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Here is my situation. My wife wants Jimmy Buffet tickets. Tickets go on sale at 10:00 a.m. I drive to the venue where the concert will take place. Their box office opens at 11:00 a.m. Which I immediately suspect is intentional in order to force patrons to purchase from Ticketmaster.After some searching, I find a Ticketmaster outlet in a lower middle class neighborhood, reasoning that lines will not be as long. I arrive there at exactly 10:00 a.m., and I am ninth in line.
by 10:12 a.m. they have sold tickets to three people, and the show is sold out. I am thinking how can that be. At the same time, a friend is on the internet, and struck out as well.
Within twenty minutes she calls me back and advises me she sees tickets for sale on Ebay, some brokers with as many as thirty tickets. Now my curiousity is really piqued. Ticketmaster limited ticket sales to six tickets per customer. They were able to sell to three customers in twelve minutes at the location I went tom which totals eighteen tickets. How then were Ebayers able to get so many tickets in that same time period?
The only conclusion I can draw is that Ticketmaster directly sells a bulk of their tickets directly to brokers, never offering them for sale to the general public, which I think violates their implicit, if not explicit, representations to the public.
Anyone here works for Ticketmaster, or knows someone who does? Anyone know the scoop? I think there is a potential case against Ticketmaster if they are indeed culling significant quantities of tickets for brokers and internet ticket agents and not informing the buying public of their business practice. If I had more time on my hands, I might pursue such an action.
Follow Ups:
If Pearl Jam couldn't do anything about it, I don't know what chance we might have...
What does it take to get middle of the auditorium seats?
You have made it to the ticket purchasing page. Now, you are confronted by a confusing array of choices of venue sections and levels of pricing. Or you can select "any price" and "best available." You would think that you would get the best available seats this way. But this is not always the case! For example, the computer will probably sell you seats near the back of the floor before selling you close loge seats! And the loge seats are better than those rear floor seats! The computer divides up the venue from most desirable to least desriable and you can see this number on your ticket (an "X" comes after the number). If you select "best available" the computer will automatically sell you the lowest "X" that is available. So for example, I select best available and the computer coughs up a crappy rear orchestra seat. But if I force the selection "loge," tada, I see a great loge seat for sale.Now you ask how to a get middle-of-the auditorium seats. Here's where using both the price and section selectors helps. Before the concert even goes on sale, see what the price structure is. Then, when it comes time to buy the seats, use a combination of price and section to zero in on what you want. Select "floor" or "orchestra" for section, then see what the prices you can select. If there are two or three prices, select, perhaps, the middle one. Now you have set yourself up to get the best available middle seats on the floor, while others who simply selected "any price" and "best available" are being offered expensive front-of-house seats (which is fine if that's what they wanted.)
I would also repeat what has already been written: Open a Ticketmaster account so that you will be alerted when seats go on sale, and so that you have less chance of screwing up the order when you fail to fill out your name/credit card/address info "in under one minute." Hit the "purchase tickets" (it might say something else like "more info" before the tickets go on sale) button around 1 minute before the seats go on sale, and keep going back and forth until you are in.
...my daughter and I have a race/contest to see who can get in for tickets first.She's on the computer and I call in to Ticketmaster on the phone.
Sometimes you can't get through on the computer.
Other times you can't get through on the phone.
If we both miss getting tickets, I wait till the concert is say, a month away, and look for tickets on CraigsList.
Suprising how many good seats you will find there at face value.
Google Ticketmaster Secrets. I've never read the book, and don't intend to. But there are snippets here and there about how the secondary ticket market works.Here's how I buy tickets. Gone are the days when people mostly lined up for tickets. You can still line up--such as at the box office or a physical ticketmaster outlet. But as someone else mentioned, they are all hooked up to the same computer, so you are better off in the comfort of your own home, sitting in front of your computer, refreshing the page starting about a minute before the tickets go on sale until you get in. (I just got 5th row tickets to Steely Dan at the Beacon Theater in NYC this way, and this after there already had been an earlier fan club presale) Yes, you will have to pay all the convienence charges. But when a ticket costs over a hundred bucks, what's another $15? Now of course you should get a Ticketmaster account. It's free to open one, and when you will avoid having to fill out numerous forms in "under 2 minutes" or "under 1 minute" to get your tickets. Sometimes fan clubs have presale codes. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't--depends on what kind, and how many, seats have been set aside for the presale. Also, I have scored great seats the day of the show--seats that were set aside for VIP's or industry people who ended up not going. These can be available both at Ticketmaster and at the box office.
I also buy tickets on ebay or broker's sites such as Stub Hub or TicketsNow. I have had good luck. I shop around. I bought a ticket to the upcoming Police concert at MSG for face price on ebay. Got lucky, I guess--bidding started at face and no one else bid. (I have since recieved the ticket and it is genuine.)
Whether or not Ticketmaster is in bed with ticket brokers, I don't know. But brokers have been around a long time. While you or I might buy a few tickets every year, they are in the business every day, and I suppose one learns the tricks of the trade. For one thing, I'm sure that they are armed with speed dialers to get in the system first.
and so has e-bay. But I am curious about how StubHub does things. Recently when I went to purchase four tickets together I couldn't get through to Ticketmaster. Within 15 minutes of the tix going on sale I found what I wanted on StubHub.
A lot of brokers sell their tickets on StubHub... they have them listed everywhere as soon as they get them (you can bet they have templates bulit and they just need to plug in the event, location, seats and price).
After I wrote my post above, I remembered this report. It is slightly dated, from 1999, but still makes interesting reading!Click Below
The Ticketmaster outlets are probably using essentially the same system as any online user, so your odds are better by buying the tix online yourself and saving yourself the time you'd wait in line.I would not buy tickets through Ebay. Do you have a Craigslist in your community? That's probably your best bet for sold out shows and where you're more likely to buy from casual sellers than places like Ebay. But, there will be scalpers there too.
Except another friend attempted to purchase the tickets online, and she was shut out. But apparently some vendors were able to buy multiple sets of six tickets, the odds for which seem to be small, unless Ticketmaster makes accomadations for them.
buy the max # online.They can be in a room with bunches of computers and get each logged into ticketmaster the moment tix go on sale.
It's really a numbers game.
I thought of that. The problem is that at the location I went to, three people were able to purchase tickets - for a total of 18 tickets. That is not enough time for brokers to purchase that many tickets waiting in line.The online gig seems more plausible, but again, a friend was shut out on that attempt as well. And how long does the online transaction take, assuming there is credit card information to log in, plus a limit of six tickets. Fr 12,000 plus tickets to go that fast, and assuming that every purchaser buys six tickets, that is 2000 transactions, if not more. Seems to me that is a lot of transactions in twelve minutes over the computer.
I am not familiar with Ebay. How long does it take to put an advertisement on Ebay? Let's do the math. Tickets on sale at 10:00 a.m. 10:12 a.m. tickets are sold out. 10:20 a.m., tickets appear on Ebay. Seems very quick to me.
I do a lot of ebay selling--trinkets and widgets. When I was new to eBay--and Ebay was simpler in 2001, I filled in every little detail one-at-a-time on eBay. It could take 1/2 hour or more to put a listing up.But, as eBay evolved and as a seller you can learn the ropes to put a listing up quickly.
EBay allows a seller to post the listing to ebay, but you can specify the starting time days or weeks in the future. Very convenient for people like me who likes to post my ebay listings at 2:00 AM; but I can schedule it to start when most people are awake. For tickets, you could pre-load listings on the assumption you will successfully be able to buy them; or cancel it if you fail to get the tickets.
Once one listing is up, you can duplicate it in less than a minute by just a few keystrokes; great for people selling more than one of the same item.
Also, ebay allows you to save a selling template. All a seller would have to do with tickets is enter in the details: artist, date, time, venue, seat number, and the all rest can be automatically filled in by default settings.
And, there is software you can use to fill in your ebay listings on your own computer, then press upload the whole thing to ebay.
Ebay is getting more and more Bigger Business oriented. I mean, more of the sellers are small or medium or big businesses, as opposed to people like me selling inherited tchotkies. If you are selling 1,000 items a month you need to make listing them fast, and ebay is meeting that need (for a fee!)
SmokeTest--plug it in, see if it smokes.
They have a bunch of accounts set-up and log on ahead of time so it's basically a one click deal once you pick your tix.TM can have lots of transactions happening at once (The TM website says they can sell "thousands" of tickets per minute) and for a popular show there are scalpers from all over the country who'll log on plus many more actual fans than the arena holds.
So 12 minutes isn't so long for 12k tickets. It could've taken 3 or 4 minutes.
Another thing scalpers do is get a hold of "presale" (usually AMEX or fan club sales) and buy up a bunch of those so tyhat when general public tix go on sale there might only be 8k instead of 12k available.
If there's a show coming up that you're interested try to get on that bands fan club mailing list and/or check out the boards on that bands' site and you should get info on the presale codes.
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