This past summer, Metallica announced that they would be playing four very intimate and special shows at the legendary Fillmore in their hometown of San Francisco. Tickets for a show like this would easily sell for upwards of $1000 on the secondary market. Knowing this, Metallica went with a Fan Club model of distribution. In theory, if you joined the Metallica Fan Club you could attend all four Metallica shows for $19.81 (1981 was Metallica’s first official year as a band). Now that’s a Black Friday deal worthy of pepper spray! But did this model of distribution work? We dig deeper to talk to fans and find out who scored tickets and who didn’t.
When you are a band like Metallica, playing a hometown venue that holds around 1200 people, the ticket scalpers are moving into town from the East Coast for this! No one wants to pay $1000 for a ticket, but fans will do it if necessary to catch a show of this caliber. The four shows start next week and are scheduled for December 5th, 7th, 9th, and 10th. The cost to join the Fan Club was between $45 and $55 depending on which level of membership you wanted, and individual show tickets were only $6 (the cost of Metallica’s first round of shows in 1980). The catch was that joining the Fan Club did not guarantee you tickets, it basically meant you were entered into a contest to win the CHANCE to purchase tickets at the incredibly low price. The “contest” ended on August 6th, and the shows kick off next week. A quick perusing of Craigslist and secondary markets show fans willing to spend up to $1000 on single tickets, and scalpers charging around $3500 for a pair. Ya, those people suck! So we want to know, did this ticketing system work for you diehard Metallica fans? Did you sign up for the Fan Club, reserve tickets and enter the contest, only to be left hanging? Are you going to the show? Did you get tickets to all four? Let us know if Metallica scored a winner with this model of distribution for their highly anticipated 30th Anniversary shows.
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