As a customer who earns a tech salary, mostly I want to be able to go on the site, find the "best available" seats, and buy them. Done.
What Ticketmaster instead forces you to do is go through an artificial queuing system, lies to you about what's best available, has widely ranging dynamic pricing, doesn't allow you to purchase all seat classes available at any given moment and releases them randomly, and does all sorts of other horrid fuckery and at the end as an extra middle finger charges you a "convenience fee" for having you print your tickets yourself or scanning them from your phone after you went through the least convenient, pleasant, and reasonable process every to get overcharged for the tickets.
And let's be clear, we're talking about overcharging. The face value of a ticket can be high for a world-famous act. So let's say the face value of a typical seat is $250 for a concert. Ticketmaster will absolutely charge you $700 for that same ticket.
They can't be both. The value of the ticket is just high. Either you pay in time, or money. Your enemy isn't ticketmaster, it's the 100,000 people who want to go to a 1,000 person venue.
Opposite of Phish, I believe they live stream all concerts for free on YouTube.
And just to complete myself sounding like a grumpy old man - just open ReListen App or Phish.in and choose any show from 1993-1997 and you'll get something 10x better.
We used to go see them a lot in the 90s. A friend was in the fan club and would always get a bunch of new years tickets, and some of those camping out festivals in Maine and New York.
At this point, it is getting extreme. With ticket sales and couch tour (live streams of concerts you can pay for) they are absurdly rich. Their ticket prices have climbed to a crazy amount and they allow all the fuckery that ticketmaster is hated for. Phish is my favorite band of all time and I have completely stopped seeing them live. I hope they enjoy their money.