Why Ticketmaster Totally Sucks

Yesterday, at exactly 12:00 PM, I went online to try for Bruce Springsteen tickets. Two additional shows were added to the Giants Stadium run in late September/early October, and I wanted the opportunity to see at least one more of these shows.

At the precise moment that the tickets went on sale according to the website, I selected the number of tickets I wanted (3), the price I wanted to pay ($33), and hit the enter button. I then had to type in the aggrevating scalper deterrent codes (which really doesn’t prevent scalping, but that is a subject for another day), and hit enter. Within 45 seconds, a big annoying box came up on my computer informing me that there were no tickets available at this time. What? At 12:00:45 PM all the tickets were sold out? You sold out all the $33 seats in 45 seconds? I call shenanigans!

Not to be thwarted, I went right back in and tried to get 3 tickets, this time at any price, any availability. I figured that if the tickets came in over my self-imposed fee of $65 then I would release them and search again. After a nice 12 minute wait, I was again shown the dreaded “no tickets available” screen. All tickets sold out in a matter of 13 minutes? 55,000+ tickets were gone that fast? WHO THE HELL GOT ALL THE TICKETS?

Well, a quick check of Stub Hub, Select-A-Ticket, and a couple of other “legal” ticket scalping sites showed me that there are a plethora of tickets available for an inflated face value. Once again, Ticketmaster has done nothing to deter the scalpers, and once again the good seats are gone to the corporations and re-sellers, while the fans are left with nothing. Ticketmaster will hide behind their usual corporate BS of “the demand for tickets was in the hundreds of thousands while there were only 55,000 tickets available…” speech, and once again they will do nothing to combat this in the future. Why should they? They’ve sold their tickets, made their money, and will be making more money on the secondary market.

This is why Ticketmaster is the Satan of the concert industry.

Irving Azoff can go stick it where the sun don’t shine!

Anyone else have any issues trying to get tickets too these shows? The Guru would love to hear all about it.

Comments are open. Feel free to post some.