Last summer I ranted about Ticketmaster in a post at a currently on-hiatus blog. After working for 72 hours to get tickets to a John Mayer show that had supposedly "sold out", I pulled up a decent seat only to find out once I was there that pit tickets had been released right before the show. This sales plan didn't make any sense to me. It still doesn't.
Perhaps now it's not making much sense to Ticketmaster either.
IAC/InterActiveCorp is pushing Ticketmaster into a independent existence with an automatic $750 million in debt used to pay a dividend to its former parent company, mostly due to the lack of profitability to the larger company. Where will the $20 service charges per ticket go towards now? I recognize that implementing and updating a ticketing system isn't the cheapest line of business, but if they were setting an average of $15 per ticket for a show that they sell 8,000 tickets, that's $120,000 just for one show.* In service charges. Multiply that by an average of 20 shows a tour, by the number of venues or artists they sell tickets for and... it's a lot of money. That sort of debt will be easy to write off.
It's not like they man their voice-response phone system with actual people except on Saturday mornings when a lot of shows go on sale, and my previously mentioned John Mayer experience proved that these service people are stuck using the exact same web portal that us mere mortals use.
Yet somehow, Ticketmaster is claiming that the debt will be the equivalent of about "two times its annual profit before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization." At the same time they've announced that this new-found independence will allow them to expand and renovate their business model to allow them to better compete with sites such as StubHub.com, yet another bane of the concert-goers existence. So now, not only is Ticketmaster going to charge insane service charges, they're going to let scalpers come back to the site and sell the same tickets for three, four, five times the price?
Something tells me that won't help with the falling consumer confidence.
On the same day IAC announced the abandonment of Ticketmaster, a federal court ruled that the makers of the software that allows evil ticket brokers faster access than normal people had to pay up $18.2 million to Ticketmaster. Though it's highly doubtful that Ticketmaster will ever see that sort of money rolling through its front door. And if they do, IAC will probably take it. Though the saddest thing about this ruling is that, despite the fine, it won't stop ticket brokers from using this or some other company's software to prevent people actually wanting to go to a show to buy tickets at face value (plus a $20 service charge).
And with Ticketmaster looking to compete with them, something tells me it might become less of an issue.
* Numbers are a low-ball count of what a Woodlands Pavilion in Houston, TX concert would bring in. The Woodlands holds nearly 17,000 people for a standard concert with lawn seats, so I'm really rounding down on this one.
Image from limowreck666's Flickr account, found through Creative Commons web search.
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