Twitter lit up with furious posts accusing Ticketmaster of charging more in fees than The Cure asked for concert tickets.
“The cure deliberately kept ticket prices low and [Ticketmaster] was like ‘lol bet’ and charges more in fees than the band is for the actual show,” one viral tweet says. The message includes a screenshot of the transaction breakdown, showing a $20 ticket charge along with a service fee, facility charge, and order processing fees that add up to more than that.
the cure deliberately kept ticket prices low and @Ticketmaster was like “lol bet” and charges more in fees than the band is for the actual show pic.twitter.com/Ig0U5Ywcpw
— frank costanza’s lawyer (@_carrrmen) March 15, 2023
As of Thursday, the tweet has more than 10 million views.
The tickets were released as part of Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan program, which seeks to discourage scalpers from buying up ticket batches and reselling them at higher prices.
The Cure guitarist Robert Smith reacted to Ticketmaster with multiple posts on his Twitter account this week.
“I am as sickened as you all are by today’s Ticketmaster ‘fees’ debacle,” the 63-year-old musician shared with fans. “To be very clear: the artist has no way to limit them,” he posted Wednesday night. “I have been asking how they are justified. If I get anything coherent by way of an answer I will let you all know.”
“We had final say in all our ticket pricing for this upcoming tour, and didn’t want those prices instantly and horribly distorted by resale,” the guitarist had previously tweeted on Tuesday.
“We didn’t agree to the ‘dynamic pricing’/‘price surging’/‘platinum ticket’ thing … because it is itself a bit of a scam? A separate conversation.” In a follow-up, he referred to dynamic pricing as “a greedy scam – and all artists have the choice not to participate … if no artists participated, it would cease to exist.”
In all his tweets, the band’s founding member insisted they agreed to Ticketmaster’s suggested ticket sale strategies to combat scalpers and make tickets available at fair prices to fans.
Ticketmaster has come under fire several times in the past few months as fans complained about dynamic pricing and issues with the verified fan ticket sales. One of the most talked-about examples happened when Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour tickets went on sale and crashed the entire system due to “extraordinarily high demand.”