I’ve been to a few events over the past year that required tickets through Ticketmaster. I remember Pearl Jam’s big battle with that company. And, at first, I thought they were just rock stars in search of something to be morally indignant about. But only takes a few experiences with this king of middle man “services” to understand why someone would have an axe to grind against them–or why one might consider going out and buying a new axe for that express purpose.
On the upside, being on Ticketmaster’s spam list (an additional free “service” if you ever buy a ticket through them) keeps me abreast of what arena shows are happening in Charleston and the greater South Atlantic region. The bigger acts skip us and hit Atlanta instead, but we get some acts on their way there (like we used to get some shows in Fayetteville, Arkansas on their way to Little Rock or in Little Rock on their way to Dallas). It’s mostly Cheetah Girls, Monster Jam, and stand-up comics, but good things land once in a while (I’m still kicking myself for not making the trip to Atlanta to see Tom Waits, but the timing just wasn’t right).
Being able to order tickets online and receive them as an Adobe PDF is cool, too.
On the downside, of course, is the price Ticketmaster sees fit to charge for these services. And, much more annoying, is the deceptive way in which they go about it. For instance, an event for which I recently purchased tickets had them available at three price points: $26, $35, and $60. That’s a reasonable spread. But then comes the “convenience charge” of $6.50 per ticket, a “delivery” charge of $2.50 per order, and a $3.50 per order “processing” charge for, well, I’m not sure what.
So the perfectly reasonable price points become quite a bit less reasonable once you factor in the charges. The base prices for a single ticket are now $38.50, $47.50, and $75.50. None of those are outrageous prices. But I resent them not being stated up front. After all, this is a web application, and I have some experience in creating those. Ticketmaster.com’s copious advertising should more than offset any hosting and bandwidth costs of providing tickets online. So there’s no justification for charging their customers additional fees for things like web delivery, which saves them both paper and postage costs.