

In the case of the Neil Diamond concerts, however, the source of the higher-priced tickets was the singer, working with Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc., which owns TicketExchange, and concert promoter AEG Live. Ticketmaster's former and current chief executives, one of whom is Mr. Diamond's personal manager, have acknowledged the arrangement, as has a person familiar with AEG Live, which is owned by Denver-based Anschutz Corp.

So, it's absolutely fine for artists to deliberately hold tickets back, in order to flog them at artificially-inflated prices. But somehow, it's wrong for ordinary people to sell on tickets they no longer need at slightly higher price, and photographic IDs must be used when buying tickets to stop this practice.

The artists sales are done through Ticketmaster's official scalping site, with - as the Wall Street Journal points out - usually no indication that the sales are coming from 'official' sources rather than a selling-on by fans. Indeed, lengths seem to be traveled in order to make it look like it's coming from fans:

Tickets for a March 27 Britney Spears concert at Mellon Arena in Pittsburgh were priced earlier this week at $39.50 to $125 apiece on Ticketmaster.com. But some of those same classes of seats were being offered at the same time through the "TicketExchange Marketplace" for as much as $1,188.60. The link to the Marketplace page was marked, "Browse premium seats plus tickets posted by fans."

Ms. Spears' spokeswoman declined to comment.

The ticket listings are offered in small batches, each at a price, such as $1,164.01, that mimics prices set via online auctions. After inquiries from The Wall Street Journal, the "tickets posted by fans" message was removed from the TicketExchange Web site. Prices also fell, narrowing the gap between Ticketmaster and TicketExchange Marketplace.

That this is all unethical is beyond question; perhaps more pertinent is the question of if it's entirely legal?