I FUCKING HATE THIS SERVICE. Assholes don't let you delete your account and ask you to go to their privacy policy page and read through 500 pages of text to find the instructions on how to delete your account, only for it to say you have to contact them to delete it, and when you contact them they never respond back other than the automated email response.
Absolute cancer that always adds on 20 extra dollars to all of your tickets at checkout time when seats are quickly selling out.
FUCK THIS MONOPOLY AND FUCK THE CORPORATE DICK SUCKING MANIACS RUNNING IT.
Adam Conover just did a video on mega mergers and Ticketmaster was prominently featured. I thought it was pretty well done, but hope you like the guy because he takes his personality to 11 on this one.
Plenty of artists tour outside of Ticketmaster, just not big ones. The best thing to do is find a venue near you that isn't owned by LiveNation and follow them on social media/subscribe to their mailing list.
Idk if it’s possible, but you could try saying you’re now a EU citizen and you want all you data and everything related to you deleted, according to GDPR laws.
I've been to a lot of events the past 2 years and ticket master are the only one to fuck up. They changed the event location and said in the app the tickets would update. They never did. Never got a refund as it was a bank holiday weekend and that's apparently my fault.
Even putting the vertical monopoly aside, their app is straight up useless and doesn't work. I spent 3 hours trying to buy tickets for a show today and the app first wouldn't let me log in, then it wouldn't let me put in a pre-sale code to get discountes tickets, then it crashed multiple times on the payment page. So not only are they the only place to buy tickets to a lot of shows, they make it almost impossible to actually buy the tickets from their own freaking service.
Big bank bots are buying up the tickets for credit card points redemption, which is why the site gets ddos'ed, causing the site to not work for regular users. Credit card companies are listing the tickets for resale at the inflated rates their customer points are equated to.
Banks have found another avenue of profit in this.
Dont know about where you're from but when someone says concert they usually mean large production in an arena or other large seating capacity venue. Not something that is held at bars. I'd call something I go to at a bar a "show".
You have other options thankfully. If you're in a large city, you can often find small independent retailers which sell tickets. When I lived in Toronto I used to go to a record shop to buy mine.
You can also go to the venue directly. Oftentimes if it's a smaller venue they'll have tickets available as well. Stadiums usually don't go this route, but it's worth a shot.
Lastly there are other online retailers for tickets like https://stubhub.com
Ticketmaster is a goddamn scam. The entire industry knows it, but it makes money for the labels so they tolerate it. There's a reason Taylor Swift and The Cure have been making a big stink about them lately. I personally won't go to a concert if Ticketmaster is the only retailer, but I'm fortunate that most bands I see play in smaller venues.
Stubhub, Seatgeek, etc. tack on their own fees as well. There’s really no escape especially for large venues (arenas, stadiums) where they have a monopoly on ticket selling. Thankfully the 2 local small venues in my city where most of the acts I follow go to still use a different ticketing vendor and you can also still buy at the box office.
Ticketmaster is known for having clauses that prohibit venues from using any other service, so the joint is either a Ticketmaster venue or independent.
So saying there are other options it's optimistic at best. Every year those options dwindle.
Dude! I was on this rant a few months ago, too! May their business die, and their pockets (and bank accounts) empty for their shitty monopolistic behaviors.
By the way, the added 20$ is considered a bait and switch, since they don't tell you right away, and wait until checkout. That's illegal. But they're big enough that the laws don't apply, it seems.
I just noticed the other day that when I clicked on a seat I wanted, it took me to another page where it had a toggle to turn on "show ticket prices with fees included." I bet that's how they get around that. I even thought when I saw it how shady that is because it only shows up after you've already found a seat you're interested in, but you're not quite at the checkout yet. It somehow makes it worse because it's so fucking blatant.
These days many websites outright block anyone using Tor from browsing them. They want their precious visitor data for resale to advertisers even if many of them block their ads anyway.
Absolutely rubbish company that has nearly cornered the market on venues artists and events and made the entire process of engaging with live entertainment worse and worse as time goes on.
The awful practices of Ticketmaster/Livenation are many, including many things others have already listed as well as an increasing phase-out out of cash and other anonymous payment methods throughout the entire process, including at the actual participating venues themselves.
So why exactly are venues forced to use ticketmaster? I don't understand. Does everyone involved in the show just get more money when ticketmaster is bleeding customers dry with fees? Are there not other simple payment processors that can be used instead?
Basically all major and non-major acts are exclusively signed with Livenation, because all venues are Livenation. And all venues are Livenation because all major and non-major artists are signed there exclusively.
I noticed that VPN issue when I tried to buy event tickets a while back. Super scummy. They don't need to know my home IP to sell me tickets. On the app, even if you have location services on, it just refuses you a connection via VPN.
Usually they just check your IP against a list of known VPN IP ranges. But they could also be blocking all IPs from data centers and only allowing residential IPs.
The service ticketmaster offers is not selling you tickets, the service is to the producers, artists etc. They get a huge cut off the sales and even get to choose what bullshit fees ticketmaster can use when selling their tickets, but ticketmaster gets the hate for it and they are still in the clear with their fans.
Ticketmaster is the apron these people use to keep themselves clean of the hate while they squeeze every last dime out of their fans pockets.
A lot of that is out of band's hands. Ticketmaster has, essentially, a monopoly on venues. It's already incredibly hard to even make net zero on playing shows, getting picky about venues makes that almost impossible and relegates your band to shitty dive bars.
@MagneticFusion hey, not sure what state you are in, but the california consumer privacy act is a forcing feature to rip your info off of any sites that will not delete it. California right to delete.