I’ve been meaning to make a nice post where I vent my frustrations with ticketmaster. I’ve been dealing with them for many years, like the rest of hungry, passionate music fans who spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars of their hard earned cash towards their favorite bands each year.
Until 2009, I didn’t have problems with getting tickets. I was always up for the 10AM/Noon sales, and got tickets whenever I needed to. That wasn’t the problem. The major problem was the ridiculous fee’s that they constantly tacked onto the bill. Transaction charge, convenience fee, service charge. Thanks for being convenient to us, but fuck you! You make enough money, why are you trying to rip us off even more? Ticket prices are already steep enough as it is. They are robbing us blind. Charging a concert goer 10 bucks every time they buy tickets certainty adds up.
I dealt with that and just sucked it up because I go to a lot of shows and have gotten used to it. However, now I’m starting to have some ill fated luck getting shows. For the 2nd straight time, ticketmaster has caused Vampire Weekend fans like my friends and myself lots of grief. Last November I logged in to get tickets for their bowery show literally when they went on sale and had no luck. I eventually got United Palace, but I could tell that there was something wrong with the ticketmaster system. I noticed ever since ticketmaster started doing their “American Express Presale” (um, why?), it’s been harder to get tickets.
Today is the day I’m official annoyed at ticketmaster. I tried to get tix for Vampire Weekend show at Radio City. Me and my friends all got sold out. We logged in literally when the clock struck noon, logged in, and got nothing. Um, wait, what? All sold out instantly. I know Vampire Weekend got popular on us, but damn. They sold out Radio City in the matter of SECONDS? If they didn’t have the ridiculous American express presale, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. But part of me thinks the presale may not be totally to blame, although it is an incredibly annoying feature. I think that Ticketmaster went through another malfunction, similar to what happened with Bruce Springsteen tickets last year. I logged on literally at noon, and couldn’t even get nosebleed section tickets? I think something fishy went down. AKA ticketmaster fucked up.
The system that they use for tickets is very poor. It runs slow, and seems to have plenty of errors. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten bad seats on a first try, refreshed the page, and got BETTER tickets. How the hell does that makes sense? Then there are times like today when you show up on time but still get locked out, seemingly because the site runs slow for you. It is completely out of your hands, and it sucks.
I’ve been very fortunate and lucky with seeing Vampire Weekend. Chris Baio was the guy responsible for getting me free tickets to Terminal 5, and sending me the Contra promo. They play tons of free shows, such as the amazing Central Park show. So this isn’t the end of the world for me. Vampire Weekend are incredibly good to their fans. This isn’t me being mad at the band, it’s far from it. It’s more so a big Vampire Weekend fan who is disappointed he can’t even see his band play anymore, all because of a shitty ticket service. I miss the times where I bought Vampire Weekend tickets for a grant total of 15 dollars and got to talk to the band outside of Bowery. Good times.
I am very tired of Ticketmaster. I’m sure I am not alone either.
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