Going to the Box Office

So, I hate AXS & Ticketmaster. They essentially have a monopoly on tickets and they have 10 million fees and it makes the ticket way more expensive in service to said monopoly. I also love concerts and supporting local venues, and this year I resolved to do this by going to the box office. The idea of getting in your car or taking the bus to the actual venue and buying them seems archaic, but you’d be surprised how many places never stopped running a box office. I especially like that you can get a physical ticket, which is a cool souvenir. Of course, the downside is that, if you lose the tickets, you might not get to go but in our modern day and age you can actually photograph them and there’s a ticket number you can call and get issued this way (I think, I haven’t actually lost any tickets yet, and it’s a miracle).

Here in Denver, you’d be surprised just how many venues run their ticketing services out of Mission Ballroom. And sure, that’s because AEG, who runs AXS, owns the venue itself. And sure, the venues they don’t own are often owned by LiveNation, who runs Ticketmaster. But concerts have been sharply affected by our affordability crisis, and you can make tickets 30-40% cheaper just by showing up in person, and I think there’s real benefits to spending more time outside interacting with people. I got tickets for the Cloud City Music Festival that’s happening in April down at Fiddler’s Green, and for 2 days it was only $60 for lawn seats!

To this end, I’ve made a Denver Box Office Guide I’ve been e-mailing venues, making calls and hopefully I’m gonna try to stay on top of updating it. It was disappointing to see certain venues, like Paramount Theatre, don’t even have a box office, but it’s my hope that more people will use the box office to save money and stick it to gigantic entertainment corps.