things i hate...

i love music. but there are some music-related things that really upset me. today, i had to deal with ticketmaster. i hoped to get tickets for myself and a large group of friends to the kanYe west concert in San Jose. tickets went on sale today at 10 a.m. and by 10:15 a.m. i was unable to get any tickets.

obviously ticketmaster is not solely to blame for this problem. i should have tried to get the tickets earlier, but i hoped to hear from a few more people. even so, this does not do anything to relieve my distaste for ticketmaster. while the short amount of time in which tickets is related to much more than how lame ticketmaster is, they provided little assistance. first off, their website doesn't indicate if an event is sold out. what is more frustrating is that when u select "best available" those are not necessarily the best tickets available and often times if u select a specific price and section u will find tickets when "best available" resulted in nothing.

understanding the shortcomings of their online system i eventually tried calling. the first few calls resulted in busy signals yet when i did finally connect i was put on hold for ten minutes. why do i get a busy signal just to get put on hold?

beyond there complaints ticketmaster also rips u off left and right with service charges and what not. i found this funny image online...
click on it for an enlarged view.

what's really frustrating and annoying is that right after tickets went on sale there were already a ton of tickets available at much more than face value on other sites reselling tickets. it's annoying that people are able to get away with bogarting tickets and then selling them at a premium. it's also frustrating that it's OK to turn around and sell tickets at higher prices than face value.

i understand the rationale behind allowing it, don't get me wrong. but at the end of the day, someone profits off of doing nothing and providing no contribution to society at all. it's easy to say it's not ticketmaster's fault, but they hold such a dominant position in the market and face such little competition (tho small changes are taking place i guess) that they don't have to respond to the consumer. it creates a world of so few options that some are able to buy up tickets just to turn around and rip u off more than ticketmaster would.

another thing about music that bugs me came from realizing that a link i posted in my very post no longer exists. the link was to kanYe's performance of "Hey Mama" from the Grammy's . it was an amazing, moving performance and i'm seriously disappointed that it is no longer on youtube.

of all the people out there i get the copyright issues involved in a situation like this. even with an understanding and grasp of it, it is still very frustrating that the video 'had' to be taken down. where else does one find live performances? occasionally they end up on a dvd. but youtube serves so many other functions and provides so much benefit. either way, here is a link to the sound from Ye's performance.

in both cases i'm not necessarily attempting to make some grand, powerful argument about the need for change, whether i believe in the need for such change. it's after 2 a.m. in the morning after a long week of work and my mind is so not in the right place to attempt to do something along those lines. but these issues and others like them are a definite source of frustration.