When a person thinks of fighting a war, they picture World War 1 or Vietnam. In the modern day, the wars we see are different; it’s a war on Ticketmaster or any other ticket-selling site.
Fighting a war on Ticketmaster might seem like a strange sentence, but it is a true one. Ticket scalpers are the people who we fight against, and they are the enemies in the war. Ticket scalpers are people who will wait in a queue for tickets and buy up as many general admission tickets as possible, in order to resell them for much more.
Recently, Ethel Cain, a musician, announced that she will be going on tour and that pre-sale for the tickets would be on March 26 this year at 10 am. I already knew, when going into that day, that I would have to fight tooth and nail for those pre-sale tickets. I did lose the war to the ticket scalpers and it destroyed me.
I was in my APUSH class when the pre-sale tickets went live and I was trying my best to bring home those Cain tickets. I was in that queue my entire class period, and then I got to the checkout, and there were the words everyone hates: “General Admission- Sold Out”.
There were also reports of tickets being sold out in less than two minutes for different shows. This just goes to show how bad of a problem ticket scalping has gotten in recent years. You can wait in line for 10 minutes or an hour, then next thing you know you get to checkout, and you’re all happy, but then it turns out the Ticket Scalpers got a majority of the general admission tickets.
Ticketmaster is already notorious for its ridiculous additional fees, but that combined with the Ticket Scalper problem (which Ticketmaster facilitates) makes for a really unenjoyable experience.
The solution to this problem unfortunately is not as easy as everyone thinks. Sure, Ticketmaster could reduce the max tickets to one or two rather than six, but then what if there’s a large family who wants to go to a show together? The easiest solution that comes to mind is for Ticketmaster to better monitor those accounts that resell tickets 24/7 and deal with them accordingly.
Overall, Ticket Scalpers are a large problem that needs to be dealt with in order to provide the best concert experience possible for people who just want to go to the show.
