Ticketmaster offers simple refund, lower fees for Cure fans: NPR

The Cure’s Robert Smith performs in Glastonbury, England, in 2019. This week, he shared his frustrations with Ticketmaster, announcing Thursday that the company will cut fees and offer partial refunds to buyers of The Cure tickets.

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The Cure’s Robert Smith performs in Glastonbury, England, in 2019. This week, he shared his frustrations with Ticketmaster, announcing Thursday that the company will cut fees and offer partial refunds to buyers of The Cure tickets.

Ian Gavan/Getty Images

One cure — or remedy, at least — to Ticketmaster’s high fees turned out to be The Cure’s captain Robert Smith, who said he was “disgusting” Who counts and announced Thursday Ticketmaster will offer a partial refund and lower fees moving forward.

“After further conversation, Ticketmaster has agreed with us that many of the fees charged are unduly high,” Smith wrote on Twitter. Smith said the company agreed to offer a $5-10 refund per ticket for verified fan accounts as a “goodwill gesture”.

Smith said that fans who have already purchased tickets will automatically receive a refund, and all future ticket purchases will incur a lower fee.

The announcement came a day after Smith shared his frustration on Twitter, saying he was “sick as all of you with today’s Ticketmaster fee debacle. To be very clear: the artist has no way of curtailing it.”

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In some cases, fans say the fee more than doubles the ticket price 1 social media user They share that they paid over $90 in fees for an $80 ticket.

Ticketmaster has been in the spotlight in recent months. Last November, Taylor Swift fans waited hours, paid high fees, and hung out on Ticketmaster’s website to try to score tickets for her IRAAS tour. One day before tickets opened to the public, the company canceled the sale due to “extremely high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient stock of tickets left to meet this demand”.

“It’s painful for me to watch mistakes happen without recourse,” Swift said in a statement on Instagram.

In January, after that debacle, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing looking into Live Nation—the company that owns Ticketmaster—and the lack of competition in the ticketing industry. Meanwhile, attorneys general in several states have launched consumer protection investigations, Swift fans have sued the company for fraud and antitrust violations and some lawmakers have called for Ticketmaster to be broken up.

Ticketmaster did not immediately respond to NPR’s request for comment.