Concerts are one of the most exciting events one can attend, either solo or with friends and family. While some local venues for lesser-known artists can be very cheap, purchasing tickets from Ticketmaster for larger events can get extremely costly with fees, ticket insurance, and their ‘platinum seat’ pricing. According to Ticketmaster, their “Official Platinum Seats are premium tickets to events made available; they give fans fair and safe access to the best seats.” The prices of these seats will fluctuate based on supply and demand; thus, higher demand at on- sale drives these prices up. While some may think that Official Platinum might be analogous to VIP access or front row seats, that is not the case: they are regular seats with no added benefit, other than potentially being at the front few rows of the section.
I’d like to share my own personal experience with Ticketmaster’s platinum pricing. I tried to buy Harry Styles tickets back in May; I didn’t have a presale code, so I attempted to purchase them the day of general on-sale. Once I got through the queue, Ticketmaster’s platinum pricing made the few tickets that remained well over $1,000 each. When thinking back to Ticketmaster’s Official Platinum policy of higher prices with higher demand, I frankly thought: of course there is going to be demand when tickets go on sale at the same time for the general population! Harry Styles isn’t the only artist to have outrageous ticket prices through Ticketmaster; one Paramore concert saw ticket prices be driven up to $8,000 during a sale. While expensive tickets may be putting more money in an artist’s pocket, it is at the expense of true fans. A few months ago, a Change.org petition came out calling for Ticketmaster to end their Platinum Pricing. While the petition gained a huge number of supporters very quickly, it is unclear whether there will be any change anytime soon. Even though Ticketmaster states that their Platinum pricing is to give fans fair and safe access to the best tickets, this policy harms fans exponentially. Artists and event organizers are actually the ones that decide whether platinum tickets are available for that event or not; however, I don’t think they realize how expensive these tickets can become. If no action is taken by Ticketmaster, I suggest that we call on our favorite artists and venues to use different online ticket vendors in order to make this process more fair to fans.