Industry: Concert-Ticketing Story Provides Second Excuse This Week To Run Wonderful C

[muzikfrk]

For its weekend edition, USA Today examines the higgeldy-piggedly world of concert-ticket sales--a world that some of our more well-connected, guest-listed readers probably haven't had to explore in some time. The good news is that good seats for in-demand shows are easier to snag nowadays; the bad news is that, in addition to premium prices, you have to navigate an increasingly confusing marketplace:

Take The Police, for instance. If you wanted to catch summer's hottest tour, you could have tried a front-row auction; a premium-seat auction; gold, silver or VIP packages; the fan-club pre-sale; the Best Buy Reward Zone pre-sale; or TicketExchange, a service that allows ticket holders to sell to other fans. Or you could have taken your chances with the general public sale.
And those were just the options through Ticketmaster.​

While the piece is ostensibly about consumer frustration, we were more intrigued by its moments of overly obsessive fan loyalty: There's the 58-year-old Clay Aiken fan who spent $400 for the chance to see his steely eyed heterosexuality in person, and the Police fan who spent $100 just to join the group's fan club and have the opportunity to spend even more on a ticket. For those of you on a tighter budget and can't afford to see live shows this summer, we repeat this advice: Take your artist's best album, put in on random, and then stand forty feet away in in the other room. Then hire some moronic 14-year-olds to distractingly text-messaging next to you while you drink from an $8 plastic bottle of Coors Light. It's the perfect way to re-create the concert experience!
The traps of shopping for concert tickets [USAToday]
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