FUCK TICKETMASTER (Rant)

yoppa, 10 months ago

I stopped going to concerts years ago. What a peaceful life. Wish I knew it before.

reddthat_209, 10 months ago

Amen brotha, same here!

reginagrogan, 10 months ago

@MagneticFusion hey, not sure what state you are in, but the california consumer privacy act is a forcing feature to rip your info off of any sites that will not delete it. California right to delete.

MagneticFusion, 10 months ago

I have requested it under the CCPA but they have not responded yet

circuitfarmer, 10 months ago

I noticed that VPN issue when I tried to buy event tickets a while back. Super scummy. They don’t need to know my home IP to sell me tickets. On the app, even if you have location services on, it just refuses you a connection via VPN.

Anamnesis, 10 months ago

How do they know that you’re on a VPN?

Zikeji, 10 months ago

Usually they just check your IP against a list of known VPN IP ranges. But they could also be blocking all IPs from data centers and only allowing residential IPs.

Nastybutler, 10 months ago

Obstensibly it’s to stop scammers

Someonelol, 10 months ago

These days many websites outright block anyone using Tor from browsing them. They want their precious visitor data for resale to advertisers even if many of them block their ads anyway.

dingus, 10 months ago

Sounds like everyone should have listened to Pearl Jam thirty years ago when Tickermaster wasn’t a complete monopoly.

Uncle_Bagel, 10 months ago

Even putting the vertical monopoly aside, their app is straight up useless and doesn’t work. I spent 3 hours trying to buy tickets for a show today and the app first wouldn’t let me log in, then it wouldn’t let me put in a pre-sale code to get discountes tickets, then it crashed multiple times on the payment page. So not only are they the only place to buy tickets to a lot of shows, they make it almost impossible to actually buy the tickets from their own freaking service.

Elektrobank, 10 months ago

But they will gladly resell you the tickets they sold themselves for 10X face value

MDKAOD, 10 months ago

Big bank bots are buying up the tickets for credit card points redemption, which is why the site gets ddos’ed, causing the site to not work for regular users. Credit card companies are listing the tickets for resale at the inflated rates their customer points are equated to.

Banks have found another avenue of profit in this.

dotslashme, 10 months ago

I’m not disagreeing, but most of the things you list are true for any major internet servive.

circuitfarmer, 10 months ago

That many businesses have equally shitty practices certainly doesn’t mean we should stop complaining about them and calling them out.

nomadjoanne, 10 months ago

They are Satan incarnate.

mathemachristian, 10 months ago

The service ticketmaster offers is not selling you tickets, the service is to the producers, artists etc. They get a huge cut off the sales and even get to choose what bullshit fees ticketmaster can use when selling their tickets, but ticketmaster gets the hate for it and they are still in the clear with their fans.

Ticketmaster is the apron these people use to keep themselves clean of the hate while they squeeze every last dime out of their fans pockets.

gamermanh, 10 months ago

No, Ticketmaster is most certainly to blame as their massive control over venues and ticket sales makes artists bend over to their demands as well

brimnac, 10 months ago

“Why not both.”

Hacksaw, 10 months ago

Remember when Fucking Pearl Jam tried to avoid Ticketmaster because of their scummy shit and even tried to sue them and failed.

Pepperidge farm remembers news.yahoo.com/1994-pearl-jam-took-ticketmaster-2…

Ticketmaster isn’t just a front for shitty artists because then artists trying to not be shitty wouldn’t have a problem.

LoraxEleven, 10 months ago

Preach that shit.

Fucking cunts are worthless. Haven’t used that shit since I got deployed to the Middle East in 1996; three days before the KISS concert we payed out the ass for and they wouldn’t refund our tickets. One of the very top shitty corporations on Earth. Nobody should ever use them or any of their relative companies.

Mugmoor, 10 months ago

You have other options thankfully. If you’re in a large city, you can often find small independent retailers which sell tickets. When I lived in Toronto I used to go to a record shop to buy mine.

You can also go to the venue directly. Oftentimes if it’s a smaller venue they’ll have tickets available as well. Stadiums usually don’t go this route, but it’s worth a shot.

Lastly there are other online retailers for tickets like stubhub.com

Ticketmaster is a goddamn scam. The entire industry knows it, but it makes money for the labels so they tolerate it. There’s a reason Taylor Swift and The Cure have been making a big stink about them lately. I personally won’t go to a concert if Ticketmaster is the only retailer, but I’m fortunate that most bands I see play in smaller venues.

scytale, 10 months ago

Stubhub, Seatgeek, etc. tack on their own fees as well. There’s really no escape especially for large venues (arenas, stadiums) where they have a monopoly on ticket selling. Thankfully the 2 local small venues in my city where most of the acts I follow go to still use a different ticketing vendor and you can also still buy at the box office.

PP_BOY_, 10 months ago

EventBrite and eTix ftw

SoylentBlake, 10 months ago

Ticketmaster is known for having clauses that prohibit venues from using any other service, so the joint is either a Ticketmaster venue or independent.

So saying there are other options it’s optimistic at best. Every year those options dwindle.

Fuck Ticketmaster, that’s bully pulpit shit. Market manipulation.

Sendbeer, 10 months ago

Adam Conover just did a video on mega mergers and Ticketmaster was prominently featured. I thought it was pretty well done, but hope you like the guy because he takes his personality to 11 on this one.

Fuck these monopoly fucks.

CraigeryTheKid, 10 months ago

I know exactly what you mean with Adam. I do like him, and his content, but wow yeah his “brand” of engagement can be exhausting.

SoylentBlake, 10 months ago

Adam was touring his comedy set recently, outside Ticketmaster, which is next to impossible to do.

I got mad respect for the guy, actually practices what he preaches.

When he goes back on tour; if you see a show in a town you know people, help spread the word for him, since he’s doing it all homegrown.

PP_BOY_, 10 months ago

Plenty of artists tour outside of Ticketmaster, just not big ones. The best thing to do is find a venue near you that isn’t owned by LiveNation and follow them on social media/subscribe to their mailing list.

SoylentBlake, 10 months ago

As I’ve always done, being an elder millennial. In the olden days yonder we had to bookmark individual webpages and create rss feeds, but even rss didn’t emerge until like the mid aughties. AOL had been around 10 years and damn near died by then, sames as yahoo.

I miss the old Internet. Sigh

adespoton, 10 months ago

The fall of the old Internet was when AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy got peering rights and Classmates.com started up.

That said, I do most of my shopping online now and have likely saved years of my life due to not having to hunt through stores only to find they could “order it in” for me.

And I’ve never used TicketMaster since they went online, and don’t feel like I’m missing anything. I prefer smaller venues.

SoylentBlake, 10 months ago

I feel ya about the savings. Almost everything I buy is shopped around AliExpress, Amazon, eBay, Craigslist then local. The trick is figuring out if the physical stores are passing any of its wholesale bulk savings to you.

Usually, that’s a laughable assumption, but some things, like individual plumbing or electrical parts, just go to the big box (except for anything copper, it’s like half the price online).

Tractor Supply has a decent amount of items at margin. By that I mean, like 15%. Which is way more than most places.