It's Tifanie again. I wrote you earlier about tickets I purchased to a Death Cab for Cutie show in Chicago Illinois. The show is sold out... at a venue that can hold 4500 people.

This means....

I'm rounding figures here but...

The ticket charges were $37 each. Which calculates to: $166,500 in sales for the tickets alone.

Now lets take into account what Ticketmaster made off of this deal:

Convenience charges were $8something per ticket... so let's round this to 9 (since it was closer to 9 than 8).... that comes out to: $40,500.

PLUS... the processing fees - so let's just assume that each person bought two tickets... 4500/2 x $5.50 = another $12,375.

This doesn't include the venue charges that I paid but Ticketmaster doesn't get that money so there's no point in calculating it.

At any rate - I have to assume that Ticketmaster takes some of the money from the ticket sales...but even without that.... Ticketmaster made $52,875 just off of convenience and processing fees alone. This is for ONE show on ONE Artist's tour.

So for this particular tour, Ticketmaster did ticketing for 9 of the shows. So if we assume that their profits are the same for each of the 9 shows... that amounts to.....

$475,875!!!!

How many Artists are touring at a time and how many of them use Ticketmaster... I can't even imagine... but that's almost half a million on ONE Artist's tour!