Ticketmaster: Held Up Without A Gun

The Bruce Springsteen song title Held up without a gun just about represents the awful, pathetic brand experience from ticketmaster (I wouldn't bother with a capital 'T') when selling tickets to the great rocker's concerts.

When it comes to screwing every last cent out of valued customers, ticketmaster must be top of the heap. The company's ludicrous service and billing charges have long been a bane to ticket buyers but the way the company handled Bruce Springsteen ticket sales this week is appalling.

What is even more appalling is consumers really do not have a choice when purchasing tickets.

Springsteen Chicago tickets went on sale at 10.00am Monday morning. I hit buy tickets at 10.00 on the button and get ‘processing order – one minute’ which goes to ‘three minutes’ to ‘four minutes.’ At about 10.05, ON the ticketmaster website I am offered scalped tickets by a tickmaster subsidiary TicketsNow which claims hands off relationship with ticketmaster. The site claims “Tickets listed on TicketsNow come from licensed brokers, as well as individual sellers.”

I am sure this is correct, but what kind of system provides hundreds of higher priced tickets – purchased supposedly on a hands off basis – within such a short period of time?

TicketsNow was offering hundreds of tickets within five minutes and as I write this today, it has 1,411 tickets for sale for the Chicago concert alone. That is about 7% of the United Center capacity. If you are really interested in seeing The Boss, you can buy 8 good tickets for $6,756 at this site. The good news is that this is the total price as the figure includes a service charge of $108.45 PER ticket. Service charge! $108.45! PER TICKET! The bad news is those tickets were originally listed at $95 on the ticketmaster website.

I do believe TicketsNow is technically operating on a ‘hands off’ basis. ClickitNow, another online scalper had over 800 tickets for sale by 10.30 Monday morning. Where do these companies get these tickets so fast?

In one sense it is a tribute to the entrepreneurial culture that this country so badly needs right now. The profit margins in this business are enormous and the investment in time and infrastructure is well worth the effort. I can even appreciate why ticketmaster wonders why it loses out on the increased premium, but its system stinks. When it comes to awful, bad taste in the mouth brand experience ticketmaster is top of the dung heap.

And the great news is the next time I want to purchase tickets for Springsteen who provides an astonishing BRAND EXPERIENCE, I have to go to ticketmaster.

Even a humorous, inspirational, motivational, business, keynote speaker like me has difficulty in finding a bright spot in that.

Enough of the wailing! As The Boss might sing, It’s hard to be a Saint in the City but we were Born to Run, so I’m Waitin’ on a Sunny Day to get my Springsteen tickets.

In the meantime, I’m going to beat the living daylights out of the recession, work harder, work smarter and fulfill my BRAND PROMISE of E4: Energize, Educate, Entertain AND Easy to work with. Phone me today at 630 718 1643 if you are looking for a speaker to ROCK your next event.

Have a Top o’ the Morning day.