Hot tickets, even hotter tempers
Fans are feeling burned by Mission Ballroom ticket sales, but there are solid reasons behind these fast sellouts.
When tickets to Tame Impala’s two-night stand at the Mission Ballroom went on sale last Friday morning, Madeline Walters was ready.
A super fan — “(Tame Impala frontman) Kevin Parker is one of the greatest musicians popular culture has seen,” she said in an email — Walters had three computers fixed on the website for ticketing platform AXS when the clock struck the 10 a.m. on-sale time.
And then ... nothing. Two of her computers froze. By the time the third had loaded, the show was sold out.
Walters wasn’t alone. “Thousands” who tried for Tame Impala tickets came up empty-handed, according to Justin Jimanez, spokesman for AXS, “even after blocking thousands of bot requests.”
The Tame Impala drought is just one of a handful of ticketing issues that’s had fans fuming at Mission Ballroom in the venue’s first week. Tickets blinked out similarly fast for the venue’s opening night with The Lumineers and a memorial show for bluegrass musician Jeff Austin. (That show was later moved to a larger venue.)
Designed to stem that issue, the venue’s Mission Fair Ticketing system, which awarded tickets randomly to fans who signed up in advance, only incensed the fans who lost out. That prompted Mission to drop the ticket system prior to the Tame Impala ticket sales. To add insult to injury, the tickets that get away appear on AXS’S own resale market seconds later at double the cost, if not more. Plus, both conve
nience fees and added resale fees can tack an extra 20 percent on to the final cost.
Some consumers blame AEG Presents, the venue’s owner and exclusive booker, and AXS for bungling ticketing to the venue’s first slate of shows.
“Tame Impala’s best fans were cheated out of tickets,” Walters wrote, “most likely by bots and resale sites. And Mission Ballroom is letting it happen.”
Denver resident Shayna Cohn had “two frustrating mornings trying to buy tickets,” she said, despite being ready to buy tickets as soon as they went on sale. “They were gone within seconds,” she said. “I was unable to get through to the page and when I eventually did, the price skyrocketed to over double the face value (of ) $65.” On the morning tickets officially went on sale, the resale price eventually creeped up to $150 per ticket, she said. “I ended up spending $165 on my ticket and I’m definitely upset.”
“I know capitalism works like this, but it’s disheartening for fans and feels deceptive and money-hungry,” she said.
How did a brand new music venue do wrong by so many fans?
“To be honest, this is supply and demand,” said Dean Dewulf, senior vice president of the music division at AXS. Dewulf cited Tame Impala as a prime example. “Our system did not fail — everything worked as it was designed,” he said. The band, which will play two nights at New York City’s 18,000-person Madison Square Garden this month, is simply much bigger than the venue. “(Tame Impala) could have very easily sold out six Mission Ballrooms; we only had two.”
That difference helps explain the sheer volume of fans upset with Mission Ballroom. The Lumineers and Tame Impala are what promoters would call “underplays” at Mission Ballroom — bands whose draw far exceeds the venue they’re booked to play. Sometimes, artists request these in an effort to create a special evening for their fans. In the case of Mission’s multiple underplays, it could be seen as a promoter looking to drum up attention for a new venue.
To be sure, Denver’s music community is talking about Mission. But Don Strasburg, senior talent buyer for AEG Presents Rocky Mountain, denied that that was the intent.
“Obviously, opening night for something of this magnitude is traditionally of that caliber,” he said, referring to The Lumineers, which filled out Greenwood Village’s 18,000-capacity Fiddler’s Green three times over in 2017. “Tame Impala wanted to play this size venue, as did the Raconteurs. We don’t book based upon marketing effort.”
For its part, Mission took pains to stem this tide by introducing Mission Fair Ticketing. The system is a slight modification of AXS’ Waiting Room mechanism, which arranges fans who land on a concert’s ticket purchase page early into a randomized queue that determines who gets the first shot at tickets. Concerts that use Fair Ticketing ask fans to essentially reserve their place the waiting room far earlier. If they are selected, fans are notified by email, rather than having to quick-draw a mouse click the second the sale begins.
The venue debuted the system for The Lumineers. Designed to be equitable, it, too enraged fans, who sank Mission to a 3.1 rating on Facebook before it opened.
Those hotly contested shows, which Strasburg pointed out are a small fraction of the bookings at Mission, inadvertently underscored AXS’S role in an aspect of the ticketing market that’s plagued consumers from its inception: scalpers. Fans can buy second-hand tickets from other fans on AXS’S website, typically at a high markup plus a hefty surcharge. For example, face-value general admission tickets to The Raconteurs’ soldout Oct. 9 show at Mission were initially advertised at $69.50. On Thursday, via AXS Resale, that same single GA ticket cost $215, plus a whopping $48.28 “resale fee.” (AXS is making out on the other end, too, charging a 7.5% “sellers fee” for each ticket listed.)
Rolled out over the last two years, the service is intended to protect consumers from buying fraudulent tickets, Dewulf said. “When we weren’t offering this, (fans) were selling them through third-party secondary sites. A fan is not going to know whether one’s listing or another listing is real or not, so we introduced trusted resale.”
This year, AXS added a service called AXS Premium to its ticketing marketplace. AXS Premium is the ticketing platform’s foray into dynamic ticket pricing, a service its competitor, Ticketmaster, has used for years under the name Ticketmaster Platinum. Essentially, this service allows an artist to get a piece of the tickets’ market value. (In solidarity with fans, artists will typically set their ticket prices lower than they could, an act of kindness that the secondary market takes advantage of.)
In AXS Premium, the artist and promoter set aside a block of tickets (“50 or 100 tickets” at a 4,000-capacity room like Mission, according to Strasburg) at a price that fluctuates with the secondary market. AXS still charges a service fee, but the mark-up on these tickets goes to the artist, not a stranger on the internet.
If AXS is under the microscope in Denver, it’s the cost of dominance. A subsidiary of AEG, AXS tickets the vast majority of the shows put on by AEG Presents. Though dominant in Denin ver, Live Nation entity Ticketmaster is far bigger nationally, ticketing 80 of the top 100 arenas in the country, according to The New York Times, and imposing comparable resale services and surcharges.
In the same fashion, Mission’s ticket headaches are a consequence of its popularity rather than a unique problem. If anything, the venue is a case study in a long-broken market.
“The way tickets have been sold for decades and the opaqueness between how they’re priced and the fees are structured and are released has confused the consumer,” said Dave Brooks, senior director of live music and touring for Billboard. “Ticketing companies and secondary sites have benefited from that.”
No matter who holds the keys to Denver’s live music scene in a decade, the future of ticketing in a growing city like Denver is a mixed bag at best, Brooks said.
“There is evidence that the ticket cost for medium-demand events will go down, as revenue off hot-selling shows increases,” Brooks said. ”But high-demand concerts aren’t going to get cheaper.”
Dylan Owens is a freelance writer in Denver.