Fans frustrated by resellers after AC/DC sells out in four minutes

When tickets to AC/DC’s November concert at GM Place went on sale Friday morning, Annette Romano and thousands of others were poised at their computers, ready to click for tickets.

The $99 tickets went on sale at precisely 10 a.m. on Ticketmaster’s website, but within minutes, Romano was receiving a message indicating she was out of luck.

“I thought my computer was malfunctioning. I couldn’t even get one seat in the nosebleeds,” Romano said Monday in an interview.

The Vancouver show sold out in four minutes, according to promoter Live Nation. The news was announced Friday in a mass e-mail sent out just 25 minutes after the tickets went on sale.

But while the quick sellout is good news for the promoter and for Ticketmaster, it has caused mass frustration among those who were unable to get tickets.

Chief among those frustrations is the fact that while all the $99 tickets were snatched up in minutes, resale tickets were available equally as fast on the ticket exchange portion of the Ticketmaster website for nearly $500. And on Monday, tickets were going for as much as $1,318 each.

At TicketsNow, a ticket-reselling website that is also owned by Ticketmaster, tickets were available Monday for between $400 and $1,070.

For the average music fan who just wants to rock out to Thunderstruck, that’s too much.

“I’ll just pop in a DVD,” said a defeated Romano.

The increasing presence of online scalpers and ticket resale brokers is making it more and more difficult for average fans to elbow their way into the fray. Between fan club pre-sales, radio promotions, and resale brokers, Romano believes fewer tickets are being released for direct sale.

No one from Ticketmaster was available Monday for comment and Live Nation is not willing to comment on the matter.

But Murray Pratt, vice-president of business development and operations for ShowTimeTickets.com, said it is an issue of supply and demand.

“The AC/DC tour is probably one of the most sought-after tickets in North America,” Pratt said Monday in an interview.

ShowTimeTickets.com is an online ticket broker that acquires tickets from those who want to sell them and resells them to eager fans.

“Our particular expertise is, being in the business for 20 years, we have relationships out there with people who are season-ticket holders. We have relationships with people who want to sell tickets to us.”

Pratt could not say definitively whether Canucks season-ticket holders were able to get pre-sale tickets for AC/DC, but he said they often get early offers for concerts.

According to ShowTimeTickets.com, ticket reselling is a $5-billion industry that is forecast to grow at a rate of 12 per cent per year over the next five years.

Ticketmaster paid $265 million for TicketsNow when it bought the company earlier this year. And eBay bought StubHub, another leader in the ticket resale market, for $310 million.

But it is the deal between Ticketmaster and TicketsNow that is particularly troubling for those who feel they have been shut out of the year’s hottest concerts or sporting events.

Tyler Anderson, an AC/DC fan who could not get a ticket first-hand from Ticketmaster, wrote The Vancouver Sun with the following comment:

“It’s time for the government to step in and either outlaw scalping altogether or at least put some rules in place so they can only charge so much more for tickets.”

Pratt said British Columbia does not have any anti-scalping legislation and noted that many jurisdictions with legislation are abandoning it in favour of allowing ticket resales.

Saskatchewan’s provincial government, however, expressed concern in July about the scalping issue when people were enraged by the huge markup in ticket prices at TicketsNow for an Elton John concert in Saskatoon.

On its website, Ticketmaster says it does not hold back tickets for resale on TicketsNow.

But TicketsNow does generate revenue from its ticket sales, tickets which it says are supplied by more than 800 professional ticket resellers who are regularly monitored to ensure their reliability.

Ticketmaster says on its website that it can sell more than 14,000 tickets per minute. Concert capacity at GM Place is about 15,000.

aobrian@vancouversun.com

Best Value AC/DC tickets available here.

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