Big news in the music world, and it is only bad news for music fans. Ticketmaster and Live Nation are in merger talks. They are the 2 biggest ticket sellers in the country.  The monopoly that they create would put enormous power in the hands of 1 company.  Ticketmaster already accounts for about %50 of ticket sales in the US, while Live Nation ranks 2nd, and also is starting to control contracts, music rights, and promotions of artists including U2, Madonna and Shakira.

Ticketmaster already does very greedy things to the ticket buyer. First, a nice Service Charge (their fee), then a Facility Charge (they facility already gets part of the ticket price, but why stop there), followed by a Processing Charge (how is this different from the Service Charge?), and then we get the Convenience Fee (where they charge you to print your own tickets). And they charge the bands as well, about %3.5 of the total gross of the show, plus an administrative fee to cover their cost of people paying with credit cards. And finally, they scalp their own tickets. One of the biggest secondary sellers of tickets is TicketsNow who is (wait for it) owned by Ticketmaster.  So if all of the fees they collect are not enough, they just move over some tickets to TicketsNow and mark them up as high as they want.

For one Eric concert, I paid $12.00 for the ticket, a $7.50 service charge, a $2.00 processing charge, and then they had the balls to charge me about $2.50 for me to print my own tickets! I paid $24 for a $12 ticket.  The recent Eric+O.A.R. show in Houston sold out about 4 weeks before the show, but I still got an email a week before the show from Ticketmaster letting me know I could still get tickets… from TicketsNow for $200 a pop.

Bruce Springsteens fans are pissed at Ticketmaster, so is The Boss.

Some background (a NICE summary can be found here on The Consumerist).

Write your congress rep about this, unless you like the prospect of paying even more for tickets.

ticketmastersucks.org