Concert Blues, My Final Concert

Iggy Pop & The Losers, Hollywood Palladium

By Garrick Rawlings, Music Writer

Iggy Pop came to town and I couldn’t resist. I thought I attended my last concert at a large venue years ago, but for the love of Iggy, I dealt with the indignity and expense of a show even at the modestly sized and historically prized venue, The Hollywood Palladium. I was a ‘concert kid,’ I’ve attended hundreds of shows in the Midwest and West Coast since I was a teenager and eventually became dismayed as ticket prices soared along with parking and concessions. I learned long ago there are so many great artists, both famed and unknown, who perform amazing shows in neighborhood bars, clubs, theaters, churches, house and backyard concerts, where I prefer the intimacy, the sound and the artistic communal experience. Magic still happens at the large venues from time to time, I occasionally attend, but only when it’s gratis per industry friend, coercion, or when I’m getting paid as a journalist. The larger point is, you can get the real thing most every week in a venue near your home, without the financial and logistical strain and further insult of pre-entry airport TSA-like security-strip-down checkpoints, if you look for it.

 The priority of live music events has largely devolved into a soulless drill down of greed, a ritual of retail commerce rather than any righteous, spiritual rock and roll or otherwise experience. This is old news of course, although it seems to be peaking with the advent of dynamic ticket pricing, where the promoters constantly adjust the price “according to demand,” based on the model that is prevalent in the airline and hotel industry, reducing live music to a commodity rather than an event, like $5,000 Bruce Springsteen tickets on Broadway. In other words, when ticket sales open for a show, they price them at whatever ridiculously high price they decide upon, marketing to the type of fans that will go for it, both to the well-heeled, and more predatorial, to the gullible fans who believe they will attain status by being first in line, or they fear missing out on a quick sellout, which does happen, but not as often as feared. What happens is, once the initial rush of purchases declines, they systematically decrease the prices, ever so slowly to suck every dollar out of the fans as possible, as the show date nears.

 On top of that they ever-so-mysteriously add “convenience or ticketing fees” which immediately jack up the price to ridiculous levels, sometimes as much or more than the face value of the ticket. Thankfully, just last week the U.S. Senate introduced the Junk Fee Prevention Act, hopefully bringing transparency to this long-standing insidious money-grab that has increased for far too long.

 There was a time when venues operated their own box offices where one could go directly to purchase a ticket for an upcoming show, but now they choose what ticket company they use, a la Ticketmaster, and funnel all their customers to these 2nd and even 3rd party middleman’s respective websites, mining your data for profit all along the way, while marketing it as a “for your convenience” experience. (Stay tuned for my crazy experience chasing down a ticket to the MC5 show at The Roxy in LA last year.)

 Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino recently defended and attempted to explain the fees recently on the Bob Lefsetz Podcast. According to Rapino, the venue sets the fees and determines how much the ticketing vendor receives, therefore the ticket company is helpless regarding negotiating ticket fees. Another insulting aspect of this greed-driven system is the higher the ticket price, the higher the “fees” are for the simple task of issuing a ticket where there is no more labor involved regardless of the price. Rapino went on to explain there are credit card fees, facility fees, ordering fees… yep.

 Here’s what I went through to purchase my ticket for Iggy: I went directly to the Palladium’s website and clicked the button to purchase a single ticket. That took me to a place called Ticket Squeeze, not even directly to Ticketmaster or Live Nation.  I click on the general admission ticket choice for $76, which of course turns into $93.55 after the random, mysterious and nefarious “Service Fees” are added.

 If that isn’t bad enough, in order to retrieve my ticket, I was directed to the Ticketmaster site where it requires one to open an account on their website whether you wish to or not — this is another well-designed drill down of greed to mine more of your personal data. There is no way around this, I tried. Once I got through that insulting inconvenience, I learned that you do not even receive a ticket code to print out or save on your device, you literally have to have your phone (or whatever) with you at the venue to access the code on their live website. This infuriated me as I never take my phone into venues. Also, what if the internet goes down that day or your battery dies/phone breaks or gets lost; what if it’s a show where the artist is against phones at the show and you’re required to lock it up via whatever system the venue uses to deal with that — and you’d rather not bring in your phone/device for that reason? All along the way they market it as “for your convenience.”

 So what happens if you don’t have a smartphone/device? For the sake of the argument, I sent almost a dozen emails, made several phone calls to every ‘contact help’ option I could find to obtain the ticket to the show in any other way that I already paid for. Every person I spoke with or emailed told me that I couldn’t get in without it, save for one who generously offered to refund the “convenience” fees but not the price of the ticket. When I explained how awful that was, they condescendingly said as if I was being unreasonable, “it’s better than nothing,” as if they were being generous! Astonishingly, the last person I spoke to before I was to give up on this effort informed me that in this case, as long as I had photo ID and the ticket code numbers, I could go to the box office early, the night of the show, and they would let me in without a device. Not one other representative along the way offered up this option.

 Similar but crazily different, proving the absolute randomness of this game, in May of last year I decided to purchase an advance ticket for Brother Wayne Kramer’s “We Are All MC5” tour date at The Roxy on the Sunset Strip. On The Roxy’s website, I clicked ‘purchase tickets’ for a reasonable $30, pleasant surprise — then the fun began. The first option presented is for an additional $6 I could purchase via the credit card of my choice — or — sign up for some online wallet option and pay that way for $0 additional, again driving customers into feeding more data mining info into the system in order to save $6, which I decline. The next click takes you to the AXS (another ticket service company) adding a $29.99 ‘convenience fee’ — so in two clicks the $30 face value ticket becomes $65.99! In this day and age, that is ‘reasonable’ but it immediately made me not want to go, but for the love of Brother Wayne and the legacy of the MC5 (Motor City 5), I soldiered on.

 Here’s where it gets crazy. I was still curious about all this and while poking around The Roxy’s website, buried deep in the middle of their FAQ page, I found and clicked “Where Can I Purchase Tickets?” where it states, with a link, that you can purchase tickets at the Shrine Auditorium Box Office in downtown LA. When you click on that it says that the box office is open on Thursdays; 12 to 5 p.m. only. For several days I tried, in vain, to reach The Shrine directly via the scant phone numbers and contact email offered on their website. Meanwhile, I notice the $29.99 ‘convenience fee’ on the Roxy website has been reduced to $10.99 a week later.

 Thursday rolled around and I decided to go see for myself if there was an open box office at The Shrine Auditorium. The bank of old-school box offices were dark and looked closed, there was no signage of any kind. Accepting defeat, I turned to walk away and out of the corner of my eye I saw a young woman peacefully reading a book in one lone window on the left flank of the main bank of windows. Startling her when I tapped on the window, asking if I could in fact purchase a ticket to the Roxy show there, she confirmed it was true to the tune of $30 + a scant $3 fee!  Even though this was lovely, who the hell has the time and wherewithal to delineate all this crap and then drive downtown to The Shrine (12 miles and 40 minutes from the venue where the show takes place) during the five-hour window that it’s open only one day a week? I imagine everyone who attended the show paid far more than the $33 I spent! What a racket.

 As disgusting as the overtly greedy money grab it is, it’s not surprising, everyone’s on the take. What is more disturbing is how many folks in our culture today have become so sheep-like and consistently lay down and accept this. This is the only reason the industry continues to get away with it, at an increasingly alarming rate with increasingly extravagant ploys to soak us; their success is our shame.

 I digress… Iggy & Co. made me smile like a real wild child for the entire 90 minutes. Thanks Mr. Osterberg, I needed it.