The ‘Overwhelming Majority of Ticket Buyers’ Are Pleased

I’m upset by the criticism Ticketmaster has received lately from people who don’t understand the business or how it has evolved, and who can’t see how much better ticket-purchasing is today than in years past. Ticketmaster would not be as successful as it is, were it not providing a service and a convenience people wanted.

Music Plus has been in business for 17 years. Our success is based on our philosophy of providing customers with service and value. We would not associate with a company whose philosophy and attitude toward the consumer is not consistent with ours.

In the nine years Music Plus has been a Ticketmaster outlet, we have sold millions of tickets, yet the number of complaints we have received about the service charges can be counted on one hand. This would seem to indicate that the overwhelming majority of ticket buyers are in fact pleased with the service Ticketmaster is providing them.

Prior to Ticketmaster and Music Plus, the ticket-buying public would have to drive many miles to a venue’s box office, possibly camp out overnight and hassle with scalpers and/or brokers who aggressively and constantly cut into line in hopes of buying a ticket to the show.

Today, Ticketmaster eliminates all of that and gives consumers the convenience of buying tickets in their own community--regardless of whether it’s for a first-day sale or a spur-of-the-moment decision to go to certain performances.

Our ticket business has evolved through the years so that today we provide our customers easier access to hundreds of venues and thousands of shows; all 86 of our Southern California stores are Ticketmaster outlets and have been since 1983.

Through our wristband system for first-day sales of large shows, we have made it safer for our customers to obtain tickets--and harder for scalpers and ticket brokers to obtain a disproportionate share of the available tickets. Our wristband system means our customers do not have to camp out overnight. (Before wristbands, customers often camped out, and some were robbed at gunpoint for the money they held to buy tickets.)

With our wristband system, brokers can no longer bring in busloads of their own people to be first in line, thereby capturing all the good seats. Our wristband system assures that more tickets than ever before get into the hands of the buying public.

All our tickets are sold at face value, plus a convenience charge based on the show and the venue. Therefore, the customer does not have to pay scalper or ticket broker prices, which are usually inflated as much as four to eight times the face value of the ticket.

As the single largest ticket outlet chain in the Ticketmaster system, Music Plus does $40 million-$50 million worth of ticket sales a year. We are proud to be a Ticketmaster outlet and happy to provide this service to Southern California, day in and day out.