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: Paul McCartney fans shut out of getting tickets for his upcoming
: show in Vancouver say Ticketmaster and resellers make it
: impossible for regular fans to score seats to popular concerts.
:
: Victoria resident Dale Dymianiw was unable to get tickets for he
: and his wife to see the megastar at Rogers Arena on Nov. 25,
: despite being on two computers, ready to buy tickets the instant
: they went on sale. " I'm going back and forth and going
: 'there's no tickets, there's no tickets.' This is right at 10
: o'clock on the day that they started selling them ," he
: told CTV's Steele on Your Side .
:
: It wasn't any better for fans that showed up at the box office.
: The first person in line at the Edmonton box office that day was
: shocked to learn there were no seats available. The arena
: staffer was similarly surprised, saying she'd never seen a
: situation like it.
:
: Unable to get tickets through the Ticketmaster website, Dymianiw
: said he was disappointed to find thousands of tickets for the
: Paul McCartney concert on resale websites - for much higher
: prices. " It's like they have a special pipeline to more
: tickets ," he said.
:
: A scan of these sites by CTV News producers found more than
: 1,900 tickets for the Vancouver show for as much as $3,200 for a
: floor seat, plus service charges of up to $800. That's in
: addition to the $40 fee to mail the tickets to the person's
: address.
:
: Kingsley Bailey, who re-sells event tickets through his company,
: Vancouver Ticket Services, says even he's having trouble getting
: his hands on tickets these days. He suggests Ticketmaster is
: holding back seats and funneling prime tickets to its own
: re-selling site, TicketsNow. " What they're doing is
: questionable but they can do what they do because right now the
: rules say what they're doing is completely right ," Bailey
: said.
:
: Although the ticket giant operates the secondary reselling site,
: Ticketmaster steadfastly maintains its tickets never end up on
: the site unless supplied by an individual ticket holder, or
: reseller. " We never divert any inventory from Ticketmaster
: to TicketsNow. We don't own the inventory - we don't control the
: inventory ," spokesperson Jacqueline Peterson told CTV's
: Lynda Steele in a telephone interview from Los Angeles.
:
: Ticketmaster claims high-tech scalpers scoop up the best seats
: using sophisticated computer programs called bots. " They
: have people, I'm going to put it in layman's terms, basically
: cutting in line with these bots to scoop up tickets to then
: resell them on secondary sites ," Peterson said.
:
: But along with millions of other concert fans, Dale Dymianiw is
: disappointed, and still isn't sure who's to blame. He bit the
: bullet and paid a premium to get tickets on a secondary site.
: " It's a conspiracy theory ," he said. " The
: little guy has no choice ."
:
: Despite Ticketmaster's assurances, a recent TV investigation in
: Tennessee found that just seven per cent of the arena's 14,000
: seats for a Justin Bieber show - or seven per cent - were
: actually released to the public. The rest were sold in
: pre-sales, fan clubs, to VIPs and ticket resellers. Several
: provinces have laws against reselling tickets for above face
: value, but Alberta just rescinded its legislation because it's
: too hard to enforce.
:
: In May, Ticketmaster Canada settled a class-action lawsuit in
: Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba and Alberta, alleging the company
: bought and sold its own tickets for profit. The suit alleged
: that Ticketmaster coerced music fans to purchase much more
: expensive seats from its subsidiary TicketsNow. The settlement
: included an automatic refund of $36 to people who bought
: qualifying tickets from TicketsNow. The company did not admit
: to any wrongdoing, but agreed to stop selling tickets for above
: face value in Ontario and Manitoba, in compliance with
: anti-scalping legislation.
:
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