Ain't No Fun Waiting 'Round For AC/DC Tickets

Fans hoping to see AC/DC on the Fall leg of the Black Ice tour have grown increasingly frustrated over the problem of securing tickets to the shows they want to see.

Officially, each show is sold out. However, if you want to pay the extortionists who operate ticket reselling sites such as Ticketmaster's own Tickets Now, there are actually plenty of seats still available for each date on the upcoming tour.

In fact, even before Ticketmaster officially opened the sales windows on Friday morning of this past week there were already several scalpers/brokers offering AC/DC tickets online. As reported here earlier, seats to any Black Ice show could easily be had if you didn't mind paying a minimum of double their face value.

The Vancouver Sun had the most in-depth story concerning these issues in their article about angry AC/DC fans. Ticketmaster, as usual, claims they're not to blame for the problems of obtaining tickets at face value, yet they happily point you to their own scalping service so I'd bet something doesn't seem quite right if you were to ask the thousands of ticket-less AC/DC fanatics, some of whom are complaining across forums and blogs all over the web.

Well, if you can't afford AC/DC tickets, perhaps you can win them. In fact, AC/DC is offering at least two different ways to win tickets to their upcoming secret show in NYC on October 26th.


If you pre-order Black Ice through the band's website, you'll automatically be entered in a drawing for tickets to the band's special rehearsal show. The AC/DC store has 500 tickets that they will give away in pairs to winners chosen at random.

Or, you could enter the "Rock Out Your Car" contest as explained here on Sony Record's AC/DC site. The winner of that competition will score 4 tickets to the "secret" AC/DC show that isn't so secret anymore. I'd suggest you ask Mom or Dad first before you repaint their car, though.

Well, if all else fails ticket-wise, maybe someday soon you'll be lucky enough to see the guy who does the one-man-band version of AC/DC in concert. Here he is performing Back In Black as seen here on Live Leak:



His voice reminds me a lot of Jack White's actually. I wonder if he plays the guitar, too?

Keep rockin, Jon

Get It Hot!

AC/DC concert tickets are red hot right now. In fact, every show on the upcoming Black Ice Tour is already sold out, as far as I can tell. Tickets for Vancouver date sold out in 4 minutes while Columbus and Boston's lasted a mere fifteen. Toronto sold out in a half-hour, as well.

Vancouver sold out so fast a group of nearly 20 fans who had hoped to charter a private jet to the show from the remote town of Prince George, BC had to cancel their flight plans. They were not happy campers, as you might suspect.

But don't fret, AC/DC fans, because the band has already added extra dates to the Fall tour and are expected to announce even more stops sometime this week. Not only that, but it's a good idea to keep checking back with Ticketmaster to see if any seats have become available due to returns or canceled orders. If all else fails, of course, there's always ticket scalpers and auctions on Ebay.

One has to wonder, however, how even before Black Ice tour tickets were officially being sold that they were up for grabs on Ticketmaster's own site, TicketsNow?

Not at face value, either! In fact, AC/DC tickets somewhere on the floor were listed at as much as $700 at some of the upcoming venues. As it stands at this moment, Tickets Now is offering "949 tickets available from $124 to $2140 each" for the October 30th show in Chicago! Other venue offerings are much the same so something is really rotten here and it isn't AC/DC's fault.

The problem is that large blocks of great seats are routinely held back from the public sale by Ticketmaster in order to "re-sell" them at much greater profit on their own network of sites. It's a scam as old as the sun in the ticket broker business and, unfortunately, AC/DC fans are being victimized all over the country right now.

Ironically, the only band to ever try to fight back against Ticketmaster was Pearl Jam in the nineties who charged that the retailer was taking advantage of their monopoly to sell tickets at more than 30% over face value. I say ironically because Pearl Jam's longtime producer, Brendan O'Brien, has just produced Black Ice for AC/DC.