Those of you longing for the days when Ticketmaster sold tickets for Live Nation events just might get your wish. The Wall Street Journal just reported that Ticketmaster and Live Nation are close to a merger. If the merger goes through, you can say goodbye to Live Nation’s ticketing system.
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didn’t want to subscribe for the whole article, but it sounds like a bad situation is getting worse. live nation could have learned a lesson from friday and improved their services, but if this goes through we’ll never know.
Some further info from the daily swarm for us non-subscribers
http://www.thedailyswarm.com/headlines/wsj-live-nation-ticketmaster-inc/
live nation ticketing worked great for me…i got almost everything i wanted.
Oh good, now the ticket business has its own DeBeers. I don’t care how bad Live Nation’s ticketing is, this can only spell bad news for live music in general.
Can you say monopoly? Let’s try to imagine the fees we will have to pay when this happens.
In other news
N.J. Congressman seeks probe of Springsteen concert sales by Ticketmaster
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2009/02/bruce_springsteen_fans_left_ou.html
seems like Phish phans weren’t the only ones to get ticketmaster’s dreaded “error message”
Perhaps this is why Live Nation is already mailing out tickets for shows in June…
Rolling Stone just did a big piece on how they were both looking to go head to head and how Live Nation was selling tix for The Eagles tour service charge free. I guess copping out and merging makes competing easier…
I agree with the point raised earlier about the beloved old age of mail order. We all picture a friendly if chaotic scene, but ultimately everybody winds up happy. This might be Phish or the GD… With the rise of immediate scalping sites, the rather obvious tech-scams being employed to horde tix, and destinations like Craigs or e-bay, one can see a class warfare element sneak into the mix. A slight stretch here folks, but remember how the scene got hurt badly, musically as well as socially, when powders came to town? – In short order, only those with mass disposable income will be able to enjoy the (hopefully) re-charged band. Assuming no change back to mail order, is the idea to play larger venues? more nights at smaller halls?
This sounds promising…
Pascrell wrote a letter today to the Federal Trade Commission and the antitrust division of the Justice Department asking them to “investigate the relationship between Ticketmaster and TicketsNow to ensure that the procedure for purchasing tickets remains fair to the average consumer.”
“There is a significant potential for abuse when one company is able to monopolize the primary market for a product and also directly manipulate and profit from the secondary market,” he wrote. “The speed with which tickets were made available on Ticketmaster’s official resale site raises questions about whether TicketsNow brokers were given preferential treatment.”
Does anybody know the back story regarding the legality of those “re-sale” sites? Who lobbied who? Is it in part based on physical location of their HQ? Is scalping a state issue as opposed to federal? (I assume so) Remember the days when one had an extra and literally was not allowed to sell it at face to folks on the box office line?
For how long have this immediate scalping sites been operational?