On Tour For DUMMIES

A Fans Guide To Being On Tour

 

E TICKETS, REAL TICKETS, & GUEST LIST

 

E Tickets are work of the Devil. I hate them They are evil in its purest form. If you disagree (and you are welcome too because we live in a free country) you are wrong. Stop with your internal dialogue, you are wrong and you simply need to accept it and move on.

Why are you paying for a Booking Fee? When it’s you that does the booking.

Why are you paying for P&P? When it is sent to your phone or e mail address.

It is maximising profit for the sake of it, we all need to make a profit, but there is taking the piss and then there is taking the piss and E Tickets are the later.

What are you going to do when you bump into the band, ask them to sign the screen on your phone?

Real Tickets, Paper Tickets, have worked for thousands of years, why change it now, well, apart from maximising profit that is.

A real ticket is a document, it is something real, something you can touch, hold in your hand, place in a memory book, photo album, place on your bedroom wall, it is something you can get signed by the band if you bump into them, something that actually adds value to whole experience of going to the gig. Everything a real ticket is, an E Ticket is not. It really is that simple.

Something else you can do with a real ticket, is to give them as a gift in a card. Try doing that with an E Ticket. It’s just like putting money into a card or opening a card to find money inside, it is something so very real, how can a small piece of paper have such an effect, how can a small piece of paper show to someone how much you care, yet it does. Is the reality starting to sink in yet? We’ve all been conned. Shit isn’t it.

Who would want a Willy Wonka Golden Ticket? Give me a gig ticket any day.

Guess what I’m now being offered? I’m now being offered commemorative concert tickets (at an extra cost). What the fuck is all of that about? Apart from maximising profit. FUCK OFF! No, I don’t want a commemorative ticket, I want the ticket I’ve paid an obscene amount of money for thank you very much. Is that too much to ask for, to actually receive the item I’ve paid for.

I now deliberately go out of my way to use ticket agencies that will send me a real ticket to the gig I want to attend. See Tickets and Ticket Scotland are always helpful. They will often send tickets straight away too instead of waiting months for them to be delivered. Why is that done? Can someone out there explain that one away.

I miss the good old days of going to a box office and speaking to a human being. I thought the interweb was supposed to make things better.

E Tickets have also made it easier to be ripped off by Secondary Ticket Sites. They are not Ticket Touts. Ticket touts are people who stand outside venues in whatever the weather throws at them shouting “Buy or sell.” They are providing a service, and just for the record, I have NEVER been ripped off by a ticket tout, I have NEVER paid more than the face value of the ticket either. I’ve had ticket touts show me the difference between a real ticket and a counterfeit ticket, sometimes I’ve even been given tickets by ticket touts.

I love ticket touts and just for the record, when you walk away from a ticket tout, whether you have done business with them or not, always leave them with the words “Be lucky.”

Those secondary ticket sites however are evil in its purest form, bringing shame and corruption to the name Ticket Touts, they sell E Tickets that you have no way of knowing if they even exist never mind if they real or not. They aren’t outside a venue in all weathers, knowing full well that if they sell you a dodgy ticket, you’ll be back ten minutes to give them a kicking, they can be anywhere on the planet selling to anyone on the planet, and it’s all being openly endorsed by the music industry is my observation.

Think about it.

How many people do you know that have been ripped off by a ticket tout outside a venue?

How many times are you going to read and hear stories about people selling and buying tickets online that are fake?

Now you tell me where the real problem lies. Now tell me why the music industry wants you to keep using those sites? Follow the money, isn’t that what we constantly hear in the movies?

As a side note to tickets, the other way to get into a gig is via the Guest List. Over the years I’ve been incredibly lucky to have gotten into gigs on the guest list, apart from the ego trip of saying “I was on the Guest List…”it actually saves you money on the ticket, but it isn’t free, someone somewhere has absorbed that cost. I’ve not always known that but I have always been very grateful that I saved a few quid, which whenever I could, I spent on merch.

There have also been times when people have offered me their “plus one,” sometimes I’ve never known them or meet them again. As the years went by, if I was ever given Guest List plus one, I would try to take a total stranger into the gig with me as my “plus one.”

As I’ve previously mentioned in Travel, it’s about passing on that debt, it’s about helping others chase their dream, I may never meet those people again, like I’ve never meet those who helped me, it is what they now call random acts of human kindness, and long may it continue.

I take great care and humility in remembering when times were difficult for me, it is important for me to never forget. May I always remember how it felt.

 

Noggin xx