I’m doing my part!
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That’s definitely something my mom would do.
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Ticketbastard has always been dystopic, but I think this new bit tips them over the line into cyberpunk territory: “just two pieces of info required.”
The implication being that “they” already know so much about you that all they have to do is reliably identify you to determine if you’re worth the risk, or not.
Welcome to the global advertising (and banking, and insurance) panopticon.
Not content with their abusive “convenience fees”, Ticketmaster has also managed to capture the ticket sales after-market, and will even facilitate your participation in said market via usury. They’re like a company store, scalper, and loan-shark all rolled up into one.1
Imagine spending even six months (much less twelve!) paying off a single night’s entertainment. And that’s just the tickets (in this case, two tickets with a face value of $90 each – which is borderline outrageous in it’s own right, but that’s a different thread). Nevermind how much you’ll spend on parking, beverages, travel, etc. And somewhere, in some corporate office, there’s a VP of Whateverthefuck saying “yeah, this is a totally reasonable and sustainable and ethical business model.”
1. If Apple Inc. has taught us nothing, it’s that vertical integration is the name of the game. I, for one, welcome our new feudal overlords.
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I doubt the “ethical” part ever gets into the equation anymore.
I’m sort of glad I don’t go to concerts anymore. 20-25 years ago we saw Emerson Lake & Palmer, starting with a Led Zep cover band, Bonham. Bonham was so loud you could feel the impulse pushing your chest in and out. We got up and went to the back fence to wait them out. ELP wasn’t so loud, thank goodness.
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I haven’t been to a concert in seven years or so (my last was Foxy Shazam and the Darkness at St. Andrews Hall.) I kinda miss the fun, but there aren’t many bands I’d take the time, trouble and expense to see these days. Big ticket prices are definitely part of that.
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I did seriously consider seeing Amy X Neuburg recently but it would have been a really long drive, and a night in a hotel. In the end, though having to medicate two of our cats made it impractical.
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My apologies. I thought the combination of “reasonable and sustainable and ethical” was obviously sarcastic given the context, but upon re-reading I can see how that wasn’t necessarily clear. 
I still go to concerts. Not as many, and not as often, as I used to, but I kind of can’t not go. No matter how curmudgeonly I get about the logistics, I keep buying tickets and convincing myself not to puss out on the day of the show.
Two more things:
- I’m super-jealous of you getting to see ELP. I’m not necessarily a huge prog-rock fan, but I dig those guys and suspect that they would’ve been a lot of fun live.
- It seems a little mean to reduce Bonham to a Zeppelin cover band. He was John Bohnam’s son, after all, and they did have their own original songs. I get where you’re coming from, musically, and agree that they weren’t doing anything revolutionary, but I probably would have enjoyed seeing them at the time.
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For some reason I thought “reasonable and sustainable” might have been legitimate business concerns, but no, probably not. Unless it somehow leads to more $$$.
Yeah concerts are fun. Most I saw when I was a lot younger: Black Sabbath decades ago, America (of “Horse With No Name” fame), and Bruford in college, Moody Blues reunion in grad school. Some other assorted things, including dance & classical, especially while at school. And some electronic concerts – The First Moog Quartet, Alvin Lucier, and Morton Subotnik. And a Renaissance reunion in a small venue more recently. Gee, I didn’t mean that to be a biography . . .
I tried to see ELP a number of times - once, I had tickets, but it was out of town, and a snowstorm made travel impossible, second time it was the Works tour where I got tickets, but the concert in my area was canceled due to budget problems on their end, dammit. Finally got to see them in a reunion concert many years later. Wow, what an experience!
Re Bonham: I’m not knowledgeable about Zeppelin or Bonham, so I don’t know what the latter played, though some seemed familiar as I recall. I knew that the name was that of one of the Zep members, but I didn’t know it was his son!
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So 2×$90 = $557.78?! Well, that does sound like Ticketmaster math, once you count the ‘convenience’ fees. It’s very convenient for them.
I love that about concerts! Makes you really feel a part of it when the music is playing inside you, turning your internal organs into instruments and your armhair is dancing along to the blasts of air from the speaker vibrations. 
The last concert I went to was a couple months ago, the Pretty In Kink tour with Lords of Acid, Orgy, Genitorturers, Little Miss Nasty, and Gabriel and the Apocalypse. It was a small venue, general admission, and those speakers were blasting. I wasn’t even near the front and could feel it pulsing through me. Made me feel 10 years younger.
My wife hates that kind of thing though. She’s short, so can’t see in general admission, and the loudness and crowding is too much. She prefers the big-name concerts in giant venues where you get stuck in a cramped seat three stories up and far enough away to need binoculars to see the act. I sometimes go to those with her, but I’m pretty much done with them. Without that elation of the crowd, and if I could see and hear it better in the comfort of my own home watching on youtube, why pay hundreds of dollars and spend hours on the road? Different experiences for different people, I guess.
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Who needs an iron lung when you can go to a concert? 
I must admit — I don’t know any of those bands cough cough where’s my geritol? But yeah, YouTube is cool for live performances. That’s where I saw Caravan Palace in concert and wow, reminds me of swing parties I went to back in the 1930s. (Not really.)
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No worries. I sometimes forget that not everyone knows all about Led Zeppelin. In fact, I was fairly recently called out for being disappointed in the young people of today and their shocking lack of knowledge of their musical heritage. (I was chatting with the clerk in a store I frequent, and he mentioned some kids describing it as “that Thor movie song” when Immigrant Song came on the radio. We were laughing and joking about not knowing who Led Zeppelin was when some punk kid a young man in his early twenties piped up with a drawn-out warning “heyyyyyyyy.” So we switched to Grandpa Simpson and talking about how we used to tie an onion to our belts because that was the fashion at the time. And a good time was had by all. 
)
It’s not just the fees, though. It’s that TM sold the tickets a first time, with the fees (normal enough, so far). And they sold them to a scalper who, thanks to TM, doesn’t even have to take possession of the tickets (much less stand on the highway outside the venue) to resell them at a markup, so they’re effectively selling the same tickets twice and taking a cut both times. But since that’s not enough, apparently, they’ll also facilitate financing of said tickets, from which they’re surely getting a kickback (er, excuse me – “referral fee”), assuming that the lender is actually a separate company, and not just a conveniently named subsidiary of TM itself.
It’s not like you couldn’t pay too much for scalped tickets and spend money you probably shouldn’t by charging the whole thing on credit cards in the past. It’s that the data-mining technology and corporate surveillance society of today makes it easy for one company to hoover up the entirety of an experience and more efficiently suck the life (and profit!) out of it and you every step of the way. Maybe I was reaching too hard for the “cyberpunk dystopia” angle and should have posted this elsewhere or not at all. It’s just when I saw it, my first thought was “huh, that’s new; and shitty; now TM can ruin your credit on top of everything else.”
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That would not surprise me. I think you’re right and this does fit under Cyberpunk Dystopia. All the more dystopian when the megacorps are doing the punk’s jobs and taking their profits!
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On June 3, the New York Times reported on research showing that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm serves up videos of young people to viewers who appear to show sexual interest in children. In any other week this might have been a huge public controversy, but the news was consumed instead by a very different content moderation blow-up.
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One more to add to the list of “_____ was not a how-to guide”
(1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, Fahrenheit 451, Snow Crash, etc)
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Are there many dystopian futures which aren’t being used as a how-to guide?
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Brave New World
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Well, probably not the ones where everyone dies, like say Terminataw damn.
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Governments may not be using that as a how-to guide, but corporations seem to be (devoting all spare time to entertainment, promoting endless consumerism, and soma could be either an antidepressant or an opioid, both of which are being overprescribed).
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