String Cheese Incident, of Boulder Colorado, fought a big and nasty and noble fight against Ticketmaster and their fees... here is how. SCI didn't want fans to have to pay $23 fees on a $60 concert ticket. As we learned from Pearl Jam's ugly and totally unsuccessful war against TM, you can't negotiate with them. Here is what SCI proposed to do. It used to be forever that there was only one way around Tm and their fees; you could go straight to the box office in person and avoid all fees. You only paid the face value of a ticket.
SCI said (I am paraphrasing here) since you won't negotiate with us, we are going to bankroll fans to go to the box office and buy up half the seats at face value. We will then buy those tickets back from them and sell them ourselves with only a $3 fee. This is beyond brilliant, it is also noble and crazy. If they felt they had the demand, they would buy 100% of the tickets for a show sending people to buy them in person and avoid all fees... then redistribute them ourselves. It is beating TM at their own game. How did TM respond? You can no longer avoid service fees by going to the box office. In fact, in researching ticket prices for an Iron Maiden show, I learned I had to pay MORE at the box office than if I bought them online. Wrap your head around that one.
Ok, now I have to bring this piece up. Consider this an annex to the appendix. This is tangent adjacent. I went to buy tickets for an Iron Maiden show. The $18 lawn seat cost me $32. I drove my ass to the box office (in the anecdote above) and found out there was no way for me to buy an $18 ticket. A month after I bought those tickets (but still a month before the actual concert) TM/Live Nation announced 'service fee free summer'. They so proudly let everyone know that for ALL shows at Fiddlers Green there would be NO fees. You fuckers! You did this after I (and most others) had bought tickets. I wanted my $14 per ticket back. I logged on to see if I could get a refund (I knew the answer would be no, but I was steaming bad) and the 'face value' for the tickets doubled. The day before they so generously announced no service fees, they bumped lawn seats up to $36 a piece.
It was now MORE expensive to buy the seats without the service fees. That is beyond evil.
