… there are NO ticket presales for his Thursday, July 18 concert at Rexall Place, according to Live Nation.
NO presales for credit-card holders, fan-club members or VIP-package buyers.
ALL tickets will go up for grabs at 10 a.m. Friday, March 8 via Ticketmaster. (ALL except those tickets used in radio contests and other similar giveaways.) Prices range from $40.75 to $84.75 plus service charges.
Tix on sale Fri @ 10am for @brunomars #TheMoonshineJungleTour w/ @elliegoulding! #yyc, #yeg 18 & #yvr! No presales. bit.ly/UoCnAB
— LiveNationWestCanada (@livenationwest) March 5, 2013
UPDATE: Sadly, there was at least ONE presale. For Oilers gold club ticketholders. Started Tuesday, according to one of those ticketholders.
Still, the lack of all other presales makes Bruno Mars a refreshing anomaly in an industry increasingly geared to be as elitist as possible. If you ask me, presales only serve to give musicians an illusion of the fastest sell-outs possible. Consumers don’t really benefit by getting an early crack at tickets — OK, well, those who actually get tickets might think they benefit.
But those who don’t get presale tickets … and then strike out during the general onsale because the remaining tickets were snapped up in three minutes or less … THOSE are the consumers who end up angry OR trying to pay ridiculous amounts for seats on the resale market. (Which simply encourages the industry to keep raising ticket prices even higher so artists can make up some of the money lost on the resale market.) THOSE are the consumers who end up boycotting shows altogether or writing letters to the Journal, wondering how such seemingly unfair practices can be allowed to thrive.
These various presales, of course, are some of the reasons why “it’s so hard to buy concert tickets,” as BuzzFeed points out. They’re also a bone of contention for Fan Freedom, a group of consumer advocates in the U.S. who think artists and venues should let fans know how many tickets are allotted to presales.
Fan Freedom, by the way, is funded by StubHub, a resale ticketing site. The company’s main competitor, Ticketmaster, also has its own consumer protection group in the U.S., Fans First.
But, as Journal reader Jeff A. recently asked me, who’s going to protect Canadian fans from resale sites such as rexallplacetickets.com and concertboom.com? Both are offering hundreds of non-gold club seats at inflated prices to Bruno Mars’ July 18 show in Edmonton — and have been for days — even though Ticketmaster hasn’t started selling tickets, and like I said, there were no presales ’til Tuesday.
