More tales of music industry corruption and sleazy insider wheeler-dealing, with an outcome that is a major poke in the eye to the some very greedy bastards. And it’s more than likely that you, Dangerous Minds reader, could directly benefit.

If being a fan of Pearl Jam taught me anything (it was a looong time ago I swear), it was that TIcketmaster suck. They have monopolised the sales of event tickets in the States and made it very hard for bands and promoters to regulate their own pricing and promote independent gigs. Well, now Ticketmaster has been forced to “refund” all its “handling fees” to all of its customers from 1999 up to this year.

Huffington Post reports: 

As the result of a class-action lawsuit, the ticket-pushing behemoth is going to be handing out $1.50 per ticket (up to 17) to everyone who used the site between October 21, 1999 and October 19, 2011. Those who chose the UPS shipping option will be getting a little bit more back: an additional $5.00 credit per order.

It seems Ticketmaster’s processing fees were deemed deceptive because they did not clearly state that Ticketmaster was profiting from them.

According to Business Insider, Ticketmaster will continue to have these fees, but must clearly label them as profit on their site.

Good news! However, I put the word “refund” in quotation marks here because, as some of the commentators on the HuffPo story have pointed out, Ticketmaster are not giving their customers money back, but money off their future purchases. And to a limit of just 17 transactions, maximum.

So while it looks good on paper, in effect every customer who used Ticketmaster is only due a $26 credit note. Unless you used UPS shipping to receive your tickets, in which case you could be due up to $85 in credit, which is quite tidy. But you still need to return to using Ticketmaster to get any value.

But still. Fuck them. It’s great that their very dodgy dealings have been called out in public for everyone to see. And as I mentioned at the start of this post, I’m pretty confident that a high percentage of our readership here at DM will have booked tickets through Ticketmaster at least once over the last twelve years (and very likely more than once at that). So Ticketmaster owe you - get on ‘em!

Thanks to Teamy.