bralph

My wife spent 5+ hours in the queue yesterday before finally being able to get some nosebleeds on the side (almost behind) the stage. She did say that she saw some available that were more, but she was buying for our daughter and her friends and wasn't sure how high everyone was willing to go. After the fact, she felt like she should have gotten the better seats, but the girls are just excited to be attending. After spending all that time on it though, I can understand why she was a bit disappointed but at least she was able to get something.

I had also gone through the verified fan process, but I was not selected for the presale. I thought that was a little odd since I actually have a purchase history. My wife had to create a new Ticketmaster account to do hers.

ViewAskewbian

Agreed though I wouldn't call Bruce Springsteen crazy popular these days but he was in the same boat of overpriced tix a few months back himself. I love The Boss but I ain't paying $800 a seat to see him, no matter what merch tent I get access too before everybody else. I mean, who needs a $50 baseball hat anyway on top of that ticket price

LurkerDan

That describes my experience almost to a T. Except I think my seats are actually behind the stage.

But I told my daughter last night (and told her that our seats were pretty bad) and she was through the roof excited, so it's all good.

dex14

Some of you may be better off waiting until closer to the show to find tickets. Multi nights at stadiums will have a ton of people unloading tickets leading up to the shows.

Decker

Yeah, there's a good chance if I don't get seats easily today for the Vegas dates, I will wait until day of. If I miss on 3/24 I can still try for 3/25.
And if I miss both, well I still have "One Phenomenal Reserved Seat Floor Ticket*" from the coveted "Karma Is My Boyfriend VIP Package" in Philly.

dex14

Vegas is probably one of the best markets to get last minute tickets.

It does suck about your $800/ticket situation though. I can’t imagine there not being a bunch of people getting rid of tickets over 3 nights in Philly.

rw2516

Crazy thing is, 40+ years ago when artists were in their prime, tickets were only $10 and the shows were better.
I scanned and posted some old tickets I kept as souvenirs and posted on facebook. Led Zeppelin 1977 $11.50. Paul McCartney and Wings 1976 $7.75.
The old days of camping out over night. The ticket outlet, usually a head shop or record store, had all the tickets right there. Guy behind the counter had a big stack of tickets with rubber band around it. Tell him how many you want and he'd peel them off. If it was reserved seats, there was a diagram of the venue taped to the counter and you pointed to where you wanted seats.

The one time it was different was Pink Floyd Animals in 1977. We were told on the radio that you had to send in for tickets with a money order and stamped return envelope. On such and such a day at such and such a time they would announce the rest of the details. A friend of mine was smart enough to suggest we go to the main downtown post office and sit in the parking lot listening to the radio. As soon as the details of price, who to make money order out to, and where to mail it. As soon as it came over the radio we dashed in the PO and got it in the mail. Some other people were there with the same idea. We got tickets. People who didn't got the money order back in the SASE.

John Galt

Yeah, I think prime seats will hold the value pretty well, but there's going to be a ton of the $49-89 nosebleed stuff people will be getting rid of. I certainly wouldn't be rushing to the secondary to buy right now. And there will certainly be more releases down the road after Ticketmaster has held back enough tickets to artificially pump up prices.

Why So Blu?

If you can make it to the L.A. shows, that's your best bet in obtaining tickets on the secondary market and possibly decent prices. FIVE fucking shows in L.A.!

cultshock

Same here. Most of the bands I'm a fan of play theaters, not stadiums or arenas, and I can usually get a ticket for around 50 bucks, and they aren't difficult to get. But oof, the prices I pay for vinyl, especially these days.

Oh yeah, I miss those days. I still have my old tickets (for bands like Metallica, KISS, NIN, Aerosmith, etc.) and none of them were over twenty bucks (arena shows too), and yep, I bought them at the local record store with no issues.

tommyp007

My prime concert time was 1987-1997. I still have my tickets from seeing Prince, U2, Metallica, Aerosmith, Van Halen, Jimmy Buffett, Garth Brooks, Janet Jackson and more and more and more.....all for less than $30 a ticket. I paid around $60 for Pink Floyd on the Division Bell tour, and the most expensive ticket was Prince in 2012 for round $100, and those were really good seats. Today's concert prices astound me, and totally price us out. We typically see artists at a few local small venues and pay in the $40 range. Huge acts? No, but acts we like. And I'm way past standing for hours in a screaming mob, so a seated show is the way to go for us.

Decker

Maybe, but I couldn't risk it. Sunday night is the only one I could make. And I wasn't going to gamble since I was flying in early to go to the show.

Ended up getting better tickets than I wanted for Vegas. Another case of seats getting snapped up left and right when you're trying to check out. But at least they were only "top tier" pricing and not jacked up. They're in the seats, near the 50 yard line, 20 rows up. Have access to the fancy lounge for those sections, that I have visited once before. It's really nice in there. Makes this accidental over-purchase worth it.

rw2516

Cheapest ticket I still have is Eric Clapton 1974 $7.00. It was general admission at a fairground grandstand. Got as close as you could get in those days. Maybe ten feet front him. He was wearing cowboy boots and I could see the scuffs on them. He had corduroy pants on and I could see the lines in the pants. Seven dollars. Found the untorn complete ticket laying on the ground as we were leaving. Don't have any stubs anymore, but lesser artists, Aerosmith, ZZ Top, Queen, KISS, etc. were probably $5.

ViewAskewbian

Most I have every paid for a ticket to a concert is about $110. It was Paul McCartney about 8 years ago and bought on StubHub after a fast sell out. I figured, hey, when am I ever going to get to see a Beatle again in this city. He came back a year later and I got a ticket for $55. Most for an event overall? Wrestlemania X-8 in Toronto for $140 but about 30 rows away from the ring.

All three of these total less then what Swift and Springsteen are asking for these days.

Hell, out of curiosity, I just went back to my saved Springsteen ticket stubs from my first show (1999) to my last (his last tour a few years ago). I have seen him times and total paid less then that $800 Swift ticket.

Urgh, it's ludicrous but you folks who paid that price for your kids get huge Dad/Mom props from me.

Decker

It is, but to be fair, since she took a bunch of college-level classes as a Senior in HS, she technically graduates from NYU next month -- a semester early (but will go through graduation ceremony at the normal time). Saving half a year tuition at those prices do help me out. Giving her this graduation present isn't so bad considering.

Decker

After going through the pre-sale yesterday I was struck by a major flaw in Ticketmaster's system : They don't ask you for the pre-sale code until it's your turn to buy tix. By doing it that way, I'm sure thousands of extra people fill up the queue hoping to game the system and clogging the site and chasing the server. If they had just asked for the pre-sale code before you could enter the waiting room, it would make the process a lot smoother, I bet.

Decker

And this pretty much confirms what I just said :

Twitter

John Galt

It really makes no sense why that many people would be entering the queues though. They issued account specific codes and you can only enter an account in a waiting room once per account per show. Sure, you can enter the waiting room with another account but you won’t be able to buy tickets without a code tied to that account. Even if people entered the waiting room for every show in that particular city where they had a code, it shouldn’t be 10x the demand that they allocated.

It would definitely help to have to enter the code before going into the queue, but I would suspect that that is currently not doable with the way the site is designed.

PerryD

Madonna made you select your price range and what shows you were interested in, and then randomly selected people and completed the purchase a day or two later. Ticketmaster having you click on actual available seats on a high demand show is futile, then when invariably they have been taken by someone else, they recommend a new pair of tickets for you but don't bother to hold them for even a second, so you click buy immediately and you are rejected again. Just putting a 2 second hold on their recommendation would instantly solve the bottleneck, they can even place you into a separate queue and wait it out that way. The constant clicking for an hour doesn't make any sense for anyone involved.

dex14

Wow.

Obi-Wanma

Was the password a generic password or was it tied to your account? And if it was generic, I assume people were spreading it around.

John Galt

^^In other words, secondary prices are high enough that Taylor’s people will just sell the remaining inventory there.

Josh-da-man

At first I read it thought it said the tour was cancelled, and thought it was from a fake Ticketmaster twitter account with a blue checkmark.

Decker

The Fan Verified pre-sale codes were individual and tied to one account. I am not sure about my PSL pre-sale. That was just seven numbers (no letters) so I am not sure about that. Previously it was just a dumb obvious code like PSLSALE that everyone could share.
Anyway I am now feeling lucky that I've been able to snag tickets to two shows. It was expensive but I am not sure if I could get even mediocre seats for that price on the secondary market, which is something that I never would have expected.

John Galt

Definitely rethinking this after looking at the inventory out there. These shows should have 8,000-10,000 tickets on the secondary right now but none have more than 2,000 and some as little as 500. And there’s probably a lot of short sellers that still have to cover. For all the flack that Ticketmaster gets, it looks like they did a really good job getting tickets into fans hands. Now the fans that weren’t able to get tickets will really feel the effects of supply and demand.