One of the easiest ways for bands to interact with their fans directly is through “Fan Clubs”, allowing artists to reach out and provide tickets personally. As a general rule, artists are allowed 8% of their tickets, but recently, Ticketmaster has been clamping down on certain artists, citing out-dated rules to minimize, or even eliminate, Fan Club sales.
In an article published in the New York Times, Traci Thomas, who manages Jason Isbell, said, “they’re picking on us over 8 percent of the house.” Mike Luba, the manager of String Cheese Incident, echoed those sentiments. “Ticketmaster has always agreed that for that 8 percent of tickets, bands could do pretty much whatever they want with them… Now it feels like that scene in ‘Star Wars’ with the trash compactor, where the walls are about to squash everybody out.”
It seems that midlevel acts are being hit the hardest by these policies, and some bands are claiming that Ticketmaster are using archaic policies to reclaim these tickets. One such example is that a Fan Club needs to have an online chat room; certainly not necessary in today’s social media internet environment. The manager of Underoath, a Christian rock band, said he worked with Ticketmaster to ensure all of the Fan Club guidelines were in place when the band reunited recently, only to have the tickets reclaimed when Ticketmaster said the Fan Club was too new.
“It felt like it was a stalling tactic to force us to agree to use their system… The ultimate goal for Ticketmaster is to bring those fan club tickets onto their platform to have Ticketmaster sell your fan club tickets for you.”
In fact, Ticketmaster is rolling out a new service, OnTour, which would accomplish just that. The new system is designed to have bands sell their Fan Club tickets, you guessed it, through Ticketmaster. The ticket giant even called Fan Club tickets “voluntary” in a recent policy statement.
Richard Jones, manager of the Pixies, said “How many people really pay that much attention to an email they get from a ticketing company listing a boxing match, ‘Disney on Ice’ and the Foo Fighters? I think they would pay more attention to a message from an artist that they have a history with and says, ‘Get your tickets directly for your local show tomorrow right at this place.'”
Ticketmaster is meeting with a number of band managers tonight, at the Barclay Center to discuss this ongoing image. Let’s hope it’s a win for the artists.