You may know the drill. You get online at 10am, several months before the show, and receive a place in the virtual queue. Perhaps you notice with dismay that your number is larger than the capacity of the venue. Perhaps you then lose your place because you’ve been misidentified as a bot, or the site crashes altogether. If you make it to the front, you may well wonder why £100 (plus about £20 in opaque surcharges) now qualifies as a cheap seat. And that’s if there are any cheap seats left, not just inflated VIP packages. And you may ask yourself why it has to be like this.
When you don’t get what you want, you tend to look for someone to blame. That someone is usually Ticketmaster. The company, which merged with concert promoters Live Nation in 2010 to form Live Nation Entertainment, sells about 70% of all concert tickets worldwide, and an even greater proportion of the arena and stadium market. In 2024, Live Nation generated a record $23.2bn (£17.5bn) in revenue, with Ticketmaster selling 637m tickets. Rivals such as See Tickets (owned by Germany’s CTS Eventim) and AXS (the ticketing arm of promoters AEG Presents) aren’t exactly minnows but Ticketmaster has become a synonym for ticketing: a lightning rod and a punchbag.
In the US, Ticketmaster’s current problems stem from a cardinal error: getting on the wrong side of Swifties. In November 2022, the company failed to stagger the presale for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, listing all 2m tickets simultaneously. The colossal demand overwhelmed the servers, causing myriad problems. Swift expressed her disappointment. Ticketmaster grovelled. Last May, the US justice department (DOJ) filed an antitrust suit, now backed by 39 states, which alleges that Live Nation and Ticketmaster use their “power and influence … to freeze innovation and bend the industry to their own benefit”.
I mean even if the show had happened it sounds like you shouldn’t have spent money you didn’t have.
Thanks for the financial advice bro.
The point is that they borrow money for free. It’s theft even if they one day refund the tickets. Because that’s how money works. Apparently you should know that since you’re clearly an expert.
Or - see my post above - they just keep my money for a cancelled show and make it impossible for me to get it back.
On the one hand, maybe it might be considered a little scummy for a megacorporation to financially abuse people, but the important point here is how dare you try to enjoy your life.
You seem to be one of the blessed people who do not work a minimum wage job, barely making ends meet, with a desire to go to a concert 'cause you haven’t been able to afford to for years.
Lucky you.
No, I don’t believe you should do it if it is going to make you struggle more long-term. At what point do we just agree a given amount of money you don’t have is stupid to spend. If someone spent $1,000+ that they can’t actually pay on a t swift concert at 25% interest, yeah, maybe you’d be in a better situation for 2y if you avoided that extra few hundred in interest for like 4y. Preventing my own struggle certainly better than a few hours of entertainment and hearing loss.
I do believe people should be paid enough to afford joys in life without struggling so much but that’s not the system we have.
I love how easily people are strawmanning this into something I didn’t say.
You said …
Please explain how my response was a strawman argument.
So if you have a mortgage, you’re not supposed to buy anything until the house is paid off?
A mortgage gets you a place to live with increasing amount of property ownership as time goes on. It isn’t at 25% interest for one evening. You never get the money back from going to a concert, you do get at least some back on a mortgage.
You could use your ticket money to pay off your mortgage, so all of your spendings are costing you the same interest at minimum.
Housing is a bit different than concert tickets, both in terms of how essential it is and the interest rate involved. I’m not putting concert tickets on anything that’s accruing interest, that’s simply a bad financial decision.