Nice work if you can get it, yeesh

I just ordered tickets for a concert that's going to be happening near here next month, and the only option to do so turned out to be through Ticketmaster. I double and triple checked. The band, the location, the organizers, nobody had anything more than a link to Ticketmaster. By the time all their fees had been added in, I ended up paying almost double the alleged ticket price. Admittedly, I was surprised by how cheap the listed "price" was and wouldn't have balked if the final price had been offered up front, but still... And if I was ordering just in time, rather than a month in advance like this, they would have raked in still more profit. Having worked at a place where sending small packages by next day or 2nd day UPS was a common occurrence, I can almost guarantee that they were charging double what it costs them for those services.

When you divide up the actual ticket price between the facilities costs, the organizers' cut, the headliners and the opening act, Ticket master gets by far the biggest slice of the pie, even assuming unheard of levels of overhead in "print out ticket, mail ticket, repeat until venue reaches maximum capacity."