Yesterday should have been a great day for Metallica fans. The band announced their 20th-anniversary concert to celebrate the release of the S & M (Elektra) album with the San Francisco Symphony. By partnering with the new venue the Chase Center, Metallica sacrificed their usual anti-scalping practices and ended up succumbing to Tickets today and Ticketmaster. Of course, the minute the fan pre-sale went live, some fans got tickets. But many more still were shut out by bots, clearly having infiltrated the fan club ticket event. Quickly the queue filled up with over 2000 places ahead of most trying to get through to make a purchase. Fans trying for the second pre-sale at 3 PM local time a few hours later were also, mostly shut out. Metal Insider reported on the outrage felt by fans and also the resale prices escalated grossly with tickets that were priced at face values of 50, 100, 250 and 500 going for up to $10000 USD. For many years Metallica’s fanclub was a paid membership, but the band made the Fifth Member Club free when they relaunched it last year. One of the main perks was to be unencumbered access to tickets. This isn’t strictly Metallica’s fault, but a brutal burn on fans. We have reported in the past that companies like Ticketmaster are colluding with scalpers, allowing Bots and artificially inflating the resale market at a profit, at the expense of fans. Continue reading →