Colorado lawsuits challenge music business' biggest players
By Matt Sebastian, Camera Music Writer
August 24, 2003
Like any serious fan of Boulder's String Cheese Incident, Adam Chall is ready to drop everything and follow the music.
The 29-year-old Bay Area real-estate developer — and String Cheese fanatic — already has tickets to the jam band's Halloween concerts in Las Vegas, and now he's mulling a warm-up trip to Colorado for the group's back-to-back Red Rocks gigs early next month.
It's finances that will govern Chall's travel plans, and in crunching the numbers, he couldn't believe how much more it would cost to buy Red Rocks tickets through Ticketmaster than from the band's in-house ticket outlet, SCI Ticketing Inc.
"Ticketmaster's charges are just ridiculous," Chall says from his San Francisco office, where he ran the figures on a spreadsheet. "Their fees are so burdensome that it makes you question whether you even want to go to the shows. I'm just glad SCI has a cheaper option."
The band's tickets can be quite a bit cheaper: To purchasesingle general admission seats to the Sept. 5 and 6 concerts, Chall would spend $79.95 through SCI Ticketing. Buying those same tickets on Ticketmaster's Web site — which doesn't let users buy seats to multiple shows in a single order, and charges steeper service fees and more than twice as much for UPS delivery — costs a whopping $116.90.
To your average music fan, that's a 46-percent price hike for the exact same product — a pair of paper ticket stubs.
"Selling tickets is just a natural extension of what we do, which is connecting with fans," says Keith Moseley, String Cheese Incident's bassist. "We're a grassroots organization and we've worked hard to build a community of fans over the years, through touring and providing them with a ticketing company that offers better service and a better price."
That may be coming to an abrupt end, though. String Cheese sued Ticketmaster this month in federal court over alleged anti-trust violations, accusing the ticketing behemoth of taking steps over the last year to limit, if not eliminate, the number of seats the band can sell.
String Cheese's lawsuit already is being closely watched by musicians and industry insiders around the country, as is another Colorado anti-trust case against Clear Channel Entertainment, which owns eight radio stations in the Denver metro area, including Boulder's KBCO-FM. In a suit filed in 2001, Denver promoter Nobody In Particular alleges the megapromoter is trying to force it out of business by using its radio stations to promote Clear Channel concerts, while shutting out advertising and promotion for rival shows.
Link to the Rest of the Story
Threaded Mode