Music fans rejoiced after finding out many of them were getting free general admission ticket vouchers as part of a class action lawsuit settlement, but that excitement turned to frustration after many confronted problems when trying to use those vouchers.
The lawsuit claimed that Ticketmaster's fees were excessive and misleading, and if you bought tickets from Ticketmaster between October 21, 1999 and February 27, 2013, you could be apart of the class action lawsuit.
As part of the settlement, Ticketmaster was forced to pay out $42 million over four years, and no less than $10.5 million per year until 2020.
Ticketmaster sent out an estimated $386 million worth of discount codes on Tuesday to 57 million people, meaning most people will never be able to redeem their vouchers, but many have tried and will continue to try.
"I'm going to see Jeff Beck with Buddy Guy at Ascend Amphitheater, and I'm also going to see Phillip Phillips and Matt Nathanson," Erin Hetrick, a Ticketmaster user, said.
Hetrick received 17 voucher codes good for 2 tickets at checkout. She looked at the shows available in Nashville and found there were 8 shows up for grabs at Ascend Amphitheater.
The performances included shows from the Barenaked Ladies, Duran Duran, Gary Clark Jr., Phillip Phillips and Matt Nathanson, Jeff Beck with Buddy Guy, Carnival of Madness Tour featuring Shinedown, Goo Goo Dolls, and Umphrey's McGee.
While Erin was able to get tickets to two of the shows, she was unable to get tickets to any others, and many of her friends had the same experience.
"They're all going, 'there's no tickets in my city,' or, 'I'm trying to get them and they say they're on this website but I can't get them,' or, 'they're all sold out,' or things like that," Hetrick said of her friends' experiences in Nashville and all around the country.
While many people were getting error messages while trying to use their voucher codes on Tuesday, on Wednesday morning, the Nashville shows at Ascend Amphitheater were all removed from the voucher website. It wasn't until around 4 p.m. that the show listings returned to the website, and at that time, they were all listed as sold out for people using vouchers.
"All the Nashville shows were gone," Trey Wallace of thereadoptional.com and Ticketmaster user said. "In my opinion, there's no possible way all the tickets were gone to those shows in one day, since they released the list yesterday around noon."
Wallace was right. Not all of the tickets were gone. Many of the shows still had general admission tickets remaining, but Ticketmaster has still removed them from the list of tickets accepting vouchers at this time.
"The fact that there are absolutely no concerts right now for Nashville for the people to be able to use, it kind of defeats the purpose of actually having the vouchers to begin with," Wallace explained.
There were still shows across the country that show the ticket vouchers could still be used, but upon trying, we were unable to complete a transaction with ticket voucher codes we received.
We reached out Ticketmaster, Live Nation, and Ascend Amphitheater, but so far, we have not heard back.
