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4:13 pm - 01/01/2013

Lady Gaga tickets being sold for deeply reduced prices at StubHub



This morning, CNN mentioned that even though Lady Gaga is one of the year's most anticipated tours, ticket sales aren't as good as expected. To further demonstrate this, StubHub, the official partner site of Ticketmaster, began showing tickets for the Born This Way Ball tour as cheap as $23 this morning, even though regular tickets on Ticketmaster sell at $60 to $200.

At her opening U.S. show in Tacoma on January 14, hundreds of tickets remain through Ticketmaster. However, there are several tickets also available at StubHub for tickets at less than face value. In San Jose, Ticketmaster lists seats as all sold out except for the most expensive tickets at $175. However, on StubHub, there are hundreds of tickets still for sale and some of those tickets are selling at below face value.

This seems to be a pattern for ticket sales throughout the Born This Way Ball tour. In Los Angeles, for example, you can buy tickets for as cheap as $23 on StubHub. Besides tickets being easily available on Ticketmaster, nearly 2,000 tickets are available for each show at StubHub. There are other secondary ticket sites that are selling tickets as well. Either there will be a lot of empty seats, or many will be secretly "given away" to avoid embarrassment.

However, Ticketmaster tells us that in general, ticket sales for Lady Gaga's tour are good and that she is one of the few artists who can play back-to-back dates at the same venue. Even though there have been several reports of downsized venues and empty seats throughout the world, the Born This Way Ball tour is one of the top five grossing tours of 2012.

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kelly_h80 1st-Jan-2013 10:26 pm (UTC)
I found it odd that when the Boston tickets went on sale I was online buying them the second it went on sale but I'll I could get was balcony seats. Yet, the other day I went onto ticketmaster to see what seats were left, and basically they showed seats that were close to mine.

Do they purposely sell the closer seats as VIP packages? Or is there some elaborate scheme that scalpers are in the know about?

/clueless
one_hoopy_frood 1st-Jan-2013 10:38 pm (UTC)
Ticketmaster owns stubhub and a certain amount of tickets are automatically given to stubhub to be sold at drastically higher prices immediately after they go on sale.
kelly_h80 1st-Jan-2013 10:41 pm (UTC)
So in the future if I wanted to get better seats and willing to pay the price I should use stubhub, right?
one_hoopy_frood 1st-Jan-2013 10:44 pm (UTC)
I've found that I get the least headache by going to a ticketmaster office in person and getting my tickets that way, if you're lucky enough to have one near you. But theoretically that would be a good idea.
crashh_world 1st-Jan-2013 11:43 pm (UTC)
If Im willing to pay a lot for good seats thats what I always do. The prices can really get up there though.
marmar627 2nd-Jan-2013 07:39 am (UTC)
Yet Ticketmaster claims to be against scalping what even
shannenb 1st-Jan-2013 10:40 pm (UTC)
Usually both. Good seats are usually part of the VIP packages, but scalpers also hit the site with hundreds of computers that allow them to basically cherry pick the tickets. So if TM has only balcony seats but scalpers have good seats, that's probably what happened.

There was an interesting article in Billboard back in March about how ticket scalpers work: http://www.billboard.com/features/confessions-of-a-ticket-scalper-billboard-1006346152.story#/features/confessions-of-a-ticket-scalper-billboard-1006346152.story

Edited at 2013-01-01 10:41 pm (UTC)
kelly_h80 1st-Jan-2013 10:47 pm (UTC)
"When Bon Jovi's charging $175, he takes the money out of the business. The fan doesn't have money to go to the next show, and I don't make any money. What can I get-$210? I end up making $20, where I used to make $60, $70, and out of that I'd lose $20-$30 because you don't pick all winners."

I'm kind of wondering now if this may be a reason for the empty seats? It's probably a wild guess, though.
jinnycalderone 1st-Jan-2013 10:41 pm (UTC)
yeah, ikr. thats so weird. i just bypassed ticketmaster all together for gaga this year & 2011 tbh. i bought mine on stubhub & ebay tbh.
peddlestools 1st-Jan-2013 10:47 pm (UTC)
sometimes good seats are also reserved only for certain credit card holders like amex and chase
kelly_h80 1st-Jan-2013 10:52 pm (UTC)
I remember seeing that. They get to buy them a few days ahead if I remember correctly.
danceparties 1st-Jan-2013 11:04 pm (UTC)
A lot of the better seats are saved for contests, giveaways, vip, etc. When these tickets aren't won, given away or bought they are usually released about a week or so before the show. If you're not comfortable with waiting you can always purchase what's available to you, try your luck a week before and if something better pops up purchase those and sell the ones you bought prior. I've gotten plenty of amazing tickets this way and have always been able to recoup the majority of what I paid for the lesser tickets.

Edited at 2013-01-01 11:08 pm (UTC)
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