Just wanted to complain about some Ticketmaster fuckery.
Mrs. Ficus is a big hair metal enthusiast. When it was announced in late 2019 that Def Leppard, Mötley Crüe, Poison, and Joan Jett were embarking on a tour it was basically an imperative that we get tickets for their stop here. We actually scored pretty good seats in the first few rows on the edge of stage left and paid a princely sum for them but it seemed worth it for the experience.
After 2 years of delays the tour is finally starting and pictures are flooding in — and it looks what Ticketmaster calls a “stage” ends up being completely obstructed unless you’re dead center.
If you’re on the outer edges of one of the left/right sections and in the first few rows you literally cannot see the stage — all you can see is the big ass screens in that area. What the fuck?
We ended up getting shittier seats in the stands and far away from the stage so at least we can see and we’re going to sell the other tickets. I’m sure we’ll make our money back but the whole thing really sucked. Why would we think when we booked the tickets that’s what shows as “stage” actually isn’t?
Anyway, the moral of this story is fuck Ticketmaster.
I guess Ticketmaster is a monopoly now? I haven’t been to a concert in years, and I kinda miss them. Last one I saw was Annie Haslam and Renaissance, at a small local venue, and that was years ago.
At first I thought you were talking about Blue Öyster Cult. I guess it was the umlaut that confused me. And as Professor Peter Schickele mentioned on one of his PDQ Bach albums, “an umlaut is just a colon that got drunk and fell over.”
Yeah, Ticketmaster is the worst but they largely have a monopoly. AXS is the only real competitor and they suck too. Just not quite as much.
But this is a good primer:
And the fancy aioli on this shit sandwich is that we listed our field level tickets for sale through Ticketmaster’s app since in the hope of at least making our money back. After some fuckery with getting it to recognize our bank account and so on (which apparently is really common), the process was pretty simple. Then we realized that Ticketmaster was adding some 25% in fees to anybody that bought the tickets on top of our list price… for tickets we already bought through Ticketmaster and paid fees for. So we buy and resell tickets through their same systems and now they get to double dip on the fees? That’s just crap.
When I had to sell tickets (blizzard knocked out our power and we needed to take care of things at home) I used Stubhub and listed them at cost (plus the Stubhub fee). It worked out well enough, even though there was a mixup and it was the day of the show (I had 4 tickets and there’s some weirdness between listing them as a group vs. individually). The buyer and I both contacted stubhub and they sorted it right out.
I bought tickets for Girl Talk on the secondary market through Stubhub which were transferred to me through AXS. Circumstances led to me not really wanting to go to the show. Tickets were bought pre-COVID, the friend I was going to go to the show with moved away, and I didn’t feel comfortable with a GA show after it got rescheduled for 2022. I decided to resell them through AXS since they were the issuer.
AXS actually did this right: they capped resale prices at no higher than 10% over list and didn’t charge any fees. My tickets sold pretty much right away.
AXS still kinda sucks for other reasons, but at least they aren’t Ticketmaster.
Hmm… apparently, in a post-Charlottesville/Jan 6th world, comedy songs about ridiculously-caricatured, clearly-satirized angry people are “ill-advised”.
I’ll grant that a few of them can get a bit creepy… but saying “Lame Claim to Fame” is “ominous” or “Albuquerque” is “full of anger”?
I’m actually a bit fond of those myself, as a counter to some of the constant sappy stuff in the Christmas season. “The Night Santa Went Crazy” feels kind of like a harder “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer” to me. And “Nature Trail to Hell” is fun for Halloween.
I can see “Melanie” or “Do I Creep You Out” being a little problematic in a trigger warning kind of way. But painting his entire discography with that brush seems a bit much.
