Last week, as part of a recent settlement with New Jersey regarding its Great Leader Bruce "The Boss" Springsteen, Ticketmaster said it would stop redirecting visitors to its solely-owned resale site, TicketsNow, before tickets went on sale to the general public (TMT News). Because, you know, it's kind of a little bit unethical. Fast forward to now. Looks like the company is doing just that with tickets to see The Patron Saint of Canada Leonard Cohen. Ontario's Attorney General Chris Bentley won't have it and says his office is now looking into a whole slew of entertainment and sporting events that Ticketmaster is in charge of. In layman's terms: you screw with The Kinky Jew/Monk, you screw with Canada, eh?
"Sometimes it's a matter [in] large corporations like that of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Is that understandable? Yes. Is that excusable? No. Do they need to correct it? Absolutely. We're not happy and I think fans are justifiably very unhappy," Copps Coliseum chief executive officer, Duncan Gillespie said. "The reality is that somebody will pay $1,000 for a Cohen ticket, but he [The Good St. Cohen] wants to keep it at reasonable prices for people, so this undermines [his intensions] totally."
Tickets with a face value of $99 to $250 were being sold on TicketsNow.com for between $568 to $856, plus a service charge ranging from $85 to $128 per ticket. Ticketmaster took a break from cackling and rolling in the money of the Great White North to insist that it hasn't done anything wrong whatsoever. It then let out a high-pitched shriek, morphed into a Jabberwocky, and flew off into the night.
Ticketmaster has already been hit with four Canadian lawsuits. The latest represents Canucks in Manitoba going all the way back to February of '07. It was initiated by a woman who tried to purchase Carrie Underwood tickets in an attempt to see the subtle differences in vocal inflection between the recorded and live versions of such hits as "Jesus Take the Wheel." She tried to buy tickets on the Ticketmaster website, but kept being redirected to TicketsNow where she thought she purchased four tickets at $57 a pop. Later, the credit card was charged $917.75 including "service" and a "delivery charges." After seeing the bill (and I can only assume after actually listening to Carrie Underwood), she tried to cancel the order, but was denied. Cohen wept.
