That's right, you're sweating bullets and have your ticket or artist website pulled up, credit card in hand ready to buy tickets the SECOND they go on sale. You sign in and feverishly type in numbers and Captchas only to be mortified to find that the best seats you could get are several rows back. What?? Well, there's a sneaky reason as to why that is and it's not entirely fair. Blame Ticket Pre-sales.

 

 

Turns out that as low as 7% of tickets for big acts are actually available to the general public on their sale date. Fan clubs, credit card companies, the venues, artists and their tour entourage, and tour sponsors, radio station promotions etc.: all have batches of tickets reserved that the public can't touch right away if at all. I can vouch for this too. Two summers ago, Journey, Foreigner and Night Ranger were all on the bill at a show at the NYS Fair. you'd think instant sell-out months previous right? Nope. I played with Foreigner's drummer the night before the show and to my surprise he ended up giving me some tickets. I went to will-call the next day and found out they were 6th row-center seats which were arguably the best seats in the house that night!

 

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So, why all of the presales and the secrecy? Well, you already know the answer don't you. Yup, MONEY. There isn't a ton of money in record sales anymore so the main way artists and their record companies make any cash these days is concert tours so it makes sense that the record companies would put a strangle-hold on ticket sales and encourage us to join fan clubs, etc. (for more money) in order to get better seats. Even joining fan clubs is no guarantee either. Everything's a game now and no matter how hard you try to learn how to play it, you still end up stiffed in the end somehow, usually in the wallet.

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