A few days ago, Paul McCartney announced a concert in August at the Dodger Stadium, and I got a bit excited thinking that it was the first time he was playing the venue since the Beatles’ concert in 1966! What a nice way to celebrate summer with my family,… the Los Angeles Times had advertised that ticket prices would start at $25 (sure probably the ones at 5 miles away) stretching to $250, and I already had my little scenario in my head, buying three tickets and going into that big nostalgic trip!
Well it didn’t work out exactly that way. The presale was Tuesday morning, through Paul McCartney’s website, starting at 9 am, and of course I could not get through, despite using three different browsers – I have heard that it works sometimes! I tried a million times, then gave up, then tried a bit more,… nothing, just different error messages telling me to re-enter my email, something that I did many, many times. Advertised on Macca Facebook page, I realized that I was not the only one, ‘The link, it does work!’,… ‘Error 503?’,… I’ve been trying for half an hour to get tickets for L.A. The web site is NOT working. ‘Error 503 Service Unavailable’… ‘RIDICULOUS and Shameful. I got into a queue .. When I was finally allowed to purchase (at 9:13 a.m. PST) ALL tickets were gone. Zero! Yet one can go to ticketmaster site and buy at double the cost. AND!!! To StubHub and buy tickets that have not been released yet. How Come!???’… ‘Ridiculous that only the wealthy can go to concerts these days. There should be laws against these places buying up the tickets. My husband is such a fan but not for $200 a ticket. We have two kids to feed.’ There were tons of disappointed fans posting messages like these ones, and it seemed that the only tickets people were able to purchase were for his concert in San Francisco. But LA was a big let down.
And these people are right, of course, before I couldn’t buy anything, or even reached a page, brokers had ‘purchased’ tickets that weren’t offered to me and were reselling them at hot prices. They actually just reserved them? There was an article in USA today last year, explaining that the best way to get tickets to a hot concert is to get to know a rock star — yeah thanks for the advice — as many seats are allocated to various pre-sales outlets and in McCartney’s case I guess, all of them! Brokers were pretty confident that people would be ready to pay huge bucks for this event, so they let us the minimum of chance to buy tickets the regular way. Apparently, resellers have specific software tools to be able to hijack large amount of tickets, but what is so weird in this case is that presales are usually reserved for the fans – I had to registered on the McCartney’s fan list a few days in advance to be sure to get in… well it didn’t help.
There is another ‘pre-sale’ for American express card holders on Thursday, but f-them too, and another sale ‘to the general public’ on Monday, but let be honest I have no chance. In the middle of the afternoon, I tried again and was redirected to the Dodgers site where I was offered VIP/Hot seat tickets. Thanks I will pass on these Hot sound VIP seats at $2,000. Fuck Live Nation, Vividseats and Stubhub! Why do artists like Paul McCartney (and everybody else by the way) let things like this happening? Can’t they have more control over their sales? There was a time when getting a ticket was just waking up early to get online in front of a box office. You were in concurrence with other people and fans but not feeling powerless in front of a computer.
