You go to concerts, so you know the frustration: you’re online at the second tickets go on sale and before you can click to buy one, ticketmaster returns you the message there is no ticket available at the moment,… how is it possible? How did this happen? The message tells you that tickets may still be available, so you refresh and refresh and refresh, and you are out of luck and never get one! It happened to me a few times, even for big venues, and I couldn’t understand how the Hollywood Bowl of 18,000 seats could possibly sell out in a few seconds.
A Nashville channel, News Channel 5, investigated the phenomenon that strikes thousands of fans every day, by getting information about a recent Justin Bieber concert at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena: the results show that only 1001 seats out of the 14,000 were actually sold to the public! Here are the numbers:
42% went to American express (you know all these pre-sales), 21% to Bieber Fan club, 20% to the venue or the artist, 10% to VIP, and so only 7% to the general public, like you and me, I mean not me because I would never go to a Bieb's show, but you got it.
You are gonna say that people who use pre sale and Bieber fan club advantages can be people like you and me, they just belong to special clubs, but the problem is that, a lot, really A LOT, of these pre sales go to resellers such as StubHub (owned by eBay) and are resold for little fortunes, especially when it is the case of hot concerts. So we are left with this 7% when we try to buy a ticket, and it’s no wonder it becomes mission impossible.
For example, Justin Bieber sold out the 20,000-seat Madison Square Garden in 30 seconds, but there are currently about 4,000 tickets on sale on StubHub for his two shows on November 28th and 29th! And the highest price is,… you’re not going to believe it … $19,500!! There is no such thing that a sold out concert, if you want to make the price.
But the worst of all this is this second revelation: the investigation discovered that Bieber’s management did also take part of this scalper business, making money at the fans' expense, buying tickets and reselling them through StubHub!! What a shame! And of course Bieber isn’t probably the only artist doing this kind of crap. In a similar way, less than 1,600 tickets were sold to the general public during Taylor Swift show in the same arena. The big stars probably all do it, but how can they get away with reselling their own tickets for outrageous amounts?
However, didn’t Jack White, at his recent and infamous Radio City Music Hall Show, make scalpers’ job much harder by not releasing paper tickets and installing a will call system verifying ID of each person having bought a ticket? I went through the same thing at Paul Simon’s show at the Henry Fonda last year, it was a little long but efficient, and nobody could resell a ticket.
I was wondering why they weren’t all doing this, but now I understand! If Bieber, Swift and Perry’s managements participate into the scalping, they have no interest in stopping it! Really, another reason, beside their crappy music, to boycott these greedy motherfuckers.