I’m a HUGE fan of the service Ticketmaster provides. Yeah, it’s pricey, but before it became such a big deal (especially before online purchasing was a big deal), it was a huge hassle for me to get tickets to shows.
Sure, if you live right in the town where a show is taking place, you could have gone down to the box office at the venue or some other local brick and mortar store that served as a ticket sales agent for the venue and picked up a ticket whenever you wanted for face value alone. So it probably sucks a little now that so many venues pretty much force you into dealing with Ticketmaster and paying them for something that used to be simply obtainable for free.
However, I live about an hour and a half from the nearest city with most of the concerts I want to see. Before Ticketmaster made it so convenient, if I wanted to see a popular act, I had to rush to make an extra trip in a car all the way to the other city where the show was going to be held to buy the tickets and hope they hadn’t sold out before I was able to get there. Especially as a working person who often couldn’t make the trip until a weekend, that sucked big time. More than once, I was out the time and gas money wasted make an extra trip just to buy tickets only to get there and still not be able to get tickets because there were none left. Even when there were tickets to be had, it was still lame to have to burn two full trips to see one show. And shows very far away, like shows in Dallas, about 5 hours from where I live, weren’t feasible at all because I couldn’t have made two trips (or run the risk of showing up on show day in hopes of buying a ticket at the door and it being sold out, so I’d have made the trip for nothing). I could swing a trip that far occasionally for a fantastic show if it was just one trip and it was certain that I’d be seeing the show when I got there, but without Ticketmaster or some other service like it, it wasn’t something I could manage at all.
Now I can sit here at my comfy desk and order tickets as soon as they go on sale, no fuss, no hassle, no worry, no driving three extra hours minimum just to buy them.
They could definitely use some improvement, but I totally appreciate them blazing the trail.
