From top: Grace Jones poster; Seatwave logo
Grace.
No favours.
Peter Prunty writes:
Trying to contain my rage as I type. I’ve often heard friends snip about the dubious mechanics of our main ticket retailer Ticketmaster, but I’ve never had much truck with them myself….until now!
Tickets for the utterly fabulous Grace Jones went on sale this morning at 9am. Having witnessed Our Lady’s previous two apparitions in Ireland in recent years, I logged in (at 8.58am) to purchase tickets.
Nervously I waited for the link to appear, as William’s Blood blared in the background. 9am….click. Nothing.
The only tickets available were Upper Circle. Surely there must be some mistake. I know Our Lady is a goddess but could the show really have all but sold out in less than a few seconds.
Disheartened, I was resigned to my fate..
But just as I was about to log off, I noticed that the good folk of Ticketmaster, while not being able to sell me a ticket, had a very helpful link to their sister website, Seatwave, where I could purchase tickets….for over double the asking price.
Seatwave to be clear is a Ticketmaster company, who allow ticket holders to resell tickets for well over retail price, for which Seatwave and by extension
Ticketmaster receive a handsome commission. So Ticketmaster are benefiting on the double off the backs of artists (and goddesses) and tainting their reputation. Outrageous…and in the case of Our Lady, I’d argue near blasphemous.
Alas, being of meagre means, I was not able to afford the double price tickets. So if any of your readers find themselves with a couple of tickets going spare (and at a reasonable rate) I would dearly appreciate it. And I’m sure Our Lady would approve.
Grace Jones tickets (Ticketmaster)
meanwhile…
#Seatwave tickets for Grace Jones will no longer be linked to for sale on @TicketmasterIre. Love to the fans.
— Blinder Films (@BlinderFilms) August 5, 2016
Toutless.com wil be your friend here. As for Ticketbastard, they’ve been scamming the public for years and getting away with it.
Had exactly the same experience here. No tickets available at 09:01 yet Seatwave has standing tickets at €470 for two.
I’m so disappointed. I’ve wanted to see her live for as long as I can remember.
So would you not pay €235 for that experience?
If I could I would. It was already costing me way more than the price of the tickets because I have to fly home for it and take time off work.
She scares me
She scares everyone. But she is fabulous.
dahling!
I know, it sucks but if they can sell them at the inflated price then that IS the tickets true value. I read a really interesting piece about the prices for the musical Hamilton in broadway- its wildly popular and tickets from touts regularly go above $1000 so the producers changed the pricing structure to react to it and to make some of the millions the touts were getting every year.
Worth a read:
https://hbr.org/2016/06/hamiltons-849-tickets-are-priced-too-low
Interesting. I think the scenario might differ along a scale when you have an investment product like a long-running Broadway show that needs backers with the attendant ‘fiduciary obligation’ mentioned in the article, or a big arena show like Springsteen and Swift, multiple nights from endless touring bands, and then varying degrees down to a solo performance by an artist in a small venue, where the latter may be more sensitive to accusations of gouging, despite the theoretical market rate. Would purely dynamic pricing be acceptable for all artists?
There are groups calling for regulation of the market e.g. https://appgticketabuse.wordpress.com/news-2/
Ultimately a compromise with more dynamic pricing of tickets (i.e. more expensive live shows) might work alongside efforts to stop gouging by ticket intermediaries.
Yeah Christopher, greed is good. Bleed them dry, right?
Oh Tish- read the article before you put words in my mouth. Thanxbai.
I feel for you and all, but lose the faux formal writing style. It’s painful to read.
I found it refreshing to read something well written.
It’s not well written. It’s contrived and pretentious, trying to appear well written.
And not a please or thank you anywhere in the letter which is typical of today’s self obsessive entitlement. People try and charm and smarm instead of asking for something clearly and simply with a ‘Please’ and then a ‘Thank You’ afterwards.
Thank you.
And all?
And all what?
Speak English you nit wit!
frilly keane has obviously ruined your standards of english
rofl
I tweeted ticketmaster
Would be worthwhile raising on their page too
They’d only masturbate frenziedly to any expression of customer anguish, though. They’re vermin like that.
As christopher said, the tout prices are closer to the genuine ‘market’ price. The fact is that artists are becoming aware that whilst a ticket to their gig might actually be worth, say, 200 quid, they don’t want to be seen to charge that in public, so they hold back a whole heap and bung ’em over to the secondary agencies, where they’ve now got plausible deniability.
Make no mistake, much as you’d like to gripe at Ticketmaster, they’re not actually the root cause of the problem. You can bitch about their fees and their charges, but ultimately, the divvying out of the tickets is at the behest of the promoter/artist/management, much and all as they’d like you to keep blaming TM.
I went to look for Paul Simon tickets recently. Three price tiers. 120, 96 and 76.
120 gets you a fairly decent seat. I checked what 96 quid would get me and it was five rows from the very back, so whilst the headline of ‘prices start at 76’ is a good one, there are evidently sod all of them.
Don’t go, she’s poo
agreed. i like her fearsomeness but her music’s unremarkable
Heh. Maybe it’s time to remove their plausible deniability. If they want the cash, let them ask for it.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123672740386088613
A Grace Jones ticket is a private, luxury good.
There are lots of other goods (housing, public transport) etc where we have all sorts of interventions to allow some level of equality of access.
I cannot see a better way of allocating tickets than to those who pay the most.
PS: The Olympia is a brilliant venue for rock/pop. From memory there seemed to be 50-odd gigs a year there back in the early 2000s. The problem is that it is small (one of the reasons why it is good) and the owner obviously does better these days by giving it over to panto or stand-up or whatever.
There’s an argument somewhere down the line though about access to the arts in general. It might even be one that some artists are willing to make.
You can see music for free almost any night of the week in Dublin. ‘The Arts’ gets lots of subsidies.
Quality, however is variable and taste is subjective.
You can get food out of refuse bins too.
The same caveat applies.
Yes that makes a lot of sense. Ticketmaster can’t be completely to blame for it/make a good fall guy, but they’re hardly a patsy either.
“never had much truck with”
*eye roll*
I liked how it was articulated.
it’s a misuse of the phrase and as for the fey Our Lady schtick … Jesus wept.
+ 10 4.
Scumbags. Ticketmaster is a greedy, evil monopoly. They have control of 90% of all venues and ticket promoters. They get away with charging their service fees, processing fees, etc. as well as the shenanigans Peter Prunty described above, and no one can do a thing about it. Pearl Jam tried to fight them and failed.
We should support local venues like the Sugar Club who hold amazing events with really great artists at very reasonable prices and they don’t sell through Ticketmaster.
Fupp Ticketmaster, they’re absolute ladyparts. As someone mentioned above, get on to Toutless and you may find some tickets at face value.
well why the hell don’t Pearl Jam come to Ireland? seriously?
even Eddie and his ukulele would be something…
EVEN? I’d happily listen to him singing the Into the Wild soundtrack. Hard Sun is one of my favourite songs.
Though I saw that PJ documentary. He’s a fierce dryballs. And a shortarse. I was dead disappointed.
They played the point a few years ago, a few times in fact I’ve seen them there
I has a similar experience recently where tkts to a show were gone almost instantly but the link to purchase them at twice the value via Seatwave was up straight away
The most annoying part was a second show was added to ticketmaster only hours late, meaning those who were naive enough to buy the inflated tickets via Seatwave needn’t have done so
Its a scam
Interesting philosophy: what ever you’re willing to pay either an official vendor or a tout, that is the true value of the ticket. Why bother with pricing structures?
It worked with houses.
The biggest scam is that Seatwave get an allocation of tickets, so it’s not actually traditional touts who are reselling the tickets at an inflated price but a Ticketmaster-owned company that’s doing it on an industrial scale.
toutless.com all the way!
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/feb/24/online-ticket-reselling-sleazy-capitalism
tickets go to secondary outlet from the promoter. Stop kidding yourselves that Ticketmaster are unilaterally doing this…it’s a circle jerk
Buy your tickets from a retailer such as Sound Cellar and you won’t pay the Ticketmaster commission.
Just from reading this I’m glad this person didn’t get the tickets.
It would be simpler if Ticketmaster had some kind of ebay-style bidding system where a week before the show you enter (privately) your maximum bid and tickets go to people in order of bid with everyone paying what the lowest successful bidder pays.
This would ensure that everyone has the same chance and if you’re being ripped off you know that the lady standing beside you is being ripped off too.
is the correct answer. It’s horrible, like, but if we’re going down the road that advertised prices aren’t really the market prices anyway…
Auctions are the most efficient and equitable way of selling certain types of goods. The internet makes them easier to hold.
People get into an awful lather about THE TICKET PRICE as if it was some kind of deity-transmitted number rather than the educated guess of a promoter just trying to fill her venue.
Yup. I don’t like it, but it’s the way things are going; in the 1970’s, The Rolling Stones would release an LP like Some Girls and make a ton of cash off the back of it, and go out on the road to sell a few more copies of it. The ticket price was roughly the same as the price of the album.
Nowadays, frankly, people* aren’t willing to pay fifteen quid for an album, but at the same time, Ed Sheeran will reckon that a bajillion plays on spotify of his last track netting him 40p isn’t sustainable either, so he’ll play a gig but the ticket price *now* is a multiple of the notional price of an album.
Of course, if he (for want of another artist) wants to keep topping up the pension pot, he needs to keep on playing and as he continues to return to these shores, the marginal utility fans get from another Ed Sheeran concert may diminish**, so in the long run, ticket prices to his gigs may fall as demand tails off***
A lot of acts, as they get more mature, won’t like yer auction thingy; that might bring home a few too many home truths as their, ahem, appeal becomes more selective.
* I am. But I’m an idiot.
** Springsteen is an exception; he’s played 4 sets of dates in Dublin AND an irish ‘tour’ in 2013 and still sells out.
*** In the long run we’re all dead, mind.
“Auctions are the most efficient and equitable way of selling certain types of goods”
But doesn’t that just mean rich people get all the good tickets? I think it probably does.
Surely the simple solution here is to just hold these shows in a larger venue if demand is that high. Ticketmaster would make even more money that way and everyone who wants to see her can, without feeling being ripped off by TM
We should all boycot Ticketmasters (those bastards) when possible.
For any shows at Whelan’s WAVticket.ie will send you your ticket (or offer you a printable ticket for a 50 cents commission).
Tickets.ie for sports events, theater plays and other events, is an outlet worth checking too.
For other venues around Dublin I would try to go myself to the box-offices in order to avoid the TM ‘s shameful racketeering….of course it is when you live in Dublin…
This is being filmed for her documentary. The producers don’t want just any old gays attending. There will be a disproportionate amount of guest list and VIPs for this show so that the producers can handpick the the finest gays and socialites in Dublin. The stage will be staged….
No riffraff….
Although his followers will be in attendance.
The audience will be 90% gays regardless. She is the original Gaga except with real talent. She has a two and a half octave vocal range. Amazing woman.
“the utterly fabulous Grace Jones”
ah, there’s your problem see.
” The only tickets available were Upper Circle “…..
Then why didn’t you buy them ? You had the opportunity to buy tickets, on ticketmaster, but you passed it up… Was it cause you felt entitled to a standing ticket ? or a better seat ?
Isn’t that what scalping is? Ticketmaster operating with Seatwave I mean. Extortionate behaviour! How is this legal?
I thought the Olympia was one of the only of the larger venues left where you could physically call to the box office to buy the paper tickets at face thus bypassing ticketbastard?
Wondering if that’s changed :(
Only suggestion is to camp on Toutless there’s usually a chance of success here
The whole seatwave thing is arse..I cannot understand how they do this legally, at best it’s false advertising
“I want to see Grace Jones but the only tickets available are Upper Circle.”
Won’t that dampen the acoustics?
“Utterly fabulous” makes the OP sound pretentious. Having said that, her Nightclubbing album is brilliant.
I checked out her show for ten mins at EP in ’08 but left as the tent was too packed.
I saw her at last years EP. During her final song she hula hooped for a solid 10 minutes – not bad for an old wan.
I treble dare you (tip me heel before ye) to go up to Ms. Jones and tell her she’s an oul wan!
She’s playing metropolis so no need to buy expensive tickets over he odds now.
expensive tickets over he odds now.
She’s playing metropolis now so no need to buy expensive tickets over the odds anymore.