Ticketmaster Scandal

Jett Houtz

THIS JUST IN: On April 12, SZA announced round 2 of her SOS tour, which would include a stop in Baltimore, Maryland at the CFG bank stadium. Her concert is on September 28th at 8pm est. Once people found out this news everyone rushed for the presale and the public sale for the tickets. But once they were up on the site everything turned for the worst. My mother set a timer for the presale so she wouldn’t miss it, and when she got in, she had to wait for 9 minutes. But once she got in, they were all gone! Everything was gone in less than 9 minutes. Not only was that an issue, but when the tickets were made available to the general public, the lowest ticket was $200! The seats were already sold after she found them and clicked on them. Ticketmaster decided to remove her off the website because she kept trying to get seats. When she tried to sign back in, she was unable to. She later stated, “That’s why people hate Ticketmaster.”

 For those who haven’t had problems with what Ticketmaster has to offer, here’s a rundown. Many people who are able to access the presale website either get kicked out, the website completely stops working for the user, they go in and click the tickets but the tickets are already gone, or the presale code isn’t working. For example, many fans seeking to get Taylor Swift tickets for her tour discovered that the presale was completely inoperable. Another example is a fan who had a $150 SZA ticket but was then asked to leave. She then returned to the website, only to discover that she no longer possessed the $150 ticket and that all rates had risen to $400! 

However, the website is not the sole source of problems. There are additional difficulties that lead to unaware ticket payments. This problem was noticed with another girl trying to get t-swift tickets. But every time she did, it glitched and indicated error. Because of this, she tried 15 times and “bought” 15 $500 tickets unknown to her! Not including any additional expenses. Not only do they have website difficulties, but they also have misleading advertising tickets! There are tickets with the title “Platinum” that are highly pricey on the website. You’ll assume you’ll get special treatment like VIPs. Nope! They’re merely a fancy word for dynamically priced tickets, which means that Ticketmaster decides how much to charge based on demand. Which is frequently exorbitantly priced.

Ticketmaster workers and developers need to fix their website ASAP! You may think that it’s only about the prices of the tickets, but you’re only half correct. By having extreme prices more people aren’t willing to pay in which will lead to those producing and hosting the shows to not get a fair pay for how much work they’ve put into it. They’re also putting people into debt without even knowing it. Tickmaster get your act together and stop these issues from happening.