Last night I was at the Fillmore Detroit to see Dethklok and Mastodon. One of my friend scored the tickets from work, and we were treated to a VIP booth and free drinks courtesy of Adult Swim. Nice. Dethklok stole the show, for sure. I’m only a sometimes-fan of metal, and one of the guys I went with is definitely not a fan of metal, but at the end of the night, we all agreed it was a good show.
Anyways, I saw the posters for upcoming concerts, and there were a few I wanted to check out. I haven’t been to a concert in quite a while, and I usually go in spurts—three or four in a relatively short amount of time, and then nothing for a long time. So today I went to LiveNation to look up tickets for AFI.
I have four questions:
- What in the hell is a “ticket fee”?
- If this “fee” is designed to offset costs of doing business, why is it charged on a per-ticket basis, rather than a per-order basis (since the marginal cost of additional tickets is exactly zero).
- Why isn’t this “fee” simply built in to the price of the ticket in the first place?
- Why is said “ticket fee” approximately 40% of the ticket’s face-value?
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by nothirdsolution: New blog post: LiveNation Ticket Fees Suck! http://bit.ly/FXKHN...
we need more traffic about this.
this is really outrageous and i completely agree with your questions and the need for a reasonable answer.
Spread the word, 1life2liveNYC! They need to know how much this policy sucks.
To clarify though, I don’t really care what they charge, I just think it’s disingenuous to pretend that they’re selling $26 tickets, when in reality, nobody pays less than $36.25 It’s just bogus that they don’t advertise it at the real price-you-pay. Hell, why don’t they just say “All tickets to all shows are now only $1!!!” Then they could just add $40 worth of “ticket fees” on the back end.