Live Nation Needs Its Ass Kicked and Irving Azoff Can Suck My Dick
I just made my first transaction on Live Nation, which is trying to merge with ticket sales overlord TicketMaster (CEO: Money grubbing Guns N’ Roses, Van Halen, Steely Dan and NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK manager Irving Azoff). Remember like a year or so ago when you would go to buy a ticket it would sometimes bring you to the old school order and if it was a pre-sale you would go to LiveNation? Fucking stupid, now they’ll be the same company. Anyway, I just bought a pair of tickets to see Protest the Hero (rawk!) in May. I have to say the Live Nation site was pretty intuitive. When I searched for the tickets I was able to easily find them and, much to my surprise, they were only sixteen bucks! That fuckin’ rules – I would have shelled out 25 if I was asked to do so. What follows is a harrowing tale of trivial amounts of money, deciet and a broken (and just fucking broke) young man.
Bag of shit.
So, being the responsible member of the financial community I am, I used my new temporary debit card (given to me so I don’t fuck up my account any further by buying fake government grant packages – I’m no better than your average HSN shopper) to swipe a pair of those puppies for myself. Not only were they available, but they were even so nice as to give me a timer so I could complete my transaction in the most hurried way possible. Not like I wanted time to reflect on spending the last money in my account or anything…
Where am I going with this? Oh yeah… So I made my way to one of the final screens to complete this virtual handjob of a transaction (if they had made it any easier, I might have actually came) and lo-and-behold. Each ticket was assigned a seperate fee. “TicketMaster charges fees all the time,” I thought to myself, “no biggie, it should be about two bucks on each ti-WHAT THE FUCK?!” Each ticket was given an eight dollar motherfucking charge. Not a somewhat irritating 10-15%, not a doable 20%, not a completely unreasonable unless you really wanted to see the band 30% – motherfuckers bent me over snickered, “look at how easy he takes it,” shoved there big corporate dick in me and right before they blasted 50% of the total cost of the tickets in me, they turned me around and hit me in the face with it.
Now, if you recall, I stated earlier something along the lines of “I would have shelled out $25 if I was asked to do so.” And, if you’re up on your basic arithmatic, you should know the total cost of the tickets only came out to $24 each. “Well, that doesn’t seem so bad, DJ,” you might be thinking to yourself. And you might horribly wrong. I have no problem shelling out the dough. My problem is that I was tricked into thinking I was getting a kickass deal and then got hit with bullshit charges I wouldn’t have to pay if I had access to the Blender Theater’s box office. I mean, really $6 to print and ship a single ticket? I could probably buy a printer and 100 stamps on eBay for that much. Plus, I had to pay that shit twice.
Of course, being fisted by the thick forearm of ticket pushers is nothing new, and it appears out government is actually doing something to help us lowly peons from further violent sexual abuse. In the meantime, I’ll be making my best effort to do what a commenter on the Wired Blog suggested. tdstr posted the following:
But there is a way to get around Ticketbastard’s charges. Just go straight to the box office to get your tickets. Much more work but the savings is fantastic. I saved over $500 on the 3 concerts I went to in 2008.
This guy saw three concerts and saved $500 is FEES?! Something is horribly amiss here.
Fuck Ticketmaster, I’m using ticketweb.com, eBay and box offices from now on. Oh yeah, and the VIP status granted me by this shitstain of a website.
03/28/2009
ticketweb is also owned by ticketmaster. :/
03/29/2009
that suuuuucks