Robert Smith of the Cure has told fans he is “as sickened as you all are” after fans complained of Ticketmaster’s additional fees on sales of tickets for the band’s US tour.
The band purposefully kept ticket costs affordable, with some as low as $20 (£16). But fans shared screenshots of Ticketmaster shopping baskets with varying fees across different venues: one image showed combined fees that exceeded the cost of a $20 ticket – each subject to a service fee of $11.65 and a facility charge of $10, plus an overall order processing fee of $5.50.
The fees were levied by the ticket sales behemoth as part of its Verified Fan programme, which allows fans to register for an advance sale that is said to prevent tickets getting into the hands of touts or bots.
“To be very clear: the artist has no way to limit them,” Smith wrote in a trademark caps lock tweet. “I have been asking how they are justified. If I get anything coherent by way of an answer I will let you all know.”
Earlier in the week, Smith said that the band had chosen to use the system in order to combat scalping, but had declined to participate in the company’s dynamic pricing and Platinum ticket schemes.
“We had final say in all our ticket pricing for this upcoming tour, and didn’t want those prices instantly and horribly distorted by resale,” Smith tweeted on 15 March, saying that the band had been told that the US resale business is a “multi-billion $ industry”.
He continued: “We didn’t agree to the ‘dynamic pricing’/‘price surging’/‘platinum ticket’ thing … because it is itself a bit of a scam? A separate conversation.” In a subsequent tweet, he called it “a greedy scam – and all artists have the choice not to participate … if no artists participated, it would cease to exist”.
Musicians such as Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift have used the dynamic pricing system, which has seen individual tickets go for thousands of dollars. In February, the Springsteen fanzine Backstreets closed down after 43 years in protest at ticket costs.
Smith concluded: “We know it’s a far from perfect system – but the reality is that if there aren’t enough tickets on sale, a number of fans are going to miss out whatever system we use; at least this one tries to get tickets into the hands of fans at a fair price”, and joked that the band should “play more/bigger shows”.
It is the latest example of fan dissatisfaction with the Ticketmaster sales model. In November, it cancelled the general sale for tickets for Swift’s Eras tour – which starts in the US on 17 March – because demand for the Verified Fan sale had left “insufficient remaining ticket inventory”, it said, citing “historically unprecedented demand”.
Swift called the situation “excruciating”, and said: “I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could” in a statement posted to Instagram.
The debacle prompted US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to call for a break-up of the Ticketmaster and Live Nation merger, calling it a “monopoly”.
In January, as a result of the Swift situation, the US Senate held a hearing about the company to hear testimony about ticket sales, monopolisation, resale markets and Ticketmaster’s influence on the live music industry.
Two groups of Swift fans subsequently sued Ticketmaster over the sales fiasco, alleging that it engaged in “fraud, price-fixing and antitrust violations” and intentionally misled fans.
In December 2022, it also cancelled hundreds of tickets for a show by Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny in Mexico City, claiming that an “unprecedented” number of fake tickets overwhelmed its system, leading to valid ticket-holders being denied entry.
Federal records show that Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation’s spend on lobbying in Washington jumped from about $250,000 (£205,000) in 2018 to nearly $1.3m (£1.1m) in 2021 and that its 2022 figures could top that peak.
The Cure are expected to return with Songs of a Lost World, their 14th studio album, later this year. It will be their first since 4:13 Dream in 2008. The band previewed material from the album on a run of UK dates in December.
“Shaped by the deaths of several members of Smith’s family, Songs of a Lost World threatens to be a bleak record … and yet, several new songs sound rooted in the sweeping, enveloping end of the Cure repertoire that dares to be beautiful – the operatic And Nothing is Forever, for instance, or the post-rock machinations of Endsong,” wrote Guardian critic Malcolm Jack.
