The Cure's Robert Smith. Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images
Robert Smith, frontman of the U.K. rock legends The Cure, is the latest artist to take aim at Ticketmaster for its business model. Tickets for The Cure's upcoming tour went on sale yesterday (March 15), and some fans complained about the fees and additional costs that were tacked on by Ticketmaster to every sale.
In tweets posted early Thursday morning, Smith took the side of disappointed ticketholders. "I am as sickened as you all are by today's Ticketmaster 'fees' debacle," he wrote. "To be very clear: the artist has no way to limit them."
Later, Smith said that resale tickets for the shows had been removed from StubHub "in all markets except NY, Chicago, Denver (i.e, cities in states that have laws protecting scalpers)." Noting that "there are still tickets available - it is just a very slow process," Smith sensibly implied that scalpers would not exist if no one purchased tickets from them.
Smith also said that The Cure had refused to tie their tour sales to Ticketmaster Platinum, the dynamic pricing model which increases ticket costs based on demand. "It is a greedy scam," Smith wrote, "and all artists have the choice not to participate... if no artists participated, it would cease to exist."
Pressure is continuing to rise against Ticketmaster on many fronts The Department of Justice has opened an antitrust investigation into Ticketmaster's parent company Live Nation over alleged power abuses, and the company has been roundly condemned for recent botched ticket sales. Bad Bunny fans with tickets were locked out of a Mexico City concert after what Ticketmaster claims was vast fraud (the company has been fined millions by the Mexican government) and a wave of potential Taylor Swift ticket buyers led to crashed Ticketmaster servers, the cancellation of the sale, a lawsuit, and a Senate subcommittee hearing.
