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ShareWhen the Eagles decided that they were getting rid of some of the ticketing fees for their shows, their new buddies at Ticketmaster had to come up with a creative way to announce this. Before we get to how they worded it, a note from the linked Live Daily article notes that TM has a ‘controlling stake’ in their management. So now that they’ve hooked up, they decided to give their fans a little break by waving the ridiculous, greedy fees that they usually attach to the ticket prices:
“Ticketmaster is testing this program and is consulting with all our clients in the hope of rolling out the ‘all- in ticketing’ program for events nationwide,” Ticketmaster CEO Sean Moriarty added. “We are honored that the Eagles are the first to kick off this unprecedented fan-friendly Ticketmaster program.”
TM themselves who’ve never even tried to show any transparency over the ‘handling’ charges for the printed tickets that they mail out, not to mention the charges that they still dole out for ‘will call’ tickets which don’t get mailed to you or the ‘paperless tickets’ that you vouch for at a box office or the printable tickets which you can just make at home (and which they sometimes charge you extra for).
When they say ‘testing out the program,’ they mean that they wanna see if they can rake in enough dough without the extra charges, especially now that a falling economy means that people have less money to spend on concerts. It also makes TM and the band look nice for not trying to rip you off with these charges. Whether it’ll be enough to keep fans coming out to shows remains to be seen.
If TM doesn’t see fit to waive the fees, then I’d suggest that the new admin’s attorney general look into their practices to see if they can really justice the charges or not. If they can’t, I say that they owe us some big refunds and not the chintzy ones that the major labels had to cough up for payola violations a few years ago.
