Stub Apocalypse - The Death of the Live Show

Originally published December 2015

Being the singer in a band, you would assume I'm a fan of live music, and you'd be right. I like going to shows and I like being part of them. Yet, with the way life can be, with those various day job responsibilities, hobbies, and other unrelated obligations, it's become more difficult to motivate myself, not to mention find the funds necessary, to go out to a live show on a regular basis. It's also become especially difficult for me to want to attend a live show of anyone other than a small band, local to the area or just rolling through on donations and gas fade. These days, I find that big-band live shows that require tickets to attend, have become the least desirable of all, for one reason or another.

With my recent experience at the Aftershock festival, I've already lost the desire to go to festival concerts. Now, just the experience of purchasing a ticket to a live show has shaken me to my moral core and made me question if it's even ethically right to go to these big-name shows. Is any of it worth the price of admission? Is it worth going against my ethical beliefs as a consumer, even for my favorite band? The harbingers of the live show apocalypse seemed to have done all they could to make me not want anything to do with big-name concerts, regardless of who is playing.

Famine - The Sponsors Cometh

Made of caffeine, sugar, alcohol, money, and everything else you couldn't eat without getting sick, these guys are here to put on a show and take your funds at every turn when you arrive at the venue. They don't care about how much fun you have, only that you are at the show long enough to get hungry or thirsty, ensuring they can sell you whatever they can at a high price. Prisoners of time and performance, who are you to question their presence?

Every show I've ever been to has certainly sold its share of food and drink at an elevated price, but it's only gotten worse over time. I used to be willing to purchase a pint of beer or a small snack to tide me over at the show, especially if it was an all-day affair. Now, I'd sooner starve than pay the prices they have at these venues, and I never buy a beer anymore unless it's before I get to the show.

Sponsors are a necessary evil, partially due to how much music piracy has ruined the revenue of the industry—certainly, the metal industry has suffered since it's one of the less popular genres. Music production companies and the musicians themselves can't hope to make enough money off just the album sales anymore and certainly don't get enough revenue from those sales to fund tours and merchandise. Thus, energy drinks, alcohol companies, and food trucks are a necessity.

Nonetheless, it is a real drag when you want to just be able to eat a sandwich you bought for an all-day event and you can't get through the door because it violates their strict no-outside-food rule. But you've heard all that before if you read my Aftershock article.

Pestilence - Price & Lice; Fees & Fleas

When did it become okay for the person selling a product to you to tack on an extra 20 bucks for the convenience of buying from them? Can you think of the last time you bought something at a store, like a Sears, or Costco, or any place for that matter, and the cashier said: "Thanks! That will be 60 dollars, oh, and another 20 because you were nice enough to buy from us. You understand, right? Convenience fees. So, that'll actually be 80 dollars."

Yet, every show for which I've ever purchased a ticket online has had some sort of fee attached to it. The fees themselves started out small, with it just being a few dollars here or there. However, as time has gone on, the convenience fees, online fees, grandmother's-second-cousin-twice-removed fees, and whatever other fees they can make up along the way, add (at least) another 20 dollars to your price tag. I think the only other rival in this method of charging extra for a product or service is cell phone companies.

If that isn't enough, they also offer "ticket insurance." You know, just in case the show is canceled. Getting a refund for a cancelled show would be handy, in the rare occasion that this actually happens. It'd be nice if you just got a refund without the need for insurance, but it's only another 2 bucks, right? Well, it was. Much like their other fees, this has gone up exponentially. Hopefully, you won't have to pay for parking too.

The latest fee absurdity I experienced was the price of obtaining my ticket. On any of these online vendors, you have to select a method by which you'll get your ticket. Since the beginning, there have been three options: will call, mail, and digital.

Mail and its various speeds at which the tickets could be delivered would cost you an extra penny, to an arm, to your last will & testament at times. Digital, of course, allows you to print them at home, or just show your phone at the door these days. Will call and digital, would typically be no additional charge because it was up to you to obtain a physical form of the ticket. The vendor wouldn't have to do anything else, or even have to deal with mail charges. Then they started charging for will-call on occasion. Thankfully digital was free, right?

Well, the last time I purchased my tickets from Ticketmaster, I had to pay an extra 2 bucks to print them at home. I had to pay the ever-benevolent vendor a print-at-home fee, so I would be able to use my own printer and ink to obtain my ticket. How is this acceptable in any way? What's to stop them from raising the prices, or charging me money just to visit their website in the first place? They're charging me to do some of their work for them! The next step in this disgusting process of fee hiking is to start charging for every delivery method. Hell, they might even charge for just choosing them as the preferred vendor, oh wait, they already do that.

War - Vendors Descend

I've already complained about vendors and their fee practices, what else is there for me to say, right? Well, what's worse than a ticket vendor that forces you to pay hiked prices and astronomically ridiculous fees? How about obscene vendor competition? How about vendors who actually harbor ticket selling practices that are immoral, and should be illegal?

Ticketmaster sucks. Everyone who's ever had to pay the extra 20 dollars for their so-called conveniences has certainly harbored a small bit of resentment for them. But what of companies like StubHub, the ticket-selling site where scalpers buy tickets from other vendors and then re-sell them at a hiked price? If Ticketmaster is the human papillomavirus (HPV) of live show vendors, then StubHub is the cancer that follows in its wake.

I thought it was a legitimate after-market ticket website, at first. I was forced to purchase some tickets from them when I had completely forgotten to buy the tickets to a Nine Inch Nails concert I was going to attend while I was visiting Las Vegas. The concert being one of the big draws of the trip, I tried to find tickets at the usual vendors and had no luck, but StubHub was there to offer some seats, that were actually really good. The only problem was that I had to pay the most money I've ever paid for a concert ticket. It was my own fault, but I said, "Oh well" and I paid the price to see one of my favorite bands for the first time. It was worth it, I thought.

Shortly after that, someone told me StubHub was the Mos Eisley of ticket selling: a hive of scum and villainy where people bought tickets from the vendors, then immediately turned around and sold them at an elevated cost. What had started as the eBay or Craigslist of after-market ticket selling, quickly became a competitive ticket vendor that sold the exact same tickets you could have purchased if you were only 10 seconds faster. I soon had an opportunity to confirm it for myself when my favorite band, Tool, announced a single show in San Francisco, last year.

I had never seen Tool before. I'd always missed them when they suddenly decided to play or were out-of-town at the time. So, I felt that I had to get tickets to this show. The cost from Ticketmaster: $75 + Fees, which really means $95. Very steep considering my cutoff price for famous bands is around $40. But I needed to see them. So I logged into Ticketmaster 5 minutes before the tickets went on sale, refreshed the page at the 1-second mark, and.... secured myself a ticket within a minute. I had a personal, mental celebration. Then a friend texted asking if I could buy the ticket for them and they'd pay me back. I agreed, only to discover that the remaining tickets had sold out in less than 5 minutes.

I couldn't believe how quickly the tickets had gone. I thought I was prepared, but I didn't realize I was lucky too. I kept refreshing the page but had no success. I saw feeds on Facebook of people upset at how quickly their opportunity had passed. Then, it occurred to me to check StubHub. Suddenly, there were more than 500 tickets available on there for the same show, and all for an extra $30 at least. Tool, through popular demand, ended up doing a second show in SF to appease the angry fans who couldn't afford the $500 tickets that remained, which was short enough notice to prevent the StubHub bots from buying up all the tickets to that day too.

Now, we finally come to the circumstances as to why I started writing this article in the first place. Deja vu: Tool announced the same lone SF show amidst their upcoming tour. I was prepared for the same trials as last time and I expected the many spurned others to be just as prepared. I did the same as last time: signed in, refreshed the page at the 1-second mark, and.... "Your wait time is 10 minutes." Not good. I knew that my chances were drastically shrinking. I had multiple browsers, windows, and tabs open hoping to jump in line. No luck.

Eventually that 10-minute timer ran out in every window, and they all said I couldn't be helped. I checked StubHub. 446 tickets available. I refreshed the page. 475 tickets available. The ticket cancer was metastasizing at a rapid rate and within an hour it had more than 700 tickets to the same Tool show available, yet I had no luck getting onto Ticketmaster. And the price? The lowest I saw was $120, which was $35 more than the Ticketmaster price.

All within one hour

Bullshit.

Death - Perpetual Personal Decadence

What it all comes down to is the decision for us as consumers to either continue to accept it, or boycott this greedy, capitalistic behavior. What StubHub harbors should be illegal and is a huge detriment to the experience for many people out there who just want to see a live show. Not to mention the fact that if they don't actually sell back the same tickets they purchased, bands will end up playing empty sold-out shows, which I personally would not want to do in their position. Allowing this type of capitalistic behavior only leads to arbitrary charges in everyday life. I wouldn't be surprised if we'll have to buy our food at auctions someday.

If we do nothing, we allow the vendors and the sponsors to continue to push us around. The problems will just continue to repeat and worsen in a downward spiral of greed. By accepting it, we continue to allow the sponsors to dictate what is "fun" at their shows, the vendors to charge you nonexistent fees, and the after-market vendors to sell us the same ticket we should have been able to purchase ourselves.

It does have an end though, eventually. It will reach a point where it is financially impossible for regular people to attend a show. The barrier to entry will be set too high. The fans will stay home and save their money, and suddenly the bands will have empty shows, no revenue, and they'll be left wondering what the hell happened. I'm already there, myself. I don't have the time, energy, and money to go to these big shows. I'd much rather give my $8 to a local show and hope it helps the bands continue to play than give my $100+ to the big companies who don't even pay bands enough to cover the costs of their tour.

I don't mean for this article to be a call to arms; it's really just an article of bitching about first-world problems. Still, if we buy tickets from places like StubHub, if we accept the arbitrary rules, and if we accept the fees, the music parasites responsible will only perpetuate the problem as they continue to suck the blood out of their hosts. They'll be perfectly content to kill off the live show and bathe in their pools of money.

Money Morality

There's nothing wrong with wanting to see your favorite bands perform. There's nothing wrong with buying tickets and accepting the fees for the sake of the show. There's nothing wrong with buying aftermarket tickets because you couldn't get them from the original seller in time. There's nothing inherently wrong with blissful ignorance. You should be able to see a band you want to see and support them.

What IS wrong is that I had to consider all this crap and came up with this overly dramatic and elaborate metaphor when I was just trying to buy tickets to a Tool show. I shouldn't have to question my morals about purchasing tickets for my favorite band. I shouldn't have to consider the fact that buying tickets from a scalper website and doing my part to perpetuate the problem conflicted with my personal ethics as a consumer. I just want to listen to my favorite band.

If Hounds of Innsmouth became someone's favorite band, I wouldn't want them to question if it's right or wrong to buy a ticket to see us. As a performer, I would love to have more people at our shows, and it would piss me off if people didn't come to our shows because the scalpers had bought all the tickets. As a person, I wouldn't want the cost of admission to involve our fans' morals either, regardless of how menial those morals may be...

Did I mention I'm a piece of shit?