What should have been a joyous occasion – buying tickets to see The Cure next year in Chicago – turned into two days of frustration.
Pre-sale yesterday – couldn’t grab any tickets whatsoever even though I was on the site, and logged in, hours beforehand. Yet within minutes there were a ton on StubHub. WTF? Tell me Ticketmaster doesn’t have some deal with the scalpers. I won’t believe you anyway.
Public sale today – Eventually got locked out of the Ticketmaster site. Not even sure why. Hitting search too fast? In any case, on a Cure fan site a girl suggested I try the Ticketmaster app. That wasn’t looking any better but surprisingly about 45 minutes after the sale went live I was able to snag two tickets. Sure, they are balcony and almost as far back as you can get, but at least they are stage right where Robert usually stands. Although at this point I’m not too happy with him so I’m not sure why I care.
The more I think about it, the more pissed off I am at The Cure for not taking measures to stop scalping. You can check all the resale sites and there are just tons of tickets on there even though fans weren’t able to get any. If I hadn’t persisted, well, I guess we wouldn’t be going because I refuse to buy from a scalper. I just can’t in good conscience support that behavior. I really wish everyone else would band together and refuse too; there wouldn’t be scalpers if they didn’t make any money.
I’m really not sure what made The Cure choose one of the smallest possible Chicago venue you could think of – UIC Pavilion. It seats less than 7000 people and for some reason they didn’t add a second show like they did for the other two venues. Rumor is they might be headlining a festival in Tennessee that weekend. Once again, Chicago gets screwed. Isn’t that always the way? Just like how they’ll play A Forest at most cities during their tour but not when they play Chicago. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Robert hates our town. Well, the feeling is starting to become mutual. I love their music, but I’m starting to really dislike the band because I don’t feel like they care who gets their hands on tickets so long as they make money. Then again, this isn’t anything new – I’ve never felt like The Cure cares about their fans in the way that other bands obviously do.
I guess the bright side to the small venue is even my “crappy” tickets won’t be as bad as the same tickets at Allstate Arena. I’ve also been told that the acoustics at UIC are pretty good, so there’s that.
But I’m going to say this now, and I mean it – this is it for me. If The Cure tours again after this, I’m not buying tickets unless they get rid of Ticketmaster and/or put some measure in place to minimize scalping. So I will try my best to enjoy my last Cure concert this coming June.