I know I won't make any friends for posting this, but I have to sort of come to Ticketmaster's defense on this. They don't make a single penny from the cost of the tickets they sell. Those fees are to cover the cost of their event programmers and customer service agents, and even a large chunk of that is rebated back to the venues and promoters. If Ticketmaster didn't exist and venues had to staff 20 plus employees to process all of their own ticket orders, the cost of putting on a major concert or sporting event would be so high that they would not be able to happen and still be profitable. Now there are companies like Live Nation that have decided to run their own ticketing, and it has turned out to be just as expensive but with more glitches. It's probably obvious that I work closely with this company, but I have an understanding of what their event programmers do, and it is highly-specialized and complicated work that doesn't come cheap. I guess I'm just saying that Ticketmaster is a necessary evil and, believe it or not, it could be much worse.
