Free Republic

Ticketmaster defended itself publicly for the first time since the concert promoter's highly publicized meltdown late last year during ticket sales for Taylor Swift's "Eras" tour.

Some of Taylor Swift’s fans want you to know three things: They’re not still 16, they have careers and resources and, right now, they’re angry. That’s a powerful political motivator, researchers say. Look what Ticketmaster made them do. It started Nov. 15, when millions crowded a presale for Swift’s long-awaited Eras Tour, resulting in crashes, prolonged waits and frantic purchases. By Thursday, Ticketmaster had canceled the general sale, citing insufficient remaining tickets and inciting a firestorm of outrage from fans. Swift herself said the ordeal “really pisses me off.” Ticketmaster apologized but the bad blood had already been sowed. And...

Swift has had a direct impact on cutting scalpers out of ticket sales, driving more money to artists. Fans waiting to buy tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras tour next week should expect two things: high demand and high prices. After all, it’s been five years and four albums since Swift toured, with her newest album, Midnights, on track to be the best-selling record of the year — earning Swift the title of first artist to ever have 10 songs dominate the top 10 of the Hot 100 chart. That popularity means that Swift can set high prices for her tickets...

AUSTIN, Texas – College students still trying to "shake it off" after scalpers jacked up resale tickets to Taylor Swift’s upcoming Era’s tour, sometimes hitting tens of thousands of dollars, sounded off to Fox News. "It's just so much gluttony in the world," a University of Texas student, Leila, told Fox News. Melis, another UT student, called the Swift resale prices "very exploitative." "I do not agree with people that both buy tickets and then resell them and price gouge," she said. Ticketmaster crashed after millions of buyers, including bots, flooded the site to purchase pre-sale tickets for Swift's tour...

MINNEAPOLIS -- Sen. Amy Klobuchar said Thursday she would call a Senate hearing to probe Ticketmaster after the Taylor Swift ticket fiasco this week left many fans frustrated and empty handed. This comes as the company canceled the general public sale of tickets originally scheduled for Friday "due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand." Swift fans sought tickets earlier this week with pre-sale codes and credit card exclusives, a rollout that was beset by technical problems. Klobuchar, who chairs a Senate subcommittee focused on consumer protection and anti-trust, said she...

(CNN) - Paying for some Bruce Springsteen tickets these days may be “Tougher Than The Rest.” That’s because Ticketmaster’s “dynamic pricing” has some seats reaching $4000 to $5000 a seat. The high prices are not going over well. “I’m sure you won’t see this @springsteen but you or your management need to have a word with the abhorrent criminals running @Ticketmaster who are charging exorbitant amounts to see you in concert,” one person tweeted. “Please listen to your fans, nobody can afford these ridiculous ticket prices.” Writer John Semley tweeted that Springsteen should “write a song about a working man...

Wallet? Check. Water? Check. COVID-19 test? The pre-concert checklist for music fans is about to get more complicated, as Ticketmaster is planning to check the coronavirus vaccination status of concert-goers prior to shows once a treatment is approved, Billboard reported Wednesday. The ticketing giant plans to have customers use their cellphones to verify their inoculation or whether they’ve tested negative for the virus within a 24- to 72-hour window, according to the exclusive report. The plan, which is still being ironed out, will utilize three separate components, including the California-based company’s digital ticketing app, third-party health information firms like CLEAR...

...ticket sales for the top 100 touring bands are down 12% this year, Live Nation Entertainment's major executives went on the defensive Thursday, blaming the press for "scaring" artists from touring and arguing that acts need to alter their pricing strategies. ..."The press," (CEO Michael) Rapino said, has "scared about every artist" out of touring in the fourth quarter. A number of major tours have struggled in 2010, including the refurbished Lilith Tour, and once-can't-miss artists such as the Jonas Brothers have been canceling dates... Yet the company's top brass did more than point fingers at the media, and promised...

This could be one of the biggest bombs Live Nation Entertainment ever produced. Minutes after the concert promoter and ticket company told analysts at its first investor day that ticket sales for its biggest acts fell 9 percent in the first half of the year and were likely to see a steeper decline during the rest of 2010, its shares plunged -- tumbling throughout the afternoon until they lost about 18 percent of their value. The bad news rocketed from the stage of Manhattan's Irving Plaza concert hall near Union Square, where the meeting was held, to Wall Street and...

The concert business is supposed to be the music industry's one sure thing. But not this summer. The Eagles, Rihanna and Maxwell have canceled tour dates. A wobbling "American Idol" tour has flooded the market with discounted tickets, and the resurrected Lilith Fair tour has called off concerts from Dallas to Salt Lake City. Even teen idols the Jonas Brothers announced this week that they're scrapping some shows. * * * With the continued evaporation of recorded music sales, acts at all levels of the talent pool must lean heavily on their live-performance earnings. That's forcing artists to tour more,...

Music fans who buy concert tickets during Live Nation's "No Service Fee Wednesday" may be surprised when they check their receipt and see some service fees were charged. Live Nation's announcement for the promotion -- and stories based on their news release -- did not mention the concert promoter's narrow definition of a "service fee." "Fans will still be asked to pay parking fees (usually $6) as well as in some cases facility fees and/or charity fees," Live Nation spokesman John Vlautin wrote in a reply to CNN's request for clarification. Still, the promotion will save consumers several dollars on...

Less than a minute after tickets for last August's Neil Diamond concerts at New York's Madison Square Garden went on sale, more than 100 seats were available for hundreds of dollars more than their normal face value on premium-ticket site TicketExchange.com. The seller? Neil Diamond. Ticket reselling -- also known as scalping -- is an estimated $3 billion-a-year business in which professional brokers buy seats with the hope of flipping them to the public at a hefty markup. ...the source of the higher-priced tickets was the singer, working with Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc., which owns TicketExchange, and concert promoter AEG Live....

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Top box office service Ticketmaster said on Tuesday that it would buy TicketsNow Inc, a Web site that resells tickets to concerts and sports events, in a bid for a stronger foothold in the secondary tickets market. Ticketmaster, a unit of IAC/InterActiveCorp that will be spun off into an independent company later this year, expects the deal to close by the end of the first quarter. Ticketmaster said it planned to build a site allowing customers to review and compare ticket pricing in the primary, premium and resale markets. Financial terms were not disclosed, but a...

LOS ANGELES - A federal judge has granted a request by Ticketmaster LLC to block a software company from making or distributing computer programs used to flood the ticket retailer's Web site with orders, beating consumers who log onto the Web site manually to buy tickets. ADVERTISEMENT U.S. District Court Judge Audrey B. Collins issued a preliminary injunction against RMG Technologies Inc. on Monday, barring the Pittsburgh, Pa.-based firm from buying or facilitating the purchase of tickets from Ticketmaster's Web site for the purpose of reselling them. Collins concluded Ticketmaster would prove its claims that RMG infringed on its copyrights,...

People who need people are in luck. People who need tickets might be screwed. A host of Barbra Streisand fans will not be singing a happy tune Tuesday in light of Ticketmaster's announcement that more than a thousand tickets for Streisand shows in Atlantic City, New York, Las Vegas and several other venues were purchased using stolen credit card numbers from the company's Website, and therefore are no longer valid. The ticket peddler said that all Streisand tickets found to have been purchased with bogus info have been invalidated, leaving those who purchased any of the tickets in question through...