Here's Where All The Tickets Went

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If I have extra tickets, I'm going to be sure to make sure I sell them to a fan here who hasn't complained non stop about it being impossible to get tix when this is just like every concert the past 30 years -- especially U2. Still more shows on sale, option for pre-sale and 9 months to aquire tickets and generous fans that have each helped each other out. It's not even 2015 and it's all doom and gloom. There will be tix drops etc and they may even add more shows to certain locations even after this sale.

I've never had a bad seat at a U2 show. Fact.

Let's cheer up and again there isn't some scam. They will sell tickets to fans or dirtbags or anyone in between.
 
well said....its shaping up better than expected....tons of tickets available for LA....and the last public sale hasn't happened yet for add on shows....Im not convinced that they will not add 2 more shows to Chicago.....I saw on stubhub you can get nosebleads for $70 to some shows and the supply isn't fully out...I guess the $300 tickets scalpers were picking up will sell for face or at a discount.....
 
BoMac said:
Funny story about the one time I lined up for U2 tickets. It was St. Patrick's Day weekend and Vertigo Tour tickets were going on sale at 10 a.m. on Saturday. So I got to the Bell Centre in Montreal late Thursday night and slept there for two days.

When I arrived, there was about 20 people ahead of me. By Saturday morning, just before the tickets went on sale, there was about 2,500 people, easily. And those first 20 people? Just before 10 a.m. they left and were replaced by others. It turns out they were homeless people paid $20 or so by scalpers to sleep at the arena and take up spots until they swoop in at the last second.
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The only time I've slept on the street overnight for something U2 related was for the U2 By U2 book signing. There wasn't much sleep involved, and the sleep I did get was awful. But the prize at the end, personalized autographs from all 4 band members, made it so worth it.

Alas... the exact same thing happened. There was a very much "unsavory" element in the line, and I'm not referring to U2 fan entitlement (even though there was some of that there as well, much like the GA lines).

Turns out there were a large number of people who were paid to wait all night so that they could get a book, get it signed, and then have the book sold on E-Bay.

It was clear and obvious to the band that this was happening, so they actually marked any book that wasn't personalized... which was fine by me and all.
 
I slept on a park bench outside the stadium in Norman, OK.....was awesome....didn't want to throw the $65 for a room for 5 hours...
 
Well, I'm sure getting an education here. I always knew there was a lot of scalping going on--but I wasn't sure how it worked in the days of the Net. I always camped out and was successful most of the time, then I found the fan club and got my GA's that way. Even though the Fan club wasn't possible in time for me this time around, I can say one thing: Thank God I DON'T want GA's.

I just didn't know that it's been common for anywhere from one-third to one-fourth of the entire venue to be on resell sites at any given time...is this true? And the top-tier pricing for the entre lower level.. that's always been true too? I really didn't know.

(I don't want GA's...Why you ask? B/c I'm very short and I had to spend most of the Vertigo shows trying to just get a glimpse of a hand or foot of the band. That and getting bumped around, leered at and splashed with beer from loudmouthed drunks. That might happen in a seat too, but generally for seats I find it hasn't happened. I did find out later that at one of those shows, Morleigh was standing right next to the guy in back of me. God's honest truth. Oh, I *thought * the lady in the white blouse and orange hotpants looked familiar. Wow!)

So since I don't know any of this stuff...I'm pretty sure I'll be the only one there, or at least first in a small line, at my chosen TM retail outlet Monday. When TM's HQ want to take the allotted amount of tix it would normally make available to a TM retail outlet in a city, say, 2 hrs from the venue like mine ( I think there are only 5 or 6 in my city, I checked) and steal them for their resell site, how would that work? Just b/c I'm supposed to be buying them from a TM computer, IMO that means jack squat, they'd dip into the retail stash same as the site, for a place like MSG. Whether it's me on trying the app, trying to access the site, OR a person at a counter pulling the screen up on her TM computer, we're all looking at the same screen aren't we?
 
Hubby and I were up over 24 hrs straight for E Lansing during 360....drove in from Youngstown, OH that am, camped outside the venue with our son in hopes of a meet & greet (he slept in the car) but they never came out, and then drove BACK to Ohio after the gig since we didn't have a hotel. The boy slept in the backseat, we hit the bed as soon as we were home and then took turns napping once the boy was awake for the day. Found out I was pregnant the next week with our girl. (And then of course met B & E a month later in Pittsburgh much to the chagrin of the boy as he didnt go to that show.)

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G900A using U2 Interference mobile app
 
ClaytonsKitten said:
Yep. Makes you long for the days of lining up and buying them in person (This was the front page story)

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G900A using U2 Interference mobile app
Click to expand...

Here's a story from the Washington Post from 1992 when I waited in line 4 nights to score front row seats

For Fans, What's 4 Nights for U2?; The Faithful Vie With Scalpers for the Best Seats at RFK
[FINAL Edition]
The Washington Post (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Washington, D.C.

After an 80-hour ordeal - four nights stuffed in a car, three days breathing bus exhaust, scarfing Cokes and franks, running blocks for pit stops - the three University of Maryland seniors who camped out at RFK Stadium prevailed.

They beat the scalpers to U2 concert tickets. At 8 a.m. today they would be, if all went as planned, first on line at the RFK box office. By 9 a.m. the 52,000-seat stadium will sell out, predicted a Ticketmaster official.
"It's what you got to do to get good seats," said Crawford Conniff, 22, stretched out near the stadium among traffic island dandelions.

"We have unlimited time," said Mike Collins, 22. "If we had a job making 50 grand, we could pay $150 to scalpers."
Actually, $150 sounds cheap for the $28.50 face-value tickets. Today's ticket sale for the Aug. 15 concert, one of thesummer's hottest, is likely to ignite an orgy of profiteering.

When the band played Los Angeles, scalpers scored up to $1,200 a ticket for prime seats. In Washington, as early as Tuesday, ticket brokers had stationed students, unemployed and even homeless people at ticket outlets to snap up
hundreds of choice seats.

"You end up with atrocities in the front-row seats," says Bob Koch, U2's tour business manager. "They're all scalped for $1,000, to rich lawyers' kids, instead of the real fans who camped out."

U2, an Irish quartet crackling with political and musical intensity, last toured in 1987. Its Top 10 album, "Achtung Baby," and the ensuing "Zoo TV Tour" - a multimedia spectacle featuring live satellite broadcasts, East German
automobiles suspended over the stage and huge video monitors flashing messages at the crowd - has fueled a nationwide ticket frenzy. Lakeland, Fla., the tour's first stop, sold out in four minutes.

Pacific Bell registered a million attempts to buy tickets in Los Angeles.
The local brokerage business is legal, as long as tickets aren't resold at the concert site. But questions about howthe business works render industry insiders edgy and brokers defensive.

"It's a big secretive thing," said an employee at the Ticket Outlet, a broker in Falls Church. " 'Cause it's really competitive."

And lucrative. Washington's seven major brokers operate like a stock market. Prime tickets for Genesis and Neil
Diamond are now selling for up to $200. The upcoming Eric Clapton show, which sold out in an hour, commands
$350. Rolling Stones seats, front row center, went for $1,000. "Fronts" or "cream seats" are the most expensive; "getins"
are in the nosebleed section, but they get you in the door.
"We have a bad reputation," said Ed Ryan, marketing director for Ticket Finders Inc., in Greenbelt. "

There are some fringy people in the business who trade behind telephone booths, but we don't go sneaking around stadiums and violating laws."

Then how do they do it? Brokers say they buy tickets from fans and season ticket holders at a premium and then crank up the price. They hire people to phone in orders or stand in line. U2 "campers," as brokers call them,
reportedly earned $50 to $80 a day.

Karl Rose, owner of Stagefront Tickets, paid 20 college kids this week $60 a day plus food to "secure" key ticket outlets.

Fans, such as the University of Maryland seniors at RFK, keep lists of who got there first, ensuring their place in line.

Ticketmaster, which handles more than 200 million tickets a year, has instituted customer ticket limits - eight per person for U2's RFK show - to stop hirelings from snatching up blocks of seats.

But when Metallica came to town recently, "campers" brought costume changes to fool ticket vendors. For the upcoming Cure show, they stood in line with cellular phones, placing orders as they waited.


Off the record, brokers admit to "special relationships" with ticket clerks. Bribes range from cash to free haircuts. One broker's sister used to work at the Capital Centre ticket office and sneak him seats.

This year, Ticketmaster fired two salespeople for reserving tickets for brokers, said Ralph Beyer, the senior vice president. One ticket clerk was snagged when he tripped a burglar alarm while ushering a gift-bearing scalper
through the back door.

During U2's recently completed 30-city indoor arena tour, the group's management instituted a two-seat limit, phonein only purchasing system in areas where scalpers are known to amass large numbers of tickets.

Agents monitored credit card numbers, names and addresses, and canceled duplicate orders.

Among the scammers they detected in Los Angeles were a man who bought a hundred post office boxes to buy tickets under a hundred different aliases and
a scalper who hired a telemarketing firm to do nothing but phone in orders.

In Boston, where brokering is illegal, a scalper has been using stolen credit card numbers, according to an employee involved in the U2 ticket sale there. The man charged $14,000 in the past four months and resold tickets at below face value.

Another rumored source for brokers' tickets is entertainment industry insiders. On average, 15 percent of the seats in a given concert hall are "pulled" for promoters, record companies, radio stations, the venue operator and the band's manager. Inevitably, some of those tickets are scalped. U2 pulled about 10 percent of its seats on its indoor tour and held back 3,000 seats at RFK.

Most brokers deny obtaining tickets this way. Said broker Rose: "As long as I know they're real tickets, I don't ask any questions."

For the hundreds of fans who lined up at RFK last night and didn't get tickets, words of consolation: Rumor has it U2 will announce a second D.C. show.
 
well my sib tried for a GA for me in the 1st Gen Sale-- after they'd gotten a pair of loges for us both in the Innocent presale--

was online for 90 mins watching the waiting time bounce up and down from 1min back to 10, 20 mins +was right in at 10AM onto TM site

and still couldn't get me a GA!:angry:

so no i don't buy "it's not a racket" line

yes i've waited on line the old fashioned way over night for The Who in 76 (traveled to Philly to stay overnight) and The Concert for Bangledesh (the 1st time my parents would let stay out like that for tixs :lol:)

and other less long but started to wait way early in morning at MSG or at a Tix Master sites
and done the drop off money order on sundays in mail when there were no tix at venues tix selling style at the time

so we've done about every kind of tix getting approach that the venues seat up over decades!

but this instant resale this really sucks! :angry: :fist: :angry: :crack:
 
Prices are steadily dropping across the board. You can get the "obstructed" nosebleeds for San Jose for $66 each, total, on StubHub. I'll probably snag them for $60 a piece if they drop that low (or pay slightly more for closer seats in those or nearby sections). Yeah, it ends up meaning my girlfriend and I give up about $40 each for the two nights to scalpers, but we'll also save some on the San Jose hotel booking early and it would be great to have this all sorted.
 
Ticket prices are continuing to drop across the board for pretty much every show. You can currently grab seats for Phoenix for not much more than the $40 nosebleed price...San Jose is now down to $65 total on StubHub. I'm able to get as low as $63 total on that OnlineCityTickets site.

As long as nobody panics, these scalpers are going to keep letting prices drop as hardly anybody seems to be picking up tickets. I plan on waiting it out longer.

Supply and demand dictates that the upper balcony seats at most venues are going to drop significantly lower. If people weren't biting at $68 total, then they're not really going to be more likely to buy tickets when they drop to $65 total as that difference is pretty much peanuts for someone expecting to attend a high-end concert such as this one.

It's particularly interesting that people aren't biting at a price point of around $60 (or even $50 for some venues) when the Vertigo Tour ten years ago was charging about $50 for the uppers before fees. There's no doubt in my mind that the band was most sought after as a live act back in the Vertigo Tour and that they could have done even better than 360 had it been all stadiums, so this definitely seems to be proof that U2 is no longer the most in-demand live act out there. If people are balking at under $50 for the cheap seats while the average ticket price for acts such as Beyone or Justin Timberlake is around $300, it's rather telling.
 
BigMacPhisto said:
Ticket prices are continuing to drop across the board for pretty much every show. You can currently grab seats for Phoenix for not much more than the $40 nosebleed price...San Jose is now down to $65 total on StubHub. I'm able to get as low as $63 total on that OnlineCityTickets site.

As long as nobody panics, these scalpers are going to keep letting prices drop as hardly anybody seems to be picking up tickets. I plan on waiting it out longer.

Supply and demand dictates that the upper balcony seats at most venues are going to drop significantly lower. If people weren't biting at $68 total, then they're not really going to be more likely to buy tickets when they drop to $65 total as that difference is pretty much peanuts for someone expecting to attend a high-end concert such as this one.

It's particularly interesting that people aren't biting at a price point of around $60 (or even $50 for some venues) when the Vertigo Tour ten years ago was charging about $50 for the uppers before fees. There's no doubt in my mind that the band was most sought after as a live act back in the Vertigo Tour and that they could have done even better than 360 had it been all stadiums, so this definitely seems to be proof that U2 is no longer the most in-demand live act out there. If people are balking at under $50 for the cheap seats while the average ticket price for acts such as Beyone or Justin Timberlake is around $300, it's rather telling.
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These shows are 5 months off. Eventually they are going to be completely sold out and all the cheapest ones will disappear off StubHub.

I doubt the $65 tickets on StubHub are being sold by professional scalpers. After StubHub's hefty 25% cut, that is face value. A scalper is not going to panic sell already cheap concert tickets half a year before the lights go out.
 
ijwthstd said:
These shows are 5 months off. Eventually they are going to be completely sold out and all the cheapest ones will disappear off StubHub.

I doubt the $65 tickets on StubHub are being sold by professional scalpers. After StubHub's hefty 25% cut, that is face value. A scalper is not going to panic sell already cheap concert tickets half a year before the lights go out.
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I'm inclined to agree. And SH fees are now sometimes more than 25%, since they take 15% from seller and between 2% and 20% is added on to the resale price (which the seller has no control over...SH has this new "market pricing" scheme in order to keep prices more consistent).

Brokers likewise aren't grabbing $40 nosebleeds looking to make a quick $10. It's not worth the hassle. They opt for the premium seats with best resale value which, with U2, has always been GA tickets. To that end, U2 has done a pretty good job of cutting out the secondary market. For Vertigo, U2 tickets were ALL OVER eBay. Since then, eBay bought SH and eBay has restructured to try to drive their ticket selling to SH where the profits are much higher.

Having said that, if I was in the market for lower end seats (i.e., nosebleeds), I would wait it out, because most listings are likely by people who just overbought and are either selling extras (perhaps trying to make a few bucks or just recoup costs because they overbought so they'd have options) or "casual" scalpers dipping their foot in the pool. In either case, the prices are going to come down because those who "had to have" their tickets right away got them, and people who have tickets listed on SH are going to panic and keep reducing prices to recoup what they can.

U2 is a mega-million dollar company and you can rest assured LN did their research to squeeze the maximum dollar out of this tour by minimizing the secondary market profiteering that occurred in Vertigo.
 
BigMacPhisto said:
...so this definitely seems to be proof that U2 is no longer the most in-demand live act out there...
Click to expand...

These type of posts crack me up. Their last tour, that ended just 3 years ago, was the LARGEST TOUR OF ALL TIME. GROSSING AND ATTENDED.

No one has come close since then. But OMG, there are tickets available on StubHub at $65 so it must mean U2 is over. Nothing to see here. Move along.

#TinfoilHats
 
bfloxng said:
I'm inclined to agree. And SH fees are now sometimes more than 25%, since they take 15% from seller and between 2% and 20% is added on to the resale price (which the seller has no control over...SH has this new "market pricing" scheme in order to keep prices more consistent).

Brokers likewise aren't grabbing $40 nosebleeds looking to make a quick $10. It's not worth the hassle. They opt for the premium seats with best resale value which, with U2, has always been GA tickets. To that end, U2 has done a pretty good job of cutting out the secondary market. For Vertigo, U2 tickets were ALL OVER eBay. Since then, eBay bought SH and eBay has restructured to try to drive their ticket selling to SH where the profits are much higher.

Having said that, if I was in the market for lower end seats (i.e., nosebleeds), I would wait it out, because most listings are likely by people who just overbought and are either selling extras (perhaps trying to make a few bucks or just recoup costs because they overbought so they'd have options) or "casual" scalpers dipping their foot in the pool. In either case, the prices are going to come down because those who "had to have" their tickets right away got them, and people who have tickets listed on SH are going to panic and keep reducing prices to recoup what they can.

U2 is a mega-million dollar company and you can rest assured LN did their research to squeeze the maximum dollar out of this tour by minimizing the secondary market profiteering that occurred in Vertigo.
Click to expand...

You're waayyyy off on a lot of this.

The StubHubbers are also scalpers but different scalpers from the massive block that's listed on all the other scalping sites. I just went in and looked around and StubHub has totally different rows/sections at the lowest price points for various dates. And they're not extra "singles" or someone just trying to do amateur scalping...some scalpers are just using StubHub instead and making a lower overall profit through that system.

In total, there's about 7,000-8,000 tickets per San Jose show then that are on these two resale sites combined (StubHub + the other scalping sites). That's hardly Ticketmaster doing a great job of keeping out the secondary market. And again, the vast majority of these tickets are in fact the cheaper ones that are easier to flip, not those $300 seats. $10 per ticket on StubHub might not seem like much profit, but when you have 1,000 of those tickets...

The most sought after seats on this tour were indeed the cheapest nosebleeds and literally every single seat was accounted for via these secondary sellers immediately after the on-sale. The only people that even managed to get them tended to use the app or the in-store software. The GAs were worthless to resellers and so were those expensive seats that the band has had trouble even selling on TM...the $40 nosebleeds were the most attractive seat in the house given how GAs can't really be resold.

Lastly, LiveNation themselves along with other touring companies have been known to purposely shift tickets over to scalping sites themselves in order to get higher prices. Sell the tickets to themselves, give the band their cut, and then sell them back to the public for more. This has been happening all over the industry like crazy. Case in point, the Rock Hall of Fame just pulled the same shit as last year lying and saying their ceremony tickets sold out in literally two seconds...they just shifted all of them over to secondary markets so that fans of Green Day or whomever will freak out and pay the high price right now...when the actual demand will mean $10 tickets come showtime, just like last year even though Nirvana was being enshrined. It's a brand new tactic to fool people into paying more.

The numbers are there and half the tickets for some of these shows didn't end up in the hands of actual fans. You can't tell me that 8,000 people possess tickets for a San Jose show on a specific night but are all waffling on going if they can squeeze out a whopping $15 more by reselling them. Please.
 
Chrisedge said:
These type of posts crack me up. Their last tour, that ended just 3 years ago, was the LARGEST TOUR OF ALL TIME. GROSSING AND ATTENDED.

No one has come close since then. But OMG, there are tickets available on StubHub at $65 so it must mean U2 is over. Nothing to see here. Move along.

#TinfoilHats
Click to expand...

Yes, it was the most successful tour ever...and now they've delivered another album that left even less of a mark on the public than the last one in terms of quality/hits/actual interest and are about five years removed from when the last 360 tickets went on sale...things change.

They still are one of the most sought after live acts on the planet, that's for sure. And it would be interesting to see how they would fare with ticket prices closer to the Vertigo Tour's + inflation rather than some of these exorbitant amounts ($300 for half the floor seats while the rest of the floor ones are VIP ones retailing for up to $600 a pop).
 
Chrisedge said:
These type of posts crack me up. Their last tour, that ended just 3 years ago, was the LARGEST TOUR OF ALL TIME. GROSSING AND ATTENDED.

No one has come close since then. But OMG, there are tickets available on StubHub at $65 so it must mean U2 is over. Nothing to see here. Move along.

#TinfoilHats
Click to expand...

Yeah, and now they drop another album not received well by the public, not much promoted, and most tours sell out at least 95% within the first week they go on sale.... while the shows are half a year or more away.

Obviously they've lost it and aren't popular anymore... :lol:
 
Ticket prices have now tumbled to $53 and $55 total on StubHub, respectively, for the San Jose shows (and those aren't even the worst nosebleed seats, either) while inventory has still barely shifted, if at all.

At this point, I'm going to just let even more of these people freak out and then choose the best sub-$60 seats I can find. It's the principle that matters most.
 
Tickets here in Toronto start at about $80 for nosebleeds, there are 3 GA tickets available $1300 each, and 3 Red Zone tickets for the second show that are going for over $3000.

I'm hoping a GA gets posted in the $200-300 range, I'm not paying a full month's rent to go to a >3 hour concert. :|
 
Total inventory for the San Jose shows on StubHub has dropped only about 100 tickets a night over the past month or so. I'd imagine they've sold a few hundred tickets on there and the inventory looks relatively stable because other people have begun posting their tickets.

Price range for the low-end tickets has ticked up about $2 bucks a night from a couple days ago. It's still going to be a tough sell-off come spring for these people to get rid of what's likely 5,000+ tickets per night. As it stands though, I'd say the $50 range for nosebleeds seems to be what a lot of people are comfortable with, so it will probably hover around there. But we'll see...there hasn't been a sign of super intense demand yet, so perhaps prices will slide further.
 
Inventory for the San Jose shows continues to drop and people are buying tickets at all sort of levels...however, the prices continue to plummet as well. Plenty of sub-$60 seating available on StubHub in the nosebleeds and you can nab tickets for night number one at $50 total and $53 total for night number two.

Also, eight seats in the same row are selling for that same $53 price for night two. Further proof that scalpers on the secondary market purchased entire swathes of tickets rather than fans managing to possess and sell eight tickets in the same exact row.

Still going to hold out a bit longer for tickets as the prices are still dropping across the board...demand in particular for the seats in the back of the "obstructed view" sections hasn't seemed to increase at all, so I'd rather see how low those tickets will go before putting down my cash. I'd rather sit in Row 16 for $50 total than Row 4 of those sections for $80 or whatever they were selling for weeks back.
 
Hell yeah, wait it out a little while longer. Make those fuckers sweat a little bit. Their prices will keep dropping, and you'll probably be able to get some of those $300 tickets for less than face value, if you wait long enough. I realize that in many ways $300 tickets help to defeat the scalpers, but this is kind of a clusterfuck.
 
Heh, no thanks to the $300 ones. If I cared that much to be up front I would have just bought a membership and scored some GAs in the pre-sale.
 
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