Ticketmaster will refund some of its fees to The Cure fans buying tickets for their US tour, after frontman Robert Smith contacted Ticketmaster over their “unduly high” fees that were, in certain cases, adding up to more than the price of a ticket, Upworthy reports. The Cure had purposefully kept tickets affordable, with some as low as $20, but fans had to pay the service fee of $11.65 per ticket and a facility charge of $10, plus an overall order processing fee of $5.50, adding up to more than the price of a ticket. “After further conversation, Ticketmaster have agreed with us that many of the fees being charged are unduly high, and as a gesture of goodwill have offered a $10 per ticket refund to all verified fan accounts for lowest ticket price (‘ltp’) transactions,” he wrote. Ticketmaster would also issue a $5 refund per ticket for any show on the US tour for all fans who bought more expensive tickets. The band had chosen to use Ticketmaster in order to combat scalping, but had declined to participate in the company’s dynamic pricing and Platinum ticket schemes as they did not want ticket prices to be “instantly and horribly distorted by resale”.

Pitchfork suggests "several approaches that ticketing companies, public policy makers, and the music community could follow to make buying concert tickets a slightly less infuriating experience:

• Stagger the presales for big tours
• Abolish surprise fees
• Unwind Ticketmaster’s merger with Live Nation
• Keep resellers in check
• Give artists a choice on dynamic pricing
• Remember the Bandcamp model, and that small can be beautiful."

Out of the pandemic and the shutdown, Trapital's Dan Runcie looks back at the ideas and trends that have started back at the height of the isolation age. He believes that some are destined to never achieve substantial success, such as Clubhouse, Bored Ape Yacht Club, artists immersed in digital environments, Community... A few might have a future - DEI initiatives that lead to real change, Verzuz, NFTs, while some are certain to stay - music rights sales and acquisitions, TikTok and short-form video, high prices for live entertainment...

General sale tickets for the UK leg of Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance‘ tour were made available yesterday (Tuesday, February 7), however her fans were met with huge queues, NME reports. Fans have reported experiencing glitches on the Ticketmaster website, with others saying they were kicked out of the queue, which reportedly reached 500,000 on some dates. Ticketmaster has since clarified that reports of ‘403’ messages actually refer to the blocking of “known bad traffic”, adding that the site “blocked 1.5million requests of that type today in the London queues alone to ensure real fans get their hands on ticket

Tickets resellers have started posting listings for tickets for Beyoncé's Renaissance tour for as much as $3,000 a ticket, although they don't actually have them, Rolling Stone reports. Some of the best seats for Beyoncé’s So-Fi Stadium show in Los Angeles in September are selling for $3,064 per ticket on VividSeats. The cheapest were listed at $570. This isn't the first such case - tickets for Fall Out Boy’s 'So Much For (Tour) Dust' Tour were listed on resale sites the day before the official start of sale for hundreds of dollars a ticket.

It's obvious, but still, Global News' Alan Cross manages to create one more drop of sadness with his nostalgic blog post about the extinction of paper-tickets: "Collecting concert ticket stubs will soon be extinct, much like the notion of B-sides, liner notes, and album artwork. Instead, our memories will be preserved as selfies taken at our seats or video recordings of the gig that we never watch. Yes, there are T-shirts, programs, and an endless supply of tchotchkes at the merch tables, but they all cost money. A ticket stub came with its own memories built into the cost".

"The practise of ticket touting is once again an issue for the dance music industry — this summer, tickets are on sale for more than 10 times their original price on reselling sites like Viagogo" - DJ Mag points out, and investigates how can promoters, venues and artists create meaningful change on this issue.

Live Nation announced a run of new $20 “all in” ticket prices for nearly 1,000 outdoor amphitheater shows in the US taking place this year, Music Business Worldwide reports. Artists who will be playing shows under the $20 ticket offer include the Jonas Brothers, Kings Of Leon, Zac Brown Band, Trippie Redd, Maroon 5, Alanis Morissette, Lil Baby, KISS, and Korn. The $20 tickets will be available to the general public starting next Wednesday, July 28th at 12pm ET/9am PT on LiveNation.com for a limited time only.

Ticket-holders for the cancelled SXSW 2020 were offered to defer their registration to 2021, 2022, or 2023 and to purchase registration for another of those years at 50% off. Not everybody is happy with it, as Billboard reports. Plaintiffs Maria Bromley and Pauta Kleber, who claim to have spent over $1,000 each on attending SXSW 2020, filed the suit against SXSW. According to Bromley and Kleber’s lawsuit, SXSW informed both plaintiffs that the offer to transfer their registration to a future year expires on April 30, 2020, and that SXSW “cannot be certain that future festivals will occur.” Their complaint reads - “SXSW has, in effect, shifted the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic onto festivalgoers … individuals who in these desperate times may sorely need the money they paid to SXSW for a festival that never occurred”.

Live Nation has updated its concert refund policy, enabling fans to get a full refund for the event no matter if it was cancelled or if it was postponed, New York Times reports. Fans who want a refund for a cancelled event, they will automatically receive a refund. If the show has been rescheduled, however, fans must request a refund within 30 days of the new show date being announced. Otherwise, tickets for the postponed event will be automatically valid for the new date. "Ticket Relief Plan" officially goes into effect on May 1, when ticket-holders will begin getting emails from Live Nation. Visit Live Nation's ticket refund website here.

Dean Budnick, co-author of Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped, shared some ideas with Inside Hook about how to prevent ticket-scalpers from inflating concert tickets. Radiohead have limited ticket sales to individuals and forced concert-goers to match tickets with identification. Grateful Dead sold 50% of the tickets to their shows through their own mail-order service and limited the number of tickets that folks could purchase. Taylor Swift started a slow-ticketing model - she meted out tickets to a given show in the weeks and months leading up to a show so that fans knew they wouldn’t have to resort to the secondary market. One of the solutions is to limit the ability of folks to purchase tickets to shows within a certain geographic range.

Rage Against the Machine have stopped approximately 85% of ticket scalping with the release of the not-quite-as-overpriced official charity tickets. A part of their plan to combat ticket scalpers is setting aside a tenth of the tickets at each venue of their upcoming tour to “resell” themselves at a higher price, but still less than what scalpers are charging. The band then gives that extra money to charity rather than lining the pockets of ticket resellers. According to Tom Morello's tweets, RATM raised over $3 million raised for charity in the first couple of days

Two of the UK’s most prolific ticket touts, Peter Hunter (51) and David Smith (66)- trading as Ticket Wiz and BZZ, have been found guilty of fraud - they used software to harvest tickets and resell them for profit. Hunter and Smith used multiple identifies and bots to buy £4m worth of tickets to events including gigs by Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift as well as West End shows such as 'Harry Potter and the Cursed Child'. The pair sold them on secondary ticketing websites for £10.8m. Ed Sheeran's manager Stuart Camp gave evidence in December when he told the jury he had spotted £75 seats for a charity gig on sale for £7,000.

The reunited Rage Against the Machine have announced that they’re doing what they can to keep scalpers and broker sites from ripping their fans over tickets for their reunion tour. RATM say that "at many concerts, up to 50% of the seating is scooped up by scalpers and then resold to fans at much higher fees" (some tickets were already being sold for $400), so they decided to do "everything we can to protect 90% of the RATM tickets from scalpers”, adding "WE are holding in reserve 10% of the seating (random seats throughout each venue) to sell at a higher ticket price (but low enough to undercut the scalpers)”. They will be donating “100% OF THE MONEY over the fees and base ticket price to charities and activist organizations IN EACH CITY”, and they also plan to donate the profits from their first three concerts to immigrants’ rights organizations.

Secondary ticketing firm Viagogo has struck a deal to buy its rival StubHub for $4bn, a deal that would create a global ticketing giant in the booming live-events business. Geneva-based company Viagogo is buying its rival from eBay, which bought StubHub in 2007 for $310m. Viagogo's boss Eric Baker will be reunited with StubHub, which […]

Tape conversation between Live Nation president of U.S. concerts, Bob Roux, and longtime Metallica associate Tony DiCioccio revealed that they conspired to place up to 88,000 concert tickets directly on the resale market. Billboard reports the recording was made in February 2017, shortly before Metallica launched their WorldWired tour in North America. Metallica wasn't the only […]

Why are promoters hiking their ticket prices up so much, and how much do the artists have a say in setting ticket prices? - NME asks after The Who announced they will charge 200 pounds for better tickets for their Wembley concert. Gideon Gottfried from Pollstar points out that artists rarely make money from albums […]