It's Time To Overthrow Our Ticketmaster

Tunisia, Egypt, Libya... the masses have finally risen up to overthrow their corrupt and heartless dictators. But there remains one brutal tyrant who continues to oppress millions of people, shattering their hopes and dreams, coddling the rich and powerful at the expense of the working class.

I'm talking, of course, about Ticketmaster.

I've written before about my frustrating experiences with Ticketmaster. If it was up to me, I'd never use the service ever again. But Ticketmaster holds, for all intents and purposes, a monopoly over the online retail of concert and event tickets. If you want to see the Yankees, Ticketmaster is the only place online where you can buy tickets at face value.

Ahem, I mean, try to buy tickets at face value. Because you won't be able to. Because Ticketmaster isn't designed to sell tickets. It's designed to force the majority of people to look elsewhere for tickets-- resellers TicketsNow (owned by Ticketmaster) and StubHub.

If that wasn't the case, why make it so difficult to see what tickets are available? Stubhub uses an easy system in which every ticket that's available is listed-- one can click on the section you want and presto-- a list of the tickets for sale in that section are presented.

Ticketmaster, however, uses a blind system. There's no way of telling how many tickets are left, or in what sections. You can be "waiting in line" for a few minutes, only to be told in the end that there are no seats available. And when that message "No Seats Available" pops up, you're not offered with great alternatives. You're given a choice of splitting your order (looking for one seat in one section, one in another section) or going back and restarting the (long) process over again.

How many times do I have to type in a complicated, non-English CAPTCHA before Ticketmaster accepts I'm a human being?

What benefit does hiding the available tickets provide? Nothing for fans. But for ticket resellers and powerful ticket brokers, the system is a boon. Let's say Ticketmaster wants to make a bigger profit. Will they make it by selling tickets at face value? Or will they make it by holding a bunch of tickets, then dumping them on their reselling site, TicketsNow, where they can charge scalper prices? If the system weren't blind, it would be obvious that Ticketmaster was withholding certain seats for resale or for powerful ticket brokers. The closed system helps Ticketmaster avoid scrutiny.

The ticket buying experience on Ticketmaster isn't anything like buying tickets at a normal ticket booth. If you wait in line at a ticket booth, when you reach the front, you're leaving with a ticket. This is not the case when you wait on the Ticketmaster website. You can spend all day on the site (which I can attest to) and even though nothing is listed as sold out, you still can't get anything.

The only way to easily get tickets is to put "Best Available" as your choice. You'll undoubtedly be offered the best seats in the house-- for tons of money. As such, the system rewards the rich, while those trying to be economical are madly scrambling to find the few available seats scattered in other sections.

I had this experience today, at 10:01 AM. Yankees tickets went on sale at 10:00. But everything except the worst of games (Toronto, 1:00, weekday) were already gone (though you wouldn't know it unless you tried, repeatedly).

Then I looked at the tickets available on StubHub and TicketsNow. Every section was available... for marked-up prices. Funny... I actually wanted to go to a game, not resell my tickets for profit. But I couldn't do it on Ticketmaster. I wonder how all these resellers got theirs? Did they snap up tickets seconds before me? Or did somebody give them a little help? I wonder???

As long as Ticketmaster keeps us blind, we'll never know.

I Won't Be Going To The World Series This Year

The pre-onsale for Yankees World Series tickets began today at 1:00. I refreshed my browser every second from 12:59 until the tickets page popped up. Immediately, I went for bleachers, Game 5. 1 minute waiting time. Sorry, no tickets available.

Next, bleachers, Game 4. 2 minute waiting time. Sorry, no tickets available.

At the same time, my cousin searched too. We abandoned hope of finding two tickets together. We just wanted one ticket. Any ticket. I had two browsers open on my desktop, and a Ticketmaster window open on my iPhone too.

Eventually, we just went for Best Available. $456 dollar seats be damned.

Sorry, no tickets available.

It was then I learned that there had been a "Preliminary Pre-Onsale," earlier, at 10 AM, for some undefined group of eligible ticket licensees.

I hate them all.

My cousin and I did find some seats available. Wheelchair seats reserved for the disabled.

"Just break my back with a baseball bat," my cousin suggested.

What followed was a 20 minute conversation on the different ways we could take advantage of having a wheelchair ticket. "Actually using them would be wrong," I concluded. "But we could buy them and sell them for profit someplace where people in wheelchairs hang out. Like a VFW hall..."

In the end, morality and human decency prevailed. But my cousin said it best:

"Even though i wasn't seriously considering it, I'm sure that at least 20 other people had the same convo today... and I bet some bought them."

"One more thing the British just couldn't get right…"


Don't Get Between Jay And His Giants Tickets

by Jay Klein

I had set my cell phone alarm for 4:50AM. The beer and pretzels were right near my laptop (where I had already practiced logging on to the ticketmaster website the night before). I was ready for anything…or so I thought. As tickets went on sale at 10am in Britain, I was set to log on at 5AM from my hotel room, coincidentally in Miami, the NY Giants opponent for the first ever regular season NFL game outside of the States.

The moment had come. Ticketmaster and nfllondon.com had been preparing for this ticket sale for months, so I thought it would go smoothly. As I logged in with my assigned password, the first roadblock was clearly printed on the website: due to "technical difficulties," the online sale would begin an hour late. Luckily, it was 5AM and time was probably my least concern.

The technical issues were fixed and the online sale began. After sitting in a queue for about another hour they had finally offered me tickets. My friend and I had the brilliant idea of buying 6 tickets. We could keep two of them and make a nice profit on the other four. Maybe this could take care of our ticket costs, a few pints, maybe even our cover at the Ministry of Sound…

I typed in my email address and my credit card information and only one column remained - shipping. If anyone could fill out the shipping information, it was me. When I was younger I dreamed about being a UPS man some day. It's not a coincidence that my favorite color was brown. My brother's wife's brother even works for Fed Ex. Ok, you get the point…But something was wrong. One question remained. Ship to: UK or Ireland. Hmm, fish and chips or Guiness? The Pound or the Euro? Then, it hit me. Maybe I should ship the tickets to the USA, as I don't live in the UK nor Ireland. But of course, that wasn't an option. I scrambled back and forth. Oh, Bloody Hell! Did I have any friends over in London? Could I mail it to my company's office in London and then try to track it down? I couldn’t figure out a solution. As time ticked away, I saw my tickets go from the lower tier 20 yard line, then to the corner of the end zone, then slowly move into the upper tier. Would I even get a seat in the stadium?

Finally, at about 7:45am, almost three hours after signing on the website to get tickets, the website offered a will-call option. Of course! Will-Call what a brilliant idea. Only if they British had though of that about three hours earlier!!

Then I realized that the British probably had thought about this weeks earlier, but probably just didn't care. Maybe they wanted revenge on Americans trying to buy tickets for a game in their homeland. Maybe they had put up with us long enough (refer to 93% of American History). Maybe Giants v. Dolphins is a chance for the British to stick it to the proverbial man (US Man that is) and what better way to start than to screw them out of tickets. You think it’s a coincidence that the two teams they picked to play in this game are probably the two most pathetic teams in the league. The NFL has been built on strength and power. Yet, they choose a team with a dolphin as their mascot and another team with Eli Manning as their quarterback. I'm not trying to create any issues that aren't there, but do you really think a team like the Patriots from Boston (refer to Tea Party) or technically from NEW england, would ever be chosen to play in this game?

At the end of the day, I got my tickets and I'm certainly gonna enjoy a game played at one of the most famous stadiums on Earth, Wembley. But I'll be damned if I'm gonna be drinking any of that English tea while I'm over there…

NFL Screws Its Fans



The NFL's first international regular season football game has already hit a huge snag, pissing off football fans in the United States and abroad.

Nearly 600,000 football fans from around the world applied online for the opportunity to buy tickets to the New York Giants-Miami Dolphins game at Wembley Stadium in London (capacity 90,000). Through a lottery system, a small percentage were lucky enough to receive a password to use on Ticketmaster. Thousands woke up early this morning as tickets went on sale at 11:00 AM British Standard Time (6 am NY time). My friend Jay and I included.

That's when everyone realized the NFL screwed up big time.

At 11:00 AM, tickets were only made available to residents of the UK. Without a UK mailing address, you couldn't buy a ticket. Jay called everyone he knew to see if anybody had relatives in the UK. We even emailed people we met on our Peru trip.

We weren't the only ones panicking. Within minutes of the sale time, complaints began pouring in to the NFLUK.com website.

"The biggest Farce is, that only persons from the UK, Ireland and Northern Ireland were able to buy tickets. Why didn't they say so from the beginning? Why did they send codes to all other countries? It's unbelievable!!!"

"I am so mad for this, they never told us. It is a game for Europe, not for UK only... god damn it. I waited for this for so long, even called work that I was going to be late because of the 1 hour delay and now this, I AM SO MAD."

"This sucks bigtime. Was i blind or was it obvious that this release was for UK residents only? Thats 2 hours spent of my life i'll never get back. Plus the heart rate isn't down yet."

"Hope this will be the last game played in the UK!!! It's unbelievable they shut out other fans!!!"

International shipping options and a will call option weren't added to the Ticketmaster site until nearly two hours later. By that time, the best seats were already gone-- and many people had already given up.

"Credit to the Brits for screwing the rest of the world out of buying tickets for the first 2 hours. International my butt. Nice play limiting the shipping options to local residents only."

Initially, tickets were supposed to go on sale at 10 am British time, but unspecified technical difficulties delayed the sale by an hour. When the tickets finally did go on sale, shocked fans discovered they couldn't order them unless they lived in Great Britain, Ireland or Scotland.

Germany was added as an option an hour and a half later. A will call option and other countries followed.

Jay and I got tickets for the game, eventually, but they weren't the 50 yard line seats we got when Jay logged in at 6 am. They were section 549 in the upper tier.

Kudos to the NFL for spreading its brand to England, but it owes its American fans, and others, a big apology.

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PLUS: International Regular-Season Games Are Stupid Anyway
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