What’s a girl gotta do to get tickets to Phish at Red Rocks?
Mindi Larkin had a plan. She set her husband Patrick’s watch to the official atomic clock and left him at their Lakewood home to work the phones and computer. Then she headed out to the battlefield.
As Larkin stood, 11th in line in a nondescript, khaki hallway at the Southwest Plaza Macy’s near her house, she was antsy but unflappable.
“I’m keeping it real and positive, willing it to me, pulling on the secret,” Larkin said, anxiously looking at the frantic, if linear, mob scene around her.
It was 11:55 a.m. on March 26, and tickets for Phish’s four-night Red Rocks Amphitheatre stand were about to go on sale via Ticketmaster — at hundreds of outlets, multiple call centers and tens of thousands of Internet portals across North America. The last time Larkin waited in line for tickets, for Phish’s 2000 show at Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre, she got to the ticketing outlet early and scored second-row seats.
But now things are very different. The public attitude toward concert ticketing in North America has reached a fever pitch in the last few years, and it’s not just because concertgoers are still paying exorbitant “service” fees — the lion’s share of which are kicked back to the promoter, the venue and the artist.
For some A-list shows — think U2, Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus, Phish and Bruce Springsteen — it can be daunting for fans to buy tickets at face value. Why? Because the best seats are being auctioned by the band, the ticketing agency, or the venue to the highest bidder via secondary-market sellers. Because scalpers are more technologically savvy than ever. Because more people have access to go after these tickets the very second that they go on sale.
“It’s almost impossible to get tickets to these big shows,” said Scott Mefferd, who was second in line at Macy’s and one of only three people to score Phish tickets before they sold out in less than 10 minutes. “When my wife was trying to get through to (Ticketmaster’s) website, it never responded until it told her that the shows were sold out.”
Mefford paid around $434 for two four-day passes to see Phish at Red Rocks July 30-Aug. 2. Similar passes landed on eBay minutes after they went on sale, and last week it looked as though individual four- day passes were drawing around $1,000 each online — a more than fourfold increase.
Such a markup should be expected; this is after all, a recently reunited band playing a storied venue, said Billboard magazine executive editor Rob Levine.
“I genuinely admire Springsteen for trying to keep his ticket prices lower, but as soon as you start selling something for less than it’s worth, you create a situation where somebody is going to buy it and sell it for more,” Levine said. “Just like houses in Cherry Creek, they’re worth what the market will bear.”
Levine has noticed the recent uproar of frustrated Ticketmaster customers. But he thinks their concerns should be put into perspective.
“People get mad at this because they have an irrational attachment to concert tickets,” Levine said. “I wish people were as upset about the inequities in the health care system (as)they are about the inequities in the concert industry. The fact that rich people get better tickets to Miley Cyrus generates a lot of anger, but the fact that rich people get better health care doesn’t generate that much anger.”
A system that thwarts fans
Others argue that fans should be angry with Ticketmaster and the system that it has created — with artists’ help. With recording-industry revenue down significantly, artists and even labels are looking to increase their revenue on the road — and they are ultimately the deciding factor in setting ticket prices.
Sometimes, straight ticket revenues aren’t enough and artists — including Neil Diamond — have owned up to stripping an allotment of high-value tickets from the sale and immediately pushing them on “secondary market” sites that scalp them for what the market will generate.
“Between 15 and 20 percent of the tickets for any given building are held back for venue insiders, and those are usually the best seats,” said Don Vaccaro, the founder of secondary seller TicketNet . “It’s not the ticket brokers that create the problems. It’s the artists themselves.
“They sell a lot of these tickets on TicketExchange, a Ticketmaster product. A lot of other people get their hands on the best seats, and they don’t disclose it to the public that those seats are never for sale. If they would disclose that to the public, there would be a lot less irritation. A lot of the public wouldn’t even try to get tickets if they knew the best tickets weren’t there.”
That may be true, but the system still makes it incredibly difficult to score seats at the big-ticket shows. The collection of 40 people in line with Larkin a couple of weeks ago at Macy’s silenced as noon approached.
Gone in 11 minutes
When they heard a telltale noise — the first tickets printing, four-day passes for a young couple — it only added to the unease.
12:01 p.m.: “I hear tickets printing,” said Larkin, who had arrived at Macy’s at 6:30 a.m. only to learn that she would have to draw a lottery number at 11:30 a.m.
12:03 p.m.: With two four-day passes in his pocket, Mefferd hurried past his mates, almost looking ashamed. (He later told The Post: “I was definitely trying to contain my excitement.”)
12:05 p.m.: In the deafening silence, you could make out the words “Saturday” and “unavailable” from the ticketing counter. Larkin grimaced.
12:06 p.m.: Carlee Frazier, a Macy’s employee, walked by with the third pair of four-day passes sold at the store this morning. Some fans cried foul, given her association with the store selling the tickets. But Frazier later told The Post that she’d pulled her lottery number just like everybody else.
12:07 p.m.: A man behind Larkin, with a cellphone to one ear and a laptop cradled in his arms, said . was telling him to check back closer to the show’s date.
12:08 p.m.: Larkin texted her husband for an update.
12:09 p.m.: Patrick Larkin texted back: “Not looking good.”
12:10 p.m.: Overheard from the ticket desk: “That didn’t work. Let me try a single ticket.” A collective exhale swept through the line.
12:11 p.m.: A nicely dressed Macy’s employee appeared from behind the counter and said in her sweetest old- lady voice, “Sorry guys. They’re gone.”
A week after the sale of Red Rocks tickets, Mindi and Patrick Larkin had managed to purchase tickets to Phish’s Aug. 15 concert at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Maryland.
“It’ll be great, but I’m not giving up hope for Red Rocks,” Mindi Larkin said.
“I have to be there at Red Rocks. I just have to.”
Ricardo Baca: 303-954-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com
Some tips on scoring tickets for hot shows
Is there a sure-fire way to score face-value tickets to the hottest show of the year? Absolutely not. But here are words of advice from three folks who should know.
Don Vaccaro,
founder, TicketNetwork: “Make a call to the venue’s executive management (before the tickets go on sale) and ask them for the number of tickets that are going to be available to the general public. If enough consumers complain (that many of the best seats in the house aren’t for sale), they might start giving those numbers out.”
If you don’t succeed on the on-sale date, shop around in the flourishing “second market,” a fancy phrase for the scalping market.
“Shop multiple sites,” Vaccaro continued. You never know what might become available. “A lot of consumers buy tickets during the height of a show or event going on sale only to realize that they can’t use their tickets.”
Scott Mefferd,
music fan who scored two four-day passes to Phish at Red Rocks: Always check to see if the band is offering some sort of a pre-sale, Mefferd said.
“It was always a tradition since the (Grateful) Dead to do the presale mail-order tickets, and Phish has always done that, too,” Mefferd said. “I didn’t get lucky in Phish’s pre-order this time around, and so I sent a short, terse response to the automated system that told me I didn’t get tickets. They responded back to me and said the raffle is totally random and not based on location or ZIP code.”
Mefferd later scored tickets by picking a lucky lottery number at the Southwest Plaza Macy’s store, where only three people got tickets before the shows sold out.
Rob Levine,
executive editor, Billboard magazine: “It’s a good idea to be online and be on the phone at the same time. It increases your chances.”
Levine also said to be realistic about the quality of seats available.
“With Springsteen, the best tickets will sell by scalpers for $500 and more, so you might have to settle for bad seats,” he said. “But let me tell you, I’m a Springsteen fan, and seeing him from bad seats is a lot of fun. And the same goes for the Jonas Brothers. I am neither the right age or gender to appreciate them, but you can have fun no matter the seats.” Ricardo Baca
Ticketmaster’s money trail paved with fans’ frustrations
It’s been a tough, yet profitable, couple of years for Ticketmaster. Here’s a recap of the company’s recent newsmaking:
In October 2007, parents everywhere revolted against scalpers who snatched up all the Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus tickets from Ticketmaster, raising the prices as much as 500 percent. That preceded ongoing debacles over sales of Phish tickets, which hit Colorado in March when the tickets to the jam band’s four-night run accidentally went on sale a week early. Fans snatched them up, and then their orders were canceled. Ticketmaster apologized and offered $50 credits for each order that went through before the error was caught. Oops.
The news in February that Ticketmaster is proposing a merger with concert giant Live Nation didn’t help the company’s reputation among fans. The deal is currently being scrutinized by President Obama’s Justice Department. Concerns were raised last week when a Reuters story revealed a couple of close connections between Obama and the two companies, his one degree of separation from Live Nation board member Ariel Emanuel, a Hollywood manager and the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.
In February, Ticketmaster was caught redirecting Bruce Springsteen tickets to its “secondary market” site, TicketsNow, which basically scalps tickets fresh off the sales block and offers them at higher rates. Fans were outraged. So was Springsteen, who wrote a scathing open letter on his website, calling the proposed merger with Live Nation “the one thing that would make the current ticket situation worse.”
Later in February, Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff acknowledged in congressional hearings on the proposed merger that the company sells only about 80-85 percent of tickets to the public, keeping “the vast majority of the best seats in the house” for other interests, according to entertainment journalist Bill Wyman, who covered the hearings live on his blog, .
And let’s not forget the news that many artists, Neil Diamond included, take a chunk of premier tickets for each show and resell them at a higher value in the secondary market, often sharing the profits with Ticketmaster. Ricardo Baca
