A week or so ago I read about how, with the new paperless tickets (you have to show your credit card to get in), the new Thom Yorke band Atoms for Peace couldn’t sell out a tiny club in Southern California and Miley Cyrus couldn’t sell out anywhere after being the hottest tix in the country for the past coupla years.
The assumption is that they are false sell outs which force punters who want to go to these shows to pay five times the correct cost.
Earlier this week a California ticket brokering firm got sent to jail. They had figured out how to get thru Ticketmasters software while we idiots are waiting for 15 minutes and upwards.
Which leads me to my adventures in Gagaland.
At 10am precisely I went on line to buy 2 tix anywhere to Lady Gaga’s MSG gigs this July on Ticketmaster.
Got right thru password and three minutes waiting time. It was sold out. Never stood a chance.
I went for another day. The wait? 15 minutes and up. Needless to say, sold out by the time, 45 minutes later, I got thru to the box office.
So I figured I’d go onto Fanscan and found 1000s of tix available at triple the price on the tix and upwards. Tickets Now (Ticketmasters barter company) had 475 tix alone.
Who is conning who here?
It is physically impossible for this to happen without some major cheating on. Don’t we have an Attorney General or something? Shouldn’t somebody be in jail. Maybe Irving Azoff or somebody.
We, the fans, are being ripped off by thieving scalpers and prices are jacked right into the outer hemisphere.
So I went back into TM and tried again. And again. And on the fourth time somebodies credit card mustn’t have gone thru because I snagged one lousy seat at $200 (that’s face, mind) but at least it was a goodie in the 200s.
And things are just gonna get worse.