In a move that has elicited reactions ranging from anger to confusion to “of course they did,” Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation Entertainment, have introduced a new pricing option for live event tickets: Oops! All Fees®.
Developed by the minds behind the Ticketmaster Platinum® dynamic pricing feature, Oops! All Fees® follows a recent spate of public relations debacles for the world’s largest live events conglomerate—from the apocalyptic Taylor Swift pre-sale last fall to the 100% fees levied on tickets for The Cure‘s “Platinum-free, low-cost” tour just last month.
Per an announcement on the Live Nation Entertainment website, Oops! All Fees® was “designed to cut out the middleman and give fans exactly what they can’t stop talking about—the fees, and nothing but the fees. … Effective immediately, Ticketmaster will offer an Oops! All Fees® ticket option for all live events. While Oops! All Fees® passes do not grant purchasers access to the event in question, they guarantee fans the highest possible price-gauging figure to rage-post during their next Twitter diatribe.”
Oops! All Fees® will also offer customizable fee packages, allowing purchasers to build their 100%-surcharge transactions out of fun new Ticketmaster fee products like the We Own The Venues fee, the We Also Run The Ticketing fee, the You Know We Take A Piece of Merch fee, and the Who’s Gonna Stop Us? fee. Purchasers may add an actual event ticket to their order for an additional fee.
During a Friday morning press conference on Park Place, an executive from Live Nation Entertainment told reporters to “think of it like the surcharge version of an Ultra-VIP ticket: There’s always some sap who will pony up for the most expensive thing just to say they did it.”
The round-faced executive sneered through his bushy, gray mustache, adjusting his bowtie and waving his cane for emphasis as he continued, “It doesn’t matter if people like us or hate us—we’re inevitable! We have all of your data. We see all of your tweets. Our research shows that what fans really want—more than live music, more than affordable prices—is to be angry on the internet. Our fees are more famous than any of the artists we work with—including you, Taylor. We’re just leaning in.”
The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee has already scheduled another choreographed display of bipartisan grandstanding about the antitrust implications of Ticketmaster’s latest grasp at fans’ wallets. Witnesses at the hearing will include exasperated spokespeople from three much, much smaller ticketing companies, the LNE exec from Friday’s press conference, and Gen-Z musicians DOMi & JD Beck, who will teach Bernie Sanders how to set up his Ticketmaster app so he can find the Steely Dan tickets he bought.
“Silly consumers,” the LNE exec added on Friday while stroking a burlap sack with a dollar sign on it. “Just because I have no real competitors and I want all of your money for myself, everyone wants me to go directly to jail without passing ‘Go’ nor collecting my hard-earned $200. But that’s not how this game works.”
When one reporter commented that the whole “Oops! All Berries” concept was a Cap’n Crunch thing, not a Monopoly thing, the exec explained that Ticketmaster had acquired the “Oops! All” copyright in a mortgage auction after Cap’n Crunch missed a hotel payment on Boardwalk.