Everton choose Ticketmaster as new ticketing partner

They charge a handling fee and are a nightmare to deal with, any problems and you'll wait hours to get through. I speak from personal experience in buying concert tickets.

Will our long-suffering fans now be faced with a 50% Chairman Bill surcharge, I wonder, when they are confronted with their Ticketmaster final bill?

This deal has Chairman Bill's oily paw marks all over it.

*The Break Up Ticketmaster coalition, which for months has been advocating for antitrust measures to separate Live Nation and Ticketmaster through antitrust measures, called the announcement ” a half-hearted attempt to ward off a looming DOJ investigation into addressing the real issue — its monopoly power over live events.”

“Our own research has shown that Live Nation-Ticketmaster wields its market dominance to charge exorbitant fees on top of the actual ticket, with multiple reports of fees that cost more than a ticket itself,” the coalition said. “Make no mistake: Being fully transparent about extorting consumers is still extortion in an anti-competitive market. Breaking up Live Nation-Ticketmaster is necessary to restore competition and fairness to event-goers, artists, independent venue owners, and the entire live events industry.”

This the man who has written about the blue collar worker most of his life - hypocrite "I just want what the rest have " Springsteen said and it took him months to say that.

He and his management should have done what Robert Smith did and call Ticketmaster out - fans of the Cure were sending him examples of the fee's being charged on tickets for their tour in the states, on many occasion the fee's were more than the fucking ticket price.
Ticketmaster are the leading experts in their field and get away with treating people like shite.
I despise them - rant over.

Nowadays it’s probably described as a “Value-adding business”. In the day, it would have been known as “Spivery”.

Another horrible practice they employ these days is when you try to buy tickets to a concert (or soon, an Everton match), the first results you'll see are resale tickets at inflated prices. They are obviously making even more money off the resales – despite having collected their fees on the original sale – and it takes a bit of digging to get to the still available (ie, not resale) tickets at face value.

Used to have a t-shirt with the Ticketmaster logo but it said Ticketbastards, got it in the parking lot scene at a Dead show in the 90s. Pretty much sums it up, horrible company to get into bed with although they do know how to sell tickets. Make no mistake, they'll be doing better out of this deal than EFC or else they wouldn't be involved.

It's an industry that is ripe for disruption, although so far I'm only aware of one company - Dice - who sell gig tickets without mark-ups. Pity Everton couldn't have gone into partnership with them rather than Ticketmaster but then, oh joy, we'll be able to see 3D rendering of restricted views at Goodison and the half-built Bramley Moore Dock.

Fuck you Everton.

There is no reason with modern computation that the club (or any large club) can't do ticket sales in house at a reasonable cost, ensuring the actual best outcome - that of Everton fans reliably receiving tickets at face value.

Of course when you have oily robbing operations adding big markup there's probably a little back-end sweetener available i.e. the handling cost saving plus a "hidden" effective rise in the ticket price for the club - without there being a stated ticket price rise.

Purely my speculation as I don't know the terms, but...

Oliver, the whole dynamic pricing concept is a growing large corporate concept across many fields. You can guess who it invariably benefits.

Swift

A couple of videos about Ticketbastards

The Fanatics deal expires this summer after 14 – FOURTEEN – years. I went into the L1 store yesterday, it resembled the Marie Celeste, the upper floor was closed and everything was at full price.

Contrast that with the Liverpool store virtually next door, which was rammed, but had big sale signs over the window. Yet every day I get an email from the club telling me about huge discounts on kit – they are still selling orange sash Cazoo away shirts, for fuck's sake.

Surely it is not beyond the wit of man to divert some product to a sale floor in Liverpool One.

Sodexo, in spite of the fact that the attendance for each home game is pretty much the same, still fail to have hot food in the Lower Bullens at half time.

Now if we have 30,000 plus season tickets and a waiting list reputed to be approaching 20,000, how hard can it be to sell the few remaining tickets? God help us when TicketMaster get their grubby mits on the allocation of away tickets. I just cannot wait.

Finally, and this has been festering for a few weeks now, we had possibly the largest event in Europe this year in the city. My family came to experience the Eurovision atmosphere, which was great, but my son-in-law – a Spurs fan – asked me if Everton had already gone out of business.

As we walked around the city, chatting with people from all over Europe and beyond, there was advertising and concession stalls for Liverpool everywhere, not one for Everton.

Rather naively, I did think that we might have had a huge Ukraine flag draped over the new stadium, something on the Liver Buildings where our admin offices are, we do have a Ukraine player on the books. But nothing, nada, zilch, nishcho!!!

Well done, Everton, for completely ignoring the biggest opportunity you will have to widen awareness of the original Liverpool football team. Absolutely brain-dead — the lot of them.

You've touched a nerve.

I still can't get served by the restart in the Upper Bullens. Maybe it's my face. Maybe I leave it too late, because I won't leave until the whistle goes.

Our marketing is shocking. Forget Liverpool 1. Forget the justifiable complaints from the US cohort about not being able to find an Everton shirt. I can't even find one in London.

We haven't projected ourselves outside of the city or nearby region.

I don't necessarily want us to become a Liverpool or Manchester United, but we have to have national and global reach.

Why does everything have to go up in price?

I'd rather buy off a tout outside the ground like the good old days. You've got more chance of getting any customer service off some scally than you have TicketMaster. Yet another own goal by the powers that be.

You can't buy an Everton shirt at John Lennon Airport — how bizarrely ridiculous is that?

I think you may understand my stance on the ticket distribution, when I claim that the seeds were planted when the Premier League and Sky TV claimed possession of football.

I cannot deny that there have been many improvements in the game, but this is when I adopt my Dinosaur outlook. All-ticket games were few and far between at Goodison, it was the norm to pay at the gate.

While Everton had supporters from North Wales, Ireland, and local areas, visiting fans were not as evident as they are today. Segregation was introduced in the mid-60s, and my first memories of violence include Manchester United and Millwall fans.

I have attended many games that were pay at the turnstiles, with plus 60,000 or 70,000 spectators attending. I'm afraid that fans like yourself would have found it hard to make the journey, because the motorways in that era were in their infancy.

So I suppose it's true to say that there is no 100% method' to meet the demand. I look forward to meeting up with you again in the near future.

But as the summer rolls on, the major changes in leadership still aren't completed and the spiral of uncertainty runs on.

The board must be in place and a new chairman, asap. Sean Dyche delivered last season but spinning too many plates at board level and seemingly not competing in the transfer market will make the new season challenges even tougher. Miracles, yes, but alone they can't resolve the problem.

No more near misses please, Everton, deliverance and reset and a fresh start is needed now.

UTFTs!

Why are we using this outfit? We don't need them.

Can't Everton sell their own tickets? 

Wait and see how prices to get into our new stadium rocket after they take their "cut"…

These people are profiteers. Remember years back when Pearl Jam and quite a few other famous bands refused to use them?

This is the thanks we get for our brilliant and continued support.

No idea who it currently is but I can only think it's a few more pounds in the bank.

Just not sure who's bank!