For me, that’s the irony. I sincerely wouldn’t mind paying fees if their service was commensurate. But given that preshows are always a shitshow and they’re never available to help if you need it I just have no patience for Ticketmaster screwing me and then not bothering with any kind of service.
I think you mistake who their customer is. Their customer is not the ticket buyer–their customer is the venue (or promoter, musical group, etc), who buys the ticketing service from them. They care very much about this customer. So much, in fact, that I understand that a chunk of that hated surcharge gets returned to the venue as some sort of ‘kickback’. This makes venues reluctant to switch to cheaper services, as a smaller surcharge means a smaller or no kickback, which impacts their bottom line.
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Why would they care about customer service? They’re effectively a monopoly. Being a monopoly means you don’t have to give a shit anymore and can charge whatever you want. As long as there aren’t too many unpurchased seats at a venue they don’t have to care at all about your feelings.
The unfortunate downside to this redesign it that it will force Ticketmaster to impose an additional $3.00 convenience charge to cover costs related to making tickets legible.
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FTFY:
I received my Welcome to Night Vale tickets from Brown Paper Tickets, and couldn’t be happier. The service charge was 7.5% of the total ticket costs (compared to upwards of 30% from TicketMaster), and am happy with the aesthetic design of the tickets. They also printed and shipped them to me for free.
Brown Paper Tickets calls themselves “The Fair-Trade Ticketing Company,” and it seems like their rates are reasonable enough that venue, performer, nor audience member are left with the short end of the fee stick. You can read all about their services and policies here.
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You dealt with hundreds of identically-formatted tickets. Of course you knew where all the relevant information was.
That doesn’t change the fact that the information is presented in a horrible way to everyone else.
These sort of naive and unsolicited redesigns do a disservice to actual designers – you know, the people who talk to constituents and understand the goals of a project before coming up with a solution. I’m going to take a guess that “aesthetically pleasing to ushers” is pretty far down the list of things that matter to TicketMaster.
The address of the venue is identical in the redesign. All of the relevant information is there. It’s amazing how people just try to pick holes.
Edit: If you look at the big set of TicketMaster tickets, you’ll see that the venue address is almost always just the name of the place. In the example pictured in the post, the venue name happens to include “99 Grove.” If a venue chose to be represented in that way, it could easily fit on the redesign.Most of the TicketMaster tickets pictured that are for a big venue, like the SAP Center, San Jose, only give the venue name.
Become the master? This guy likes Imagine Dragons. He’ll be lucky to become a middle-school girl.
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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.
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“It’s amazing how people just try to pick holes”
That’s what happens to design. Maybe you’re not a designer? If you were you’d know that. Good design is born of ruthless critique. One very basic critique is, “is this necessary?” The answer is in this case, “meh, not really.”
Let me just say this -
Met a woman who saw Led Zeppelin when Robert Plant’s hair was all the way down to his butt - early 70s.
Cost? $7
Because that’s just the way it was. That’s what people really wish would come back, and what Ticketmaster killed.
Oh yeah,and as far as the redesign - dudes, RFID is such a better way to handle the whole mess.
I care less about their ticket design than their ticket prices. Any event that uses ticketmaster has significantly less chance of seeing my money than if they using any of the more reasonably priced ticketing services.
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Sports teams have been doing this for years. This guy didn’t do anything innovative. Hell he probably saw them and just reoriented the ticketmaster design to reflect them.
Will Pointless Everything still honor my Family Pass? We go to Pointless Everything every year, sometimes twice a year. The kids just love trying to give each other paper cuts with the Pointless Everything tickets; they’ll be dismayed.
My contempt for TicketBastard knows no bounds.
Event fee: $35.00
Convenience fee: $5.00
Service charge: $7.00
Building facility charge: $10.00
Processing charge: $12.00
Early bird fee: $4.00
Late enter fee: $3.00
PDF printing fee: $5.00
Ticketless paper fee: $6.00
Ticket redesign fee: $7.00
Thanks, jerk.
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