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More country fun from Nancy Wilson. K99online.com
Back in the day, when you wanted to see a concert, you stood in line for tickets. Hours at a time. Sometimes even days of camping outside a venue to get good seats. Often, you were rewarded with “floor seats” or, if you were really lucky, you got tickets in the first five rows.
With today’s technology, you don’t have to stand in the weather to see your fave singers, you just click a button on your computer and hopefully will get something. And it’s not easy. Jason Aldean’s Burn It Down Tour 2014 with Miranda Lambert, Florida Georgia Line and Tyler Farr sold out Great American Ballpark for the July 19 show in less than 10 minutes. That’s 40,000-plus seats. Luke Bryan’s That’s My Kind of Night Tour is coming to Riverbend Music Center on Aug. 23-24. Hope you got tickets. Both shows sold out in five minutes. Five. That’s 300 seconds.
Which is not to say tickets aren’t still available for those two artists. They are. But you will pay big time. For Jason Aldean, StubHub has seats for anywhere from $84 each to more $8,000! As for Luke, you can get lawn seats for $58 to more than $5,000. Yeah, my eyes were popping too.
Basically, StubHub.com works like this: People list tickets for sale (at any price they want), other people buy them. StubHub is the in-between, taking a percentage of the selling price.
An article written by Neal Karlinsky and Bonnie Mclean on ABC.com from February 2013 called the San Francisco-based online marketplace, “the ticket scalper of the digital age, the ultimate middleman to shake up the way people interact to buy and sell tickets to almost any concert, theater performance or sporting event.” The article goes on to sale the company makes its money from the percentage it takes — 15 percent of the price from sellers and 10 percent from buyers. What the site offers in return is “security from that shady guy selling tickets on the sidewalk and security from fraud because it ensures that the tickets people are buying from that online stranger are real and will actually show up on time.”
That may not do much to calm down Eric Church, who last week went after those “shady guys.” After fans complained when 14,000 tickets to his Sept. 16 The Outsiders World Tour show in Minneapolis sold out so quickly they never had a chance to buy them, Eric took action.
When he discovered close to a thousand seats had been purchased by scalpers violating the sales limits of the show, he canceled the sales and put them back up for fans to purchase. “A lot of acts just want to sell as many tickets as they can, and they don’t care who they sell them to,” he said on his website last Friday. “I want my fans to be the ones who buy tickets to my shows, and I want scalpers to back off. I can’t stop ticket scalpers completely, but I can definitely make it harder for them.”
How much do scalpers bother “The Chief”? In an interview a few days later at the Stagecoach Music Festival, he told radio stations K-Frog 95.1 and 92.9 “I hate that. I hate ’em,” he said. “We put these parameters in place. We do everything we can to make it hard on them. If it was an even playing field, I wouldn’t be as passionate as I am. But it’s not. They have companies. They’ve got 100 of these ’bots that are always probing.”
He added: “The way they succeed is just unfair. There’s only so much you can do.” Which is what lead to Church getting back the scalped tickets in Minneapolis that were going for $800-900. “We decided heck with it, we’ll just cancel ’em. We’ve taken them back and put them back in the on sale,” he said. “It’s one of the flaws right now with the music industry. There are a number of them, but that’s one that we should fix.”
Fans on the K99.1FM Facebook page back the singer 100 percent: “More artists should do this!” “It’s about time someone stood up to those people!” “Way to go E-C!”
To be fair, StubHub serves a purpose and are in business because people keep them that way. But if it were up to me, I’d wouldn’t mind going back to waiting in line.
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