Ticketmaster to be more transparent about ticket fees

nme.com:

the subject of a recent hearing in the US Congress which examined the issues with the ticketing market that contributed to a well-publicised fiasco relating to the pre-sale of Taylor Swift’s upcoming ‘Eras’ tour.Tickets for the tour went on sale in November and saw thousands of fans reporting lengthy wait times, website outages, and hyper-inflated prices on resale sites (including Ticketmaster’s own).

The ticketing company later admitted it buckled under the “historically unprecedented demand” they faced from Swift’s fans before cancelling the general sale.President Joe Biden recently called on ticketing companies to limit such fees, often called “junk fees”, that are added to ticket prices which he said “can easily add hundreds of bucks to a family’s nights out”.Now, according to Billboard, the President and CEO of Live Nation – Ticketmaster’s parent company – Michael Rapino said to investors on a recent call: “We all want to know what is the true cost to see the show when we start shopping, adding that he wanted transparent pricing to be “mandated tomorrow across the board” which would “relieve a lot of the stress [and] the consumer’s perception that there’s this magical extra fee added on.”“We’ve got to now go out and do a much better job so policymakers and consumers understand how the business operates,” he added.““We’ve historically not had a big incentive to shout out loud that venues are charging high service fees or artist costs are expensive.