Got a Ticket-Buying Horror Story?
The service fees are scary enough!
Welcome to a spooky Thursday edition of Sound Off, our weekly posts with questions for subscribers, aimed at getting some conversation going in the comments. Usually, it runs on Fridays so you have the weekend to weigh in, but today is Halloween, which suits the subject at hand: Your concert-ticket horror stories. Ahh!!!!!!!! Murderous service fees, eternal queues, sicko scalpers, fan-exclusive presales that go bump in the night.
I have to admit that I don’t have any of my own, but that’s mostly because I don’t go to a whole lot of big concerts. I’m more likely to go see my friends play gigs at bars and other small venues around New York, where I usually just bug them for a spot on the guest list or bite the bullet and pay 15 bucks at the door. Mercifully, for now at least, the Stubhubs and Ticketmasters of the world can’t be bothered with such small potatoes. But I thought I remembered my mom mentioning a bad experience years ago, which I just texted her to confirm.
It goes like this: In 2017, she, my dad, and some friends of theirs were going to see Bonnie Raitt and James Taylor play at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. My mom was tasked with securing tickets. Reasonably, she Googled something like “James Taylor Bonnie Raitt Washington DC Ticketmaster.” The first result on the page was not Ticketmaster itself, but a sponsored link to a ticket reseller. She clicked, and landed on a site that did not make particularly clear that it was not the official seller for the event, or that there were plentiful tickets still available directly through official channels. She ended up buying a few tickets for $225 each, and later learning that she could have gotten them for $120 through Ticketmaster. “I assumed it was what I wanted,” she told me, referring to the innocuous-looking reseller site. “Fortunately, everyone we went with was very understanding and paid me back what I paid.”
I wrote a big piece about the political machinations that make this sort of thing possible when we launched Hearing Things, and I have to admit that thinking about my mom getting taken in riles me up about it all over again. Stay away from her, you leeches! The piece also goes into some detail about methods that are even more misleading than the ones she encountered, including websites that are designed explicitly to look like the official box offices for venues, down to their URLs. Coincidentally, the example I used to illustrate that phenomenon also involved James Taylor tickets.
Hearing Things will continue to cover the ticketing industry, and advocate for making it better for fans and musicians alike. In the meantime, we want to know: Do you have horror stories of your own? Let us know in the comments.
