Category: External Music (Page 45 of 50)

Can I piss and moan for a moment?

I bought a pair of tickets for the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah show at the Henry Fonda Theater in Los Angeles, and here’s the fee breakdown:

Full Price Ticket: $20.50 x 2 = $41.00
Facility Charge: $2.00 x 2 = $4.00
Convenience Charge: $7.70 x 2 = $15.40
Order Processing Fee: $4.55
Total Price: $64.95

Getting bent over by a company with a monopoly? Priceless.

Here is a description of the fees from Ticketmaster’s website:

Convenience Charge
This fee covers costs that allow Ticketmaster to provide the widest range of available tickets while giving you multiple ways to purchase. Tickets are available in many neighborhoods via local ticket outlet locations, our telephone reservation system and Ticketmaster.com. Tickets can be purchased through at least one distribution channel virtually 24 hours a day. The convenience charge varies by event and is determined by negotiations with arena operators, promoters and others, based on costs for each event.

Order Processing Fee
The order processing fee covers the cost to fulfill your ticket request when you purchase the tickets online or by phone. This charge includes services, such as taking and maintaining your order on our ticketing systems, arranging for shipping and/or coordinating with the box office will call. It is applied to an entire order. Both the venue or promoter and Ticketmaster determine the charge on an event-by-event basis. In almost all cases, additional delivery prices may be charged based on the delivery method that you choose.

These two fees sound a lot alike.

For some reason, I find it difficult to understand why it costs almost $10 per ticket for Ticketmaster to sell me a pair of seats when it only costs $20.50 per ticket for the band to put on an actual show. Certainly, it must be more than twice as expensive to transport a band, its roadies and its equipment to a venue, and set up and put on a concert than it does to print out a ticket.

For many moons, Ticketmaster has held a monopoly in cities across the country by taking all of this extra revenue and giving some of it to the venues as part of an exclusive contract, which makes it impossible for the venues to use a Ticketmaster competitor to sell tickets. I’m almost used to the “convenience charge,” but this “order processing fee” is new. I wonder what a Ticketmaster receipt will look like in 10 years. Will the fees actually surpass the ticket price?