Posted Feb 25, 2009, 9:27 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Hamilton/Dresden
Posts: 1,859
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So is Leonard playing Copps or Hamilton Place?
From NP:
While tickets for Leonard Cohen’s upcoming North American tour didn’t officially go on sale from Ticketmaster until yesterday, that didn’t stop some devotees of the Canadian legend from landing seats to the show even earlier via the ticket-seller’s affiliate site, TicketsNow — albeit at substantially inflated prices.
It’s enough to draw more ire against Ticketmaster, which earlier this week settled a lawsuit regarding its online sales of Bruce Springsteen tickets through TicketsNow.
On Monday, seats for Cohen’s upcoming Canadian shows were made available for hundreds of dollars more than their intended asking price via TicketsNow.
The TicketsNow site was reportedly charging between $568 and $856 for tickets with a $99 to $250 face value (before an $85 to $128 service charge). The sale was taken down between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, but not without escaping the notice of Cohen’s camp.
“The reality is that somebody will pay $1,000 for a Cohen ticket, but [Cohen] wants to keep it at reasonable prices for people, so this undermines this totally,” Duncan Gillespie, the chief executive officer of Hamilton’s Copps Coliseum, told the CBC.
Cohen, who starts his official North American tour in Austin, Tex., on April 2, is scheduled to play Hamilton in May. Other Canadian stops include Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Quebec City, Ottawa, Kingston, Ont., and London, Ont.
Gillespie said that Ticketmaster promised to take care of the matter after receiving complaints about the TicketNow sales.
“Sometimes it’s a matter in large corporations like that of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing,” he told the CBC. “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.”
Earlier this month, Ticketmaster was served with a $500-million class action suit that claims the company violated Ontario’s ticket-scalping laws. The lawsuit came about after a man from Toronto, who was trying to purchase tickets to a Smashing Pumpkins show, says he was redirected to more expensive seats available at TicketsNow after the Ticketmaster website informed him the show was sold out.
Leah Collins, Canwest News Service
[Leonard Cohen wants to make some money on his current tour — but he's not looking to soak people with scalpers' prices. Photo by Diego Tuson / AFP / Getty Images]
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