I've always wondered how Ticketmaster managed to get a monopoly on ticket sales and basically have no competition. If you want to go to a concert, you pretty much have no choice but to use Ticketmaster, which then hits you with surplus charges as a "convenience fee". What's the convenience when you only have one option? I know anti-trust/monopoly lawsuits have been thrown at them, but ticketmaster still exists as your only option for concert tickets unless you want to wait and get them from a secondary source, which basically means ticketmaster got a fee and know you get to pay marked up prices. Anyway, I guess now it's even worse with this new thing called TicketsNow which is part of Ticketmaster....and supposedly Ticketmaster may merge with Live Nation...great :( Supposedly, Ticketmaster reserved some of the tickets for the Springsteen concert to go to TicketsNow which then marked them up above face value...so even though there were still face value seats available, Ticketmaster sent the seats to a secondary site at higher costs to the fans. Springsteen got mad and wrote an open letter condemning Ticketmaster's acts. Ticketmaster apologized and refunded the differences, I guess that's why you don't mess with a dude they call the Boss. Or as the Idolater put it, "Translation: Please don't say the word 'antitrust' too loudly, Bruce. Please? The public opinion about our merger is bad enough, but we really need this to happen, otherwise we're screwed."
Read the article on the Idolater about the whole situation, it's pretty interesting.
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