A topic to divide the masses:

Is Ticketmaster ruining the concert experience?

I think it’s fair to say that Ticketmaster has a monopoly over the event ticketing sector, especially concerts.

Of all my years buying tickets, I would say that maybe 80% have been purchased through Ticketmaster. Depending on the demand for the show, I have witnessed varying degrees of difficulty, and the full spectrum of emotions.

My most recent hearbreak is Coldplay tickets. Myself and what appears to be the whole of the UK, tried to secure a ticket to one of their many UK shows planned for 2025 when they went on sale at 9am last Friday. However, like many others, I was unsuccessful in this endevour. Which has left a extremely resentful feeling towards the ticketing platform.

However, Coldplay wasn’t a one off. Within the last year I have had the same experience with Sabrina Carpenter, Oasis, Taylor Swift, Bears Den and Scouting for Girls.

Buying tickets has never been an easy feat, and there has always been an air of stress when buying them. However, in recent years I have found that I have lost confidence when entering into Ticketmaster queues. I feel as though the demand for tickets has tripled, I’m fighting thousands of people, bots and touters on an interface that can’t sustain the sheer traffic when popular artists announce shows.

Foe: Is Ticketmaster to blame?

I can’t place the full blame on Ticketmaster, as the demand can be completely unprecedented. However, there were a few key things which just made the experience a lot more stressful.

Below are 5 key topics for me that make the Ticketmaster experience pretty dreadful:

1. THE WEBSITE CRASHED?!?!

I would LOVE to know why there was no preventative actions in place to stop the website from crashing when one of the biggest artists in the WORLD is releasing tickets. And if there were preventative measures WHY didn’t they work.

To put into context for Coldplay:

There are 10 Wembly Shows. Capacity of 90,000.

10 x 90,000 = 900,000

There are also 2 Hull Shows (apparently 12,000 capacity).

For arguments sake, let’s say that the 24,000 tickets that are allocated for Hull’s Craven Park are presale tickets, Artist tickets ect. that didn’t go live on Friday.

That is nearly 1,000,000 (1 MILLION) tickets that were going live for the general public to grapple for.

The sheer quantity of tickets should have been a massive flag for Ticketmaster to realise that if there is any event to make sure the website doesn’t crash it’s this one…

But 8am Friday morning I logged on to find that the website was down. I wasn’t even able to get onto the website, let alone into the waiting room. Instead I continued refreshing 408 Error codes.

2. THE DREADED WAITING ROOM

The cursed waiting room is the only way to describe the early stages of the Ticketmaster experience.

For the life of my I cannot understand why or how I can join the waiting room at 8am for a 9am sale and end up 95,000 in the queue. But I can then also join it at 5 past 9 and be 2,000 in the queue.

Is it randomly generated? Is it first come first serve? Does it depend on the web browser? The WiFi? What you ate for breakfast? Whether you have an A in your name?

I NEED answers please Ticketmaster.

There has to be a better way to get into the queue then praying on whatever God you believe in to put you under 10,000 in the queue.

3. TICKET RESALE

I do appreciate the way that Ticketmaster is now picking up on Bots (I can’t get into the site if I’m on any VPN). However, it is incredibly frustrating when you get allocated as a Bot and kicked off the website despite being very much a real person.

However, bots and touters are still getting into Ticketmaster, buying as many tickets they can get their nasty hands on, and heading straight to a resale site and hiking up the price.

The tickets on sale aren’t just people who have figured out that the concert date doesn’t work for them and want to get rid of the tickets. These are people trying their hardest to rinse people of money and seeing how far they can price with such high demand tickets.

I would NEVER buy tickets off of any resale site, especially when you’re looking at prices which have been inflated to over double their face value. You also have to be careful with these tickets as they can also be a scam, or a ticket which has already been scanned and therefore your one won’t work.

I’ve seen the crushing reality of someone realising their ticket was fake at the doors of a venue. They had traveled 3 hours, paid x2 the price and were so excited to go in, but were then told that their ticket was a fake and they were denied entry.

4. DYNAMIC PRICING

Now this is the big one. The controversial one. The one that gets so far under my skin it’s unreal.

In early September Ticketmaster hit the headlines when their ‘dynamic pricing’ saw Oasis tickets inflated from £135 to over £300. PA Media, the bands management, came forward to say that the band “at no time had any awareness that dynamic pricing was going to be used”.

Like many others, I had no idea that Ticketmaster had this scale of influence over pricing, and it was completely their discretion to how they priced the tickets.

Ticketmaster has compared its use of “dynamic pricing” to airlines and hotels, which increase costs based on demand, and has said the prices are set by artists and their management. – The Guardian

What’s even more interesting is the involvement of offical organisations such as the European Commission and the Advertising Standards Authority. Both received complaints and are now investigating Ticketmaster and their use of dynamic pricing due to the “misleading claims about availability and pricing”.

Unfortunately I don’t think we’ve seen the last of dynamic pricing. The supply and demand of tickets, especially for incredibly popular artists is so imbalanced that corporations such as Ticketmaster can continue to charge obscene prices.

Since Covid there has been this massive jump in price. Pre-covid, the most I ever paid for a ticket was £90 for a front pit standing. Post-Covid, for a seat at a Wembly show you’re now looking at £100 minimum to be up in the Gods. With Harry Styles pit tickets being £250 + and Sabrina Carpenter VIP tickets selling at £360 EACH.

There is now an increasing number of times that I have made it through the dreaded waiting room, done my time in the queue, to reach the ticket prices and then close the tab. Only last week I was contemplating a £220 standing Coldplay ticket, despite just coming back from a 3 day trip in France where my accomodation was only just slightly more expensive.

Which one to pick?

A 3 day trip on the French Riviera or a 3 hour concert staring at a screen

Going to any concert now requires more and more saving. Not only are you taking out a small mortgage on buying tickets, but public transport, parking, ULEZ charges, food, and drink in the venue, etc., all amount to an incredible sum of money. It’s no longer a small feat to go to a gig; you have to have a decent amount of disposable income if you want to attend back-to-back shows.

Can we also discuss the additional charges? What do you mean that the ticket is £50, but all of a sudden there are £8 worth of additional charges?! Just build this into the main ticket price, so when I do get to the checkout I am not completely blindsided by an extra 10 quid being added on. It would be great to gain an understanding of why I am paying a Service Charge, a Facility Charge, and an Order Processing Fee in addition to an Artist ticket!

5. MULTIPLE DEVICES:

Another one to divide opinion:

How do you feel about the multiple devices rule?

In the last year or so, Ticketmaster has created a way to place multiple devices in the same space in the queue when all signed into the same account.

This means that no matter if you’re on your phone, tablet, laptop, etc., as it is all under the same account, it will put all three devices at the same point in the queue. This is also true for different website tabs open!

You also can’t try and rig the system by creating another account using a different email address, as each account is aligned to one phone number.

This is my take on it:

Pros:

• The number you are in the queue is a true representation of the number of people, not number of devices
• You get to bond with your family/friends as you’re all working together in different accounts trying to get tickets

Cons:

• You are completely relying on the luck of 1 device, you are no longer able to play the odds by having multiple devices live.
• Get kicked out on one device = get kicked out on all
• With the new telephone rule you can’t have multiple accounts with different emails. Once again relying on one device and account, the probability of getting tickets drops significantly.

I love to play the odds, I love to have multiple devices around me all with different positions in the queue. So this new feature is definitely not a favourite of mine…

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FRIEND: The home of Ticketing

RELIABILITY & SAFETY

As much as Ticketmaster does make the ticket-buying experience a living hell, they are a very safe website (I am actively ignoring the security breach they had earlier this year). I am able to log on and know for a fact that I won’t be scammed, sold a fake ticket, or robbed of money.

They have a team of people who can help me if I were to put the wrong email in, or if I have a question regarding the venue or event. They store all my tickets in my online account, so I don’t have to worry about trailing back through my thousands of emails. I can easily transfer tickets to friends, sell them back to Ticketmaster, look at the historical events I’ve attended, etc.

THE HOME OF TICKETING

Ticketmaster truly is the home of ticketing and it is a one-stop-shop.

Anything I want, any event I am interested in attending, will most likely be found on Ticketmaster. Gigs, West End Shows, Comedy, Sport, all of it is there.

They’ve got guides of the best things to do and places to go, up to date news on concerts and gigs. Exclusive pricing for West End shows, offers and more.

The app on my phone and tablet is incredibly functional and the website itself is easy to use (only when it isn’t crashing).

So for what it is, a ticket buying platform, Ticketmaster is pretty good at it’s job.

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To summarise, ultimately it is a shame that such a large corporation has the lion’s share of control over the event ticketing space. Even Live Nation, another ticketing hub, often redirects you to Ticketmaster. I have found, however, that the smaller the artist or venue, the tickets tend to be sold via another website, usually the venue’s website such as Engine Rooms or the Royal Albert Hall.

There isn’t really a way to combat this monopoly. There will always be demand for tickets, and with Ticketmaster truly being the home of ticketing, I fear that they will always remain in power. I think moving forward there needs to be continuous backlash regarding dynamic pricing, pushback on the artists to lower the costs of shows, and further work to stop touts reselling tickets.

Ticketmaster truly is a source of happiness for me. But it would be fantastic to find a way of making the ticket buying experience a lot less stressful. So moving forward, albeit sometimes reluctantly, I will continue to use Ticketmaster to purchase event tickets, however I will strive to never fall victim to the dynamic pricing.