Starting in September, Live Nation will offer “one clear, total price” for all shows at venues and festivals owned by the corporation
Starting later this year, there will be more clarity in the process of buying concert tickets through Ticketmaster and Live Nation.
After President Joe Biden called out “junk fees” and hidden fees on concert tickets throughout the past year, several ticketing companies including Live Nation Entertainment, which owns Ticketmaster, vowed on Thursday to start displaying all fees to customers upfront.
The new policy will roll out in September, said Live Nation in a meeting between ticketing companies and Biden on Thursday, according to a White House press release.
Rather than fans choosing a price point for tickets and being hit with several fees at checkout, Live Nation will offer “one clear, total price” for all shows at venues and festivals owned by the corporation. Additionally, Ticketmaster will offer the option for customers to see all fees upfront at all other shows.
Other companies that committed to more transparent ticket pricing during the meeting include SeatGeek and xBk.
“Today’s voluntary actions demonstrate that companies both big and small recognize the importance of providing consumers with honest, up-front all-in pricing, rather than tricking them with surprise fees at the end of checkout,” said the White House in a statement. “It is also just a first step towards addressing junk fees in the economy.”
The White House added, “The President continues to call on Congress to pass legislation that mandates up-front all-in pricing for all ticket sellers, bans surprise “resort fees,” eliminates early termination fees charged by cable, internet, and cellphone companies, and bans family seating fees.”
Pricing isn’t the only issue Live Nation and Ticketmaster have faced as of late. In November, after more than 2 million tickets were sold for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour through Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan presale, the company announced that a planned general sale for all other customers was canceled.
Shortly afterward, Ticketmaster issued an apology. The company explained its Verified Fan registration process, which is intended to help manage high-demand sales and weed out bots, and noted that more than 3.5 million people pre-registered for the TaylorSwiftTix Presale powered by Verified Fan, which was its largest registration in history.
The company sent codes to 1.5 million users to join the sale for all 52 tour dates. The two million remaining users were placed on a waiting list in case any tickets remained available.
Ticketmaster said that around 15% of users experienced issues, some of whom lost tickets they had carted. They blamed the “unprecedented traffic” on a “staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have codes,” with 3.5 billion total system requests, four times higher than its previous peak.
“The biggest venues and artists turn to us because we have the leading ticketing technology in the world — that doesn’t mean it’s perfect, and clearly for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour on-sale, it wasn’t,” the statement read. “But we’re always working to improve the ticket-buying experience. Especially for high-demand on-sales, which continue to test new limits.”
Swift then called out Ticketmaster, although she didn’t directly name the company in a statement that said that the chaotic presale “really pisses me off.“
“I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could,” Swift wrote on her Instagram Story. “It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department launched an antitrust investigation into Ticketmaster’s parent company Live Nation Entertainment, according to The New York Times.
Source: people
