Business News Live Business

Lots of Ticketmaster news: Credit ratings, secondary hassles, and mis-sold Phish tickets

By | Published on Thursday 26 March 2009

It seems someone at Ticketmaster slipped and pressed the button that made tickets for Phish’s upcoming show at the Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado available for purchase last week.

Tickets for the show are due to go on sale today, so fans were obviously thrilled to be granted early access and understandably started buying them up. Phish weren’t so pleased, though, and demanded that Ticketmaster cancel all the tickets and wait until the appropriate time to sell them. Ticketmaster have done that up, and given everyone who bought tickets a $50 gift voucher for the site by way of compensation.

A statement, published on Phish’s official website, said: “Last night we learned Ticketmaster mistakenly put on sale a substantial number of four-day passes to Phish’s concerts this summer at Red Rocks Amphitheater, giving some fans an unfair advantage to purchase tickets ahead of the 26 Mar publicly announced on sale date. Ticketmaster has fully acknowledged this significant error, and to make sure that all of our fans have the same, fair opportunity to purchase tickets to this event, they have cancelled all of these orders with all charges being refunded. … We are putting pressure on the ticketing providers to improve their systems. We are focused on the ticket broker activity in our tickets and the inability of the existing ticket systems to stop this. We are actively seeking options to limit this”.

In an email to all those who purchased the bad tickets, Ticketmaster president David Butler said: “The sale of these tickets prior to the scheduled onsale date was the result of an inadvertent error on the part of Ticketmaster. While we strive to be perfect, errors do occur, albeit rarely”.

It’s not been a great week for the ticketing giant, who have found themselves increasingly under the media spotlight since they began their merger with Live Nation, and as their dabbling into the secondary ticketing market come under increased criticism.

The previously reported financial statement from the ticketing firm, which admitted to an 81% decline in profits for the last quarter of 2008, and a considerable write down of the value of the company’s assets, has led to a downgrading of the company’s credit rating by influential New York analysts Standard & Poor. The analysts say that they think the ticketing firm will be impacted in the short term by a decline in ticket sales during the recession, and that the growth of its secondary ticketing business won’t fully compensate for that decline. Still, if the Live Nation merger goes ahead all of this might be a bit irrelevant, given the combined Live Nation/Ticketmaster will be a very different company.

Meanwhile, criticism of Ticketmaster’s dabblings in the secondary ticketing market continues. As previously reported, artists, music fans and political types have been critical of the way Ticketmaster promotes TicketsNow, the ticket resale site it acquired last year, via its primary ticketing website. The New Jersey District Attorney in the US forced a number of restrictions on that promotional activity after Bruce Springsteen claimed his fans had been ripped off by the ticketing giant, who had directed fans to TicketsNow – where touted tickets are normally marked up in price – when his official page on Ticketmaster website was too busy, and, as previously reported, similar moves are being considered by legislators in Canada.

Most recently, Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty has confirmed he wants similar restrictions on the way Ticketmaster promote TicketsNow, and that he’ll introduce laws to force such restrictions if the ticketing firm won’t voluntarily sign up to them. He’s told the Torono Star: “We’re just asking the folks at Ticketmaster to be reasonable. It appears that we are going to have to introduce legislation, and that’s what we’re prepared to do”.

Some are speculating that the whole TicketsNow thing is becoming too big a distraction – and PR nightmare – for Ticketmaster, who’d rather be concentrating on getting their Live Nation merger approved. So much so they may consider selling the ticket resale website off. That speculation, in turn, seemingly affected Standard & Poor’s credit rating decision. Certainly Ticketmaster’s secondary ticketing business wouldn’t help overcome declines in primary ticket sales if said business was sold off (over and above the quick cash boost any sale created, of course).



READ MORE ABOUT: