Concert-Ticketing Story Provides Second Excuse This Week To Run Wonderful Clay Aiken-Related Picture

Brian Raftery | June 15, 2007 2:38 am

For its weekend edition, USA Today examines the higgeldy-piggedly world of concert-ticket sales–a world that some of our more well-connected, guest-listed readers probably haven’t had to explore in some time. The good news is that good seats for in-demand shows are easier to snag nowadays; the bad news is that, in addition to premium prices, you have to navigate an increasingly confusing marketplace:

Take The Police, for instance. If you wanted to catch summer’s hottest tour, you could have tried a front-row auction; a premium-seat auction; gold, silver or VIP packages; the fan-club pre-sale; the Best Buy Reward Zone pre-sale; or TicketExchange, a service that allows ticket holders to sell to other fans. Or you could have taken your chances with the general public sale.

And those were just the options through Ticketmaster.

While the piece is ostensibly about consumer frustration, we were more intrigued by its moments of overly obsessive fan loyalty: There’s the 58-year-old Clay Aiken fan who spent $400 for the chance to see his steely eyed heterosexuality in person, and the Police fan who spent $100 just to join the group’s fan club and have the opportunity to spend even more on a ticket. For those of you on a tighter budget and can’t afford to see live shows this summer, we repeat this advice: Take your artist’s best album, put in on random, and then stand forty feet away in in the other room. Then hire some moronic 14-year-olds to distractingly text-messaging next to you while you drink from an $8 plastic bottle of Coors Light. It’s the perfect way to re-create the concert experience!

The traps of shopping for concert tickets [USAToday]

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