| All the arts are about getting your s*** out. And getting it out in a way that, if you're lucky, is gonna create a path for someone else to work through their s***. |
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 | | The Roots at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind., April 16, 2008. | | (Paul Warner/WireImage/Getty Images) | | |
| quote of the day |
| "All the arts are about getting your s*** out. And getting it out in a way that, if you're lucky, is gonna create a path for someone else to work through their s***." | | - Black Thought | |
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What the Price
How it started. How it's going.
Today we catch up on a busy February's worth of stories on tickets and ticketing—stories from a month in which attention shifted from TAYLOR SWIFT and BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN to BEYONCÉ, whose RENAISSANCE tour went on sale with fewer hiccups than other recent megatours, but all the same dollar signs. As of Tuesday, you could still find "verified resale" floor seats in GIANTS STADIUM for just shy of $5,000 through TICKETMASTER, and similar seats for upwards of $6,000 on SEATGEEK. The latter will also happily sell you secondhand nosebleeds for prices like $715 and $867, though it's hard to imagine there's a Beyoncé fan anywhere in the world who has that much money and is willing to sit in those seats. The relevant question in that case isn't who's getting ripped off for a seat in section 318, but who's being blocked from sitting there.
If you waited till the last minute to see Bruce Springsteen Tuesday night in Tulsa, you could have scored seats behind the stage for a rock bottom $6, a fact that people who think the system is just fine have been giddily trumpeting. Those Beyoncé nosebleeds will no doubt be available for a lot less, too, come July. But that won't help the verified fans, the passionate fans, the ones who went through the whole Ticketmaster rigmarole on day one, or the scalper rigmarole on day two (or, um, day zero), and paid a hefty premium for their trouble. And it won't help the Springsteen fans who want to sit in front of the stage, or couldn't get to Tulsa. The $6 ticket may balance out the $6,000 ticket in the bank account of the scalper trying to turn a profit, but it won't do a thing for those early-bird super fans. And it doesn't appear to have changed any minds at the Springsteen fanzine BACKSTREETS, a bible for Boss fans that covered his every musical move for 43 years but announced three weeks ago it's going out of business because of his ticket prices. "These are concerts that we can hardly afford; that many of our readers cannot afford; and that a good portion of our readership has lost interest in as a result," editor CHRISTOPHER PHILLIPS wrote. When you've lost the crowd that's been publishing a magazine about you since the 1980s, you might want to pause for a moment and reflect.
So. Many. Entities. To. Blame. The SENATE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE deserves praise for airing out a lot of these issues during its January hearing on competition in the ticketing market. But it didn't air out all of them, and its pointed tweet @Ticketmaster on Beyoncé's on-sale day (is that how government now works?) was weird in the sense that it wasn't accompanied by another tweet @SeatGeek (or any number of other resellers). It's going to be hard to fix the system without addressing... the system.
If senators AMY KLOBUCHAR and MIKE LEE, who ran that hearing, are in Los Angeles this morning, they might consider dropping in on the POLLSTAR LIVE conference, where at 9:45 am IRVING AZOFF will moderate a "Ticketing Real Talk" discussion with MADISON SQUARE GARDEN chairman/CEO JAMES DOLAN, former US assistant attorney general MAKAN DELRAHIM and stadium tour veteran GARTH BROOKS. One imagines the panel would have as many questions for them as they would for the panel. (No current Ticketmaster employees will be on that panel, but one will be in the room a couple hours later for a separate discussion on "What's Going On in Ticketing?," which promises to drill down into some of the technology and logistics behind that real talk.)
Rest in Peace
R&B singer CHUCK JACKSON, best known for the early 1960s hits "Any Day Now" and "Tell Her I'm Not Home"... Manga/anime artist LEIJI MATSUMOTO, who collaborated with Daft Punk on several videos and the film "Interstellar 5555."
| | - Matty Karas, curator | |
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 | | Rolling Stone |
| | No, Those $1,800 Zach Bryan Tickets Aren't Legit | | By Ethan Millman | | "Any tickets offered on resale sites are either fraudulent or will not be honored at the show," a rep for tour promoter and ticketer AEG told Rolling Stone after tickets to Bryan's tour showed up on the secondary market. | | |
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 | | Complex |
| | These Documentary Filmmakers Are on a Mission To Elevate Hip-Hop Storytelling | | By Ecleen Luzmila Caraballo | | Karam Gill and Daniel Malikyar are the twentysomethings behind the Lil Baby documentary, "Untrapped," Migos' "Ice Cold" series, the City Girls' first docuseries, and "G Funk." For the last seven years, the in-sync yet diametric dynamic duo has steadily and quietly worked to be the industry's top music doc guys, and now, they've arrived. | | |
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 | | Complete Music Update |
| | 90% of tickets on Viagogo sold by commercial touts, says New Zealand Commerce Commission | | By Chris Cooke | | New Zealand's Commerce Commission this week told the High Court in Auckland that 90% of the tickets sold via often controversial secondary ticketing platform Viagogo are put on sale by professional touts. It also revealed that the consumer rights regulator has received 1300 complaints or communications about the ticket resale site. | | |
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 | | Resident Advisor |
| | How to Launch a Web Radio Station | | By Niamh O'Connor | | Five radio stations--Dublin Digital Radio (ddr.), Rádio Quântica, Oroko, Skylab and Threads--provide some tips on how to do it yourself. | | |
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 | | Bandsplaining |
| | The Meltdown of Russia's Music Scene | | Since the war with Ukraine, dissenting Russian bands have been "canceled" en masse, including many of the scene's original founders. Bands who faced censorship, harassment and intimidation during the Soviet days are now experiencing the same thing some 40 years later. | | |
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| what we're into |
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| Music | Media | | | | | | Suggest a link  | | "REDEF is dedicated to my mother, who nurtured and encouraged my interest in everything and slightly regrets the day she taught me to always ask 'why?'" |
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