Neil Young’s fight against the powers that be in the music industry continues, this time with a critique of Ticketmaster, the market’s leading ticket publisher. The Canadian musician denounced on his website that “I receive letters blaming me for charging $3,000 for a ticket to a charity concert. That money does not reach me,” denounces the musician, who in turn claims that artists should “worry about their fans blaming them for Ticketmaster’s commissions and resales.” Young have it clear “Tours are not fun anymore. Tours are not what they used to be,” he says.
Young utters this complaint in response to the controversy that arose between the ticket company and Te Cure when the group led by Robert Smith decided to lower the price of their tour tickets. “Despite The Cure’s efforts to keep the tickets at a reasonable price, Ticketmaster added several commissions that, in some cases, exceeded the price of the ticket itself,” explains Neil Young on his website, citing a news from the qz.com portal.
This situation led Robert Smith himself to affirm that he was “sick” by the commissions that Ticketmaster had imposed on his tour tickets. “The artist has no way of limiting them,” explained Smith in a tweet, who justified the use of the ticket holder with the aim of avoiding resale, although he had declined to apply dynamic prices, which change the value of the tickets as they are sold. they are running out. The British band, which had lowered the prices of its tickets to $20, denounced that the final price of these tickets exceeded $40.
Following criticism of the ticket office, The Cure announced that the company had offered a refund of $10 or $5, acknowledging that the commissions applied to the tickets were excessively high.
It is not the first time that Neil Young has raised his voice to denounce what he considers injustices in the music industry. In January of last year, he demanded that Spotify withdraw his songs from the aggregator in protest of the Swedish company’s decision to sign a contract with Joe Rogan, a pandemic denier.
