Ticketmaster has refunded 18 million pesos to the 2,155 customers who missed Bad Bunny’s concert on December 9, 2022 at Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. The Federal Attorney General for Consumer Protection (Profeco) has issued a statement in which it assures that it has checked with the company that all those affected have received the full price they paid for their ticket plus the 20% that the law stipulates for the Damage dictates received have caused. Since Ticketmaster complied with its customers in this case, Profeco will not penalize the company, although users of this and many other concerts have been complaining for some time about its abusive practices: charging excessive commissions, impossibility to buy tickets online and not paying attention . if there are problems with ticket sales for less media concerts.
On that December night, the Puerto Rican artist climbed onto a floating palm tree that moved across a nearly empty dance floor. Outside, thousands of people were crying in frustration at not seeing their favorite singer at one of his recent concerts. Ticketmaster’s scanning machines failed to detect the presence of tickets, and staff with no other way to check their validity were forced to ban users who had bought their tickets legally. Ticketmaster announced its version of the cause of the outages, which is now supported by Profeco: The high concentration of mobile devices has degraded the Internet signal used by the scanning systems.
At the second concert the following day, the flow of people outside the venue who had gone to party the day before, although they didn’t have a ticket, was reduced and access flowed smoothly, so the special operation of Profeco was used that night. However, the institute does not report on the remaining complaints and concerts that the company has received in recent months. Many Ticketmaster users who had problems with their tickets are still not getting their money, and the company’s social networks have been filled with comments about people who have not yet received attention.
A young woman was unable to enter the concert, explains her situation in a phone call during the Bad Bunny concert on December 9th. Emilio Espejel
More and more major artists are rebelling against the abusive commissions the company is charging its clients. The most relevant allegations came from the United States, where the Senate accused the company of monopoly over problems selling Taylor Swift tickets, their exorbitant prices and downtime on the website, forcing it to testify before the chamber. They angered their fans and made sure of it that the concert was cancelled. Speaking towards the end of the audience, Clyde Lawrence, lead singer of mid-sized band Lawrence, explained the businesses LiveNation and Ticketmaster have been doing since their merger: “In this case, promoter and venue are part of the same corporate entity, so it’s essentially Live Nation , which negotiates to pay itself. Because of Live Nation’s control of the entire industry, artists have virtually no say in the discussion of these games, nor are we offered much transparency about them.”
The last conflict the company was beaten for was with the group The Cure. His singer Robert Smith was outraged on social media after learning his tickets were being sold under the dynamic pricing model, which increases the price when the system sees strong demand. The artist does not receive this price increase. Ticketmaster accepted that the fees they charged were excessive and set out to reimburse their customers for the extra price paid by fans. The company justified it by saying that this type of pricing was due to an attempt to discourage resale, another major problem with the platform.
(WE DIDN’T AGREE TO THE “DYNAMIC PRICES” / “PRICE RISE” / “PLATINUM TICKET” THING…BECAUSE IT’S A BIT SCAM ITSELF? A SEPARATE CONVERSATION!)
— ROBERT SMITH (@RobertSmith) March 15, 2023
Guitarist Neil Young has joined Robert Smith’s lawsuit against Ticketmaster. “It’s over,” he wrote in a statement on his website, “the old days are gone. Artists now have to worry about fans getting scammed due to Ticketmaster plugins and resellers. Concert tours aren’t fun anymore.” In Mexico, the company’s monopoly goes a long way. Besides the case that Profeco opened after the Bad Bunny concert, this agency is known not to have taken any further action against Ticketmaster for the remaining irregularities reported by their customers. Thousands of young people, meanwhile, are spending entire salaries on concerts they’ve been saving for months for, waiting in line hoping their tickets aren’t cloned or counterfeit, or that the Ticketmaster machines aren’t working anymore.
People in front of a guard at the entrances during the Bad Bunny concert on December 9, 2022.Emilio Espejel
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