Testimony from the editor of Patrol magazine, which I like for several reasons*:

I’ve had equally hellish experiences with the two companies [i.e., Ticketmaster and Live Nation], particularly during the now-infamous Radiohead debacle at Nissan Pavilion in Bristow, Virginia, last year. The purchasing process went smoothly enough if you ignore the exorbitant $13.50 fee Ticketmaster added to the $77.00 ticket price. But Nissan is a Live Nation venue well-known among northern Virginians as a concert-experience deal-breaker: only realistically accessible by helicopter, it sees traffic meltdowns before and after every major show. Add a Genesis-scale deluge the afternoon of the show, and you have a recipe for disaster. Accidents and traffic jams made many ticketholders late to a “rain or shine” ** show that most certainly should have been rescheduled. Live Nation employees turned away latecomers in droves, claiming the show was canceled. It wasn’t, and thousands of fans drove for hours through the torrent only to be denied entry at the gate.

Sessions also describes a Coldplay show in Dallas for which he paid more than $28 per ticket in Ticketmaster service fees; he refers us to further testimony about that show at a blog called, um, douchebagface.com:

[…] I proceed to checkout where it informs me that there is a $28.33 PER TICKET convenience fee, bringing the total of each ticket well over $125 dollars, adding in tax to get to a grand total of 2 seats an entire section back from the stage for over 255 dollars. Are you fucking kidding me? So I thought to myself, maybe it is just the closer seats that have the high fees so I ran a lawn ticket through my shopping cart and the grand total of that one came out to $56, that would be the $35 it “costs” (and I use that term very loosely) plus 21 fucking dollars of convenience fees per ticket. This is insanity.

* The magazine, I mean, which “began in 2006 as ‘The CCM Patrol,’ a satirical blog about the Christian music scene” and is now published by King’s College, which, I found out, is located in the Empire State Building.

** The companies that run these outdoor amphitheaters do so many offensive things that it’s hard to keep them all straight. “Rain or shine” means that they are selling tickets to venues a large percentage of the attendees at which won’t have a roof, and aren’t intending to offer refunds if folks get rained on. The promoters can make the argument that lawn seats are cheaper, but I’ve also noticed that not all of the higher priced seats are always under what roof there is. Parking is another nightmare; the sheds are often in smaller suburban and exurban cities or towns not likely to require the venue to have anything other than a two-lane road heading in or out of the facility, making for long waits both before and after the show. (N.B.: I’m not bitching about this from personal experience: Critics get in free, and often got special parking besides.)

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Previously in Hitsville:
Ticketmaster shareholders sue to stop merger
How Live Nation does business
Will the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger mean higher concert prices?
Another suit against Ticketmaster
Constantly updated: The Ticketmaster-Live-Nation unholy-matrimony news round-up!
Five arguments against the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger
Irving Azoff kicks it old school
The music industry’s Putin
Bad merger coverage
WWBD (What would Bono do?)
Billboard’s analysis of the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger
Springsteen and Landau bash Ticketmaster and Live Nation!
P.S. on Ticketmaster: A case study, starring Bruce Springsteen
Why the potential Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger is a very bad idea
Is Ticketmaster trying to muddle the fees issue?
The Azoff-Ticketmaster deal: Bad news for concert-goers—and the music industry
Why you so seldom read about obscene Ticketmaster-style ticketing charges