IN THE NEWS
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Family pays $21,000 for 4 last-minute tickets to Taylor Swift concert at Gillette Stadium
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SOMERVILLE, Mass. —
Since the day they first went on sale, tickets to Taylor Swift’s latest concert tour have been hard to get. In some cases, the struggle continued nearly to the day of the concert after fans who thought they had bought tickets to one of her shows at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough found out their purchases fell through.
Anthony Silva said he originally purchased tickets in November through online ticket reseller StubHub for about $1,800 and gave them to his daughter as a Christmas gift. He said the tickets were never delivered, and after he contacted StubHub, Silva said the company informed him that alternative tickets were not available.
“This is just not right,” he said. “In my opinion, they should not wait until the day before for the tickets to be sent out by the re-seller.”
Silva said he switched to a different ticket re-seller and spent nearly $21,000 on four tickets.
Silva, who had also hired a limousine for the night, said he was determined to get the tickets for his daughter and her friends. “We played a joke on them telling them yesterday, telling them the tickets were really gone, and the look on their faces I never want to see again. One girl had a quivering lip. I won’t tell you who,” Silva said.
Silva said StubHub is supposed to refund his original purchase price within 10 days.
In some other cases, StubHub told NewsCenter 5 it was able to find alternative tickets for customers whose original purchases fell apart.
Ashley Hulme also gave her daughter and her friends Taylor Swift tickets as a Christmas present. She spent nearly $1,570 on the tickets through StubHub in November, but the tickets never arrived in her account.
She called StubHub on Thursday, and the company admitted the original seller had gone dark and wasn’t answering emails.
Later Thursday, after NewsCenter 5 contacted StubHub, a company spokesperson said the customer service team had provided Hulme with a “Hot Seat VIP Package” valued at $3,824 per ticket at no additional cost.
NewsCenter 5 also contacted the company about Rommy Fuller, of Vermont, who originally bought seats in November for Friday night’s concert in Section 339 for $1,454.95. StubHub said the seller was unable to fulfill the order and, as of Thursday night, no replacement tickets were available.
A spokesperson for StubHub said Friday morning that the customer service team had “manually replaced” the customer’s tickets and moved her four seats into Section 224.
The Scary Truth About Sports Ticket Fees
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By Robert Litan
If you’ve made it to this first sentence, you probably aren’t happy about those hefty fees that various ticketing services tack on for sports and entertainment events. This happens for purchases directly on a venue’s behalf and on the secondary market (resales of tickets already purchased).
How did it come to this and how can fans hoping to attend games and concerts combat these extra prices? Before we answer that, we must delve into the history of ticket sales.
In the days before pre-online ticketing services, teams and venues for concerts and other forms of entertainment handled their own ticketing, using paper tickets. There were “secondary” markets for tickets but they were generally illegal if the transactions were conducted close to the arenas. Nonetheless, ticket holders could take the legal risk of “scalping” them at or close to the event sites, or legitimately sell them off site, in person, or through their pre-social media social networks.
Justin Thomas ‘blown away’ by high prices of beer and food at 2022 PGA Championship
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Going to watch live sports has been increasing in price as years have gone by, but enough is enough for Justin Thomas. The 2017 PGA Championship winner is not happy about what fans will have to pay for drinks and food at this year’s edition of the major.
When Thomas got wind of a report from Golfweek’s Steve DiMeglio, which said it will cost fans $18 for a beer and $16 for a salad at Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he felt he had to say something. Thomas replied to the tweet with the report expressing his incredulity. “$18(!!!!!!) for a beer… uhhhh what. Gotta treat the fans better than that!” the 29-year-old said.
When one twitter user challenged Thomas as to where he thought the large winner’s prize pot came from, Thomas said humorously: “Tv deals, ticket sales, corporate sponsors, etc. from the looks of it if the concession stands were factored into our purse we would be playing for $15 million.” (see full article)
Live Music Is Roaring Back. But Fans Are Reeling From Sticker Shock.
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Buying concert tickets has become a mess of high prices and surcharges, anxiety-inducing registrations and pervasive scalping as some of pop’s biggest acts hit the road again.
Bruce Springsteen onstage, reaching out to fans in the front row as he sings into a microphone.
Bruce Springsteen sold some tickets for his latest tour with the E Street Band using dynamic pricing, which fluctuated with demand, alienating some longtime fans. (Credit…Nina Westervelt for The New York Times)
By Ben Sisario
Ben Sisario has been covering the live music industry, and issues around ticketing, for more than 15 years, including the scalping world and the growing dominance of Live Nation.
Published April 7, 2023
Updated April 12, 2023
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Ellen Rothman still speaks with awe about the first time she saw Bruce Springsteen perform, at “a sleazy little blues bar” in Cambridge, Mass., in 1974.
“It was like the roof was going to blow off the venue,” she recalled recently. “I have never experienced anything else like that in my life.”
Now 75, Rothman said she had been to around 180 Springsteen concerts, but was skipping his latest tour. For decades, Springsteen had kept his tickets at bargain rates, buttressing his reputation as a man of the people. But for his current outing with the E Street Band, a chunk of the seats for each venue were sold through “dynamic pricing,” which allows their cost to rise and fall with demand; some went for up to $5,000.
“We feel betrayed on some level,” Rothman said. “I have no problem with an artist making a good living. But at what point do you feel taken advantage of?”
This year should be a gigantic one for the concert business, with major tours by Springsteen, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Ed Sheeran, Drake, Madonna, Morgan Wallen, Metallica and others filling stadiums and arenas. The music industry, now largely free of the restrictions that hampered touring during the Covid-19 pandemic, is already buzzing about whether box-office records will be broken.
But for the average music fan, the once simple act of buying a ticket is now often a frustrating mess of high prices and surcharges, anxiety-inducing presale registrations, pervasive scalping and crushing competition for the most in-demand shows.
“Nowadays it just feels so daunting,” said Evan Howard, 24, a musician and Pilates instructor in New York. “It’s this whole task you need to set aside an entire day for.”
Swift’s botched presale in November, when Ticketmaster’s systems were overwhelmed by demand from both fans and bots, was the most high-profile problem. It led to a vituperative Senate Judiciary hearing at which senators from both parties called Ticketmaster and its corporate parent, Live Nation Entertainment, a monopoly. (see full article)
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