Truly, there is a sucker born every minute. Between those minutes, there is born the person who will take advantage of the sucker. There is no shortage of either.Today, another e-mail came from my pals at Ticketmaster (born in the in-between minutes), asking me if I would like to participate in an on-line auction for premium seats for the Pop Tarts of American Idol - you remember, I mused on it a few days ago. What followed was a list of tour dates, and prospective suckers were to click on their local venue and place a bid on the auction which will run for 7 agonizing days, where the high bid wins. The bidding starts at $100, even though the fourth row tickets have a "face value" of $90. Already I'm annoyed. Seats in the front row have a face value of $160. You'd have to pay me $160 just to use the rest room in the same building as this concert. Shitting my pants would be a viable option.
I only found out that the minimum bid was $100 after I placed my initial bid of $10, which was rejected, as you could well imagine. But hey ... it was $10 each, so that's pretty good, right? I wanted to scalp the tickets, just like Ticketmaster. But Ticketmaster has decided to get a leg-up on the re-sellers and act as their own re-seller. Schrewd marketing, but I didn't get out of bed early enough to get one over on them. Not for ten bucks, anyway.
There are two issues at work here. ONE - The folks at Ticketmaster are now in the business of ticket scalping and TWO - the Tarts in charge of the event are worried that they may not be charging the suckers of America enough for tickets, so they will allow the market to price the tickets for them. By that I mean, over-price. Front row tickets to this nonsense will probably go for about $1,000, and since the kids are on the road for all of July and August, there is a lot of extra money to be made for the franchise.
I don't like to see big business taking advantage of people. They know how much you love the show, and now they want to see just how much - in dollars. And I suppose that no one is reading this tonight because you're all glued to your TV waiting for the next glorious song in America's biggest Karaoke contest.
Nobody ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the general public, so go ahead and piss away your money while corporate America laughs in your face. If you're going to place a bid, think of it as a huge test-marketing scheme, and get used to it. Soon, tickets to every major concert event may be placed on the auction block, and you'll be forced to either bid high or stay home. All in the name of corporate entertainment.
3 comments:
TV isn't watched much here at my home. American Idol, I've seen it before. I think I watched the very first one they had out. If I do watch TV, it'll probably be Law and Order, Bones or House. But even then, I'd rather be doing something else. I don't pay for cable. There is no way I'd pay that much for ticket to ANYTHING. I pay for XM radio. We really enjoy the variety of music. But it's under 20 bucks a month, so it's worth it.
Corporate America Counts on the public being suckers.... Its how they thier millions... The sad thing is that they must be counting right because they HAVE millions!! Whats that say about the general public????
Kate - they sure are counting right. And just when you thought the public couldn't sink any lower, they manage to drain a little more water out of the pool!
But remember what Jim Morrison said: "They got the guns but we got the numbers".
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