I fought Ticketmaster, and Ticketmaster won

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I thought I had found a way to beat Ticketmaster.

In July, 2023, Beyonce e-mailed Toronto concertgoers advising she intended to start her show the following night on time, whether or not we were in our seats. Stressed, my friend and I arrived 45 minutes early – and sat confused in a near-empty Skydome for almost two hours, wondering whether Beyonce was going to play in an echoing 50,000-seat arena. She didn’t, of course: Eventually, everyone finally streamed in.

My friend, who had paid $250 each for our nosebleed seats, spent the wait checking resale prices and cursing. Lower bowl and even floor tickets were selling for the same price we had paid. The show was spectacular, and we got over it. But I wanted to study this potential money-saving manoeuvre, and whether I could pull it off too. I relished the idea of not giving Ticketmaster a single penny more than necessary.

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The reasons to hate Ticketmaster are solid and plentiful. Lately, the reason is “dynamic pricing,” where high demand artists can opt in to eye-watering prices. There are also accusations of the company colluding with scalpers and pressuring small venues not to use other vendors by withholding acts managed by its parent firm, Live Nation. A Quebec class action argues “official platinum” seats are “just regular tickets sold by Ticketmaster at an artificially inflated premium in bad faith” (agree!). All of it is not just brutal for our wallets, but also for the industry – and music culture as a whole.

I began watching Raptors prices fluctuate based on performance (sob) and game time, and saw them dip considerably just after tipoff. I pored over online discussions about the shortest amount of time it takes to transfer tickets between accounts. (It can be done up to the last minute, but I wouldn’t push it past the morning of an event.) I now look at Ticketmaster’s website on a desktop and use the interactive seat map, which makes it easier to compare the cost of blue dots, which represent never-sold tickets, against red, which are resale. (Yes, you can sort by price in the scroll-down list, but the cheapest tickets surfaced may not actually be the best value.)

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Eventually, I created a spreadsheet to track price changes for events I both did and didn’t care about. I wanted to see whether any patterns emerged: Was there was an ideal moment to purchase tickets? (Raptors’ tickets are far cheaper even just five minutes after tipoff, I learned.)

Obsessive, to be sure, but in January, I had a victory. Eight hours before showtime, I paid half of face value for lower bowl tickets to see Madonna, thrilling my inner teen. At $198 each, they still weren’t cheap. But they were far less than the $600-plus resale seats around me.

I felt like I had cracked a code, mastered the matrix. If you’re trying to get Taylor Swift tickets for less than $3,000 I wish you the best though, because as the year went on, my spreadsheet showed my win was at least partly luck.

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Consider the columns for one summer show I tried to see: Bad Bunny. Buyers who made it into his presale were steaming after the dynamic prices they paid dropped by hundreds of dollars when the regular sale opened and non-superfans balked. That stinks for those fans, and hopefully a few scalpers got soaked. But in Toronto at least, the show was full and lower bowl tickets never went below $300 – even just a few hours before doors.

Besides, what was a win for my wallet was not, I realized, a win for the industry. Even scoring tickets at face value isn’t always worth feeling good about.

One $1,000-night every two years in an arena with seats isn’t live music, it’s a spectacle. Sweaty bodies, sticky floors, a vantage point actually close enough to hear notes soar, or crack, right here, right now and never again – that’s live music. Saving up our pennies for spectacles instead puts both our ability to experience it, and musicians’ ability to provide it, at risk.

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In my youth, I went to concerts constantly, and even a festival rarely hit $100. Today, for too many, cost makes live music a special event. At the same time, my kid’s music class is regularly cancelled because of Ontario’s teacher shortage, leaving tweens not learning basic notes or rhythm getting hyped for virtual Fortnite “concerts” by Eminem and Ariana Grande. Music isn’t daily life but a fancy hobby, often experienced essentially alone.

The solution might appear not in a spreadsheet, but rather, to be seeing smaller acts in smaller venues. Well, Live Nation bought the Opera House, where I saw some of my first shows, and charges cuckoo prices despite the terrible acoustics.

It cost me $67 to see Neko Case at the Danforth Music Hall in September, and a friend who bought resale paid $100. But she’s one of my favourites and it was worth it. Between songs, she warned that her ilk of beloved-but-not-Beyonce musicians are going “extinct.” Ticketmaster is making money hand over fist while fans’ hearts break and the majority of musicians struggle. As live music grows increasingly unaffordable, we’re losing something priceless.

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