Call to Action

The euphoria experienced when you are finally inhabiting the same space as your beloved artist is like no other. You find yourself in a special happy place! Unfortunately, you also fall victim to the economics of greedy corporations like Ticketmaster! Concert promoters partner with Ticketmaster to create demand and drive ticket prices up by manufacturing complicated presale categories and mandating presale dates and time. No one knows how many tickets are being released and sold in any given presale dates. Fans are at its mercy. Fans first? Not so much.

Even if you happen to qualify for one of the presale categories, such as cash card holders or Spotify super fan, you could still be left without a ticket after waiting in a virtual queue for hours. It is a time honored marketing trick: By creating scarcity and chaos, whatever product you are trying to sell would become instantly more desirable. Word on the street is that tickets are selling fast! The problem is that at the end of the day we do not know how many tickets are still available for the general public. Case in point: On the day when the general public was allowed to purchase tickets for Sabrina Carpenter’s November concert, the only tickets left were “verified resale tickets.” Fans were left with pricey tickets. All the original tickets were purchased during the presale dates, and a good [number] of the tickets were purchased with the intention of reselling them!

To top this off, how is it not illegal for an entity like Ticketmaster to act as an intermediary for both selling and reselling the same concert tickets? We love our artists. We want to see them performed in person. We want to be in that happy place … but at what price? “Verified resale tickets” are at least doubled if not tripled the original price. By the way, if you could stomach the cost of the overpriced tickets, you are slapped with an additional hefty processing fee of $70 per ticket at checkout!

So fans: are you outraged? Make some noise today and show your support for the Justice Department’s suit against Live Nation-Ticketmaster for monopolizing markets across the live concert industry!

Amy Ho
La Crescenta