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Ticketmaster Fees Make Ticket Prices Skyrocket Ticketmaster Fees Make Ticket Prices Skyrocket

By Danyell Monk

DANYELL MONK: From outside and inside his office, it’s easy to tell that Syracuse University professor Les Rose is much more than just a casual music listener. Like many music fans, one of Rose’s favorite aspects is getting to hear his favorite artists live.

LES ROSE: Some of my favorite moments ever in life have happened at concert.

MONK: Throughout his attending of over one-thousand-three-hundred concerts, the process for buying tickets has changed. The website Ticketmaster is the current most common way. Rose recalls being confused one of the first times he purchased tickets through the website.

ROSE: I just remember staring at like a 15, 20-dollar ticket for a decent band like ACDC or whoever, and suddenly there was four or five dollars in a fee back then. And I’m thinking, how can they charge so much? That’s almost a fourth of what I’m paying for the show.

MONK: And since then, those fees have skyrocketed. Ticketmaster handles ticketing for approximately 70 percent of events in North America, including central New York venues like the JMA Wireless Dome and the Landmark Theatre. This means anytime a fan wants to go to events at these venues, they’re paying extra towards the venue, the ticketing company, and technical processing. Syracuse.com reporter Geoff Herbert says fans from around the country feel that their hard-earned money is wasted on these fees.

GEOFF HERBERT: They don’t realize how much a ticket actually costs at the beginning of the transaction, and it feels like a rip off to some fans because they’re paying 25, 30 or even 50 to 75% more than what they were originally planning on spending for the ticket.

MONK: In New York state, it’s law that ticket sellers must be transparent with their ticket prices. This means that the total cost, including service charges and fees, must be disclosed before ticket is actually purchased. For example, right now I’m buying tickets for a documentary premiere at the Landmark Theater. The cost shown on the screen is $28.30. However, if we look a little more closely, we’ll see the ticket itself is actually only $20. That additional $8.30, that’s added fees. Ticketmaster has come out in support of a proposed fair ticketing act, a federal law requiring showing added fees before purchase nationwide. However, this is no guarantee that the fees themselves would be lowered. Herbert says it seems like Ticketmaster is trying to generate good PR for themselves since hiding added fees before checkout has benefited them.

HERBERT: The ticketing companies, including Ticketmaster, have found that when those extra fees are not displayed upfront, they’re more likely to get the fans to actually complete the transaction if it only appears at the very end of the transaction.

MONK: With how complicated Ticketmaster and it’s fees can be, rose compares it to a quote from one of music’s all-time greats.

ROSE: Chuck Berry in the day said it best that if a 45 record is $0.99 and he’s getting a penny, who gets the other $0.98?

MONK: In Syracuse, Danyell Monk, NCC News.

SYRACUSE, N.Y. (NCC News) — With summer on the way music fans, sports lovers, and others attending events are going online to purchase tickets before they sell out. One of the most common places to buy tickets is Ticketmaster, the leading ticketing company in North America.

Recently Ticketmaster is facing backlash for issues like pricey added fees, tickets being resold for well above their face value and the near monopoly that Ticketmaster has on the event ticketing industry.

In 2009, Ticketmaster and Live Nation, the world’s largest concert venue owner, agreed to merge. Syracuse.com reporter Geoff Herbert said this merger has led to artists having very little choice about many aspects of their concerts.

“There are a lot of venues out there that will only be allowed to do Ticketmaster events,” Herbert said. “The bigger the artist, the bigger the venue, and Live Nation owns and operates most of those venues which means that they are controlling and essentially have a monopoly on some of these places.”

Recently, hundreds of Taylor Swift fans filed a lawsuit against Ticketmaster and Live Nation. This comes after issues with the ticketing process for The Eras Tour. Fans could sign up for a verified fan pre-sale. This means they could register and potentially get chosen via lottery to get a pre-sale code. Herbert said fans sharing codes with those not chosen overloaded the system and caused Ticketmaster to crash.

“There were maybe a million to 1.5 million tickets to be sold there and there were about 14 million people that were trying to get tickets at the same time,” Herbert said. “One of the issues that they want to try and change is to either improve the ticketing process so that way more fans can get access to tickets or to change the way tickets are rolled out, which is to say if they’re doing a 50 city tour, should all the tickets go on sale the same day at the same time?”

Also aggravating fans are resellers, also known as scalpers, buying large amounts of tickets at face value and reselling them for profit. This has recently gotten out of control with scalpers posting tickets on third-party ticket resale websites. Tickets can be priced at any value on these websites, meaning scalpers can price tickets at multiple times the face value. Many people want to see ticket scalping banned altogether. Herbert said this is unlikely but there are efforts to stop scalper bots.

“One thing that has been banned in New York State is scalper bots, which are computer programs that quickly snatch up hundreds of tickets and then they immediately appear on another website and drive the ticket prices up,” Herbert said. “Nobody thinks it’s fair that people should have to pay more than a concert ticket is worth for an event.”

Herbert said that it is ultimately most important that Ticketmaster and Live Nation keep in mind what artists and fans want.

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