"It's A Good Life If You Don't Weaken"

The handsome fellow above is Gordon ("Gord") Downie, and for the past three decades, he's been the lead singer and lyricist of the Canadian band The Tragically Hip. I've had the pleasure of listening to The Hip on the regular for about two decades, when I fell in love with Day For Night from 1994; I've also seen the band live a handful of times, including one show at The Orbit Room where I got to tell Gord to his face just how much he and the band meant to me. As a proper Canadian, Gord let me ramble on, smiling all the while, and then thanked me profusely for being there. I mean, come on.

Almost a month ago, it was publicly announced that Gord Downie was suffering from terminal brain cancer, and a horrible year for music fans became just that much more ugly and shattering. (I could spend the rest of this post talking about the depth of meaning that the music of The Hip has brought to my life -- sharing sentiments like the ones offered here -- but that's not what this post is about.) The Hip announced one last Canadian tour toward the end of the summer, and my friend Brian and I debated the merits of making the trek to one of those last shows. Sadly, the decision was largely taken out of our hands by forces beyond our control, forces that seem especially venal and repulsive given the context. I'm talking, of course, about our broken system of ticket sales for concerts.

Twenty-ish years ago, I was working at Michigan Wherehouse Records in Mt. Pleasant, which had a Ticketmaster outlet in the store, when I caved to a whim and looked at the available seats for The Eagles, who had recently reunited. It was just my luck that a great seat was open, and I saw one of the more enjoyable concerts of my life that night. Sadly, that kind of caprice would not be rewarded today, as the current system of ticketing -- especially for high-profile shows -- is broken, biased against the average fan in favor of what we'll call the "secondary market" (or, as it's better known, "the scalpers").

As part of a fan club for The Tragically Hip, I was given a presale code to get tickets to the Canadian gigs. However, when I tried to get tickets at the predetermined time, there were none left. There were none left for the presale, there were none left for the official on-sale date, and there were none this morning after additional tickets were released. Then how might a fan get tickets, you might ask? Well, if I really wanted to see one of the shows, I could access any one of the secondary markets and pay thousands (yes, thousands) of dollars per ticket. And as much as part of me wants to see one of the shows (while another part of me won't be able to enjoy the show due to the hot tears likely to constantly run down my face), I'm not sure I want to reward the secondary markets with my dollars.

But even if I decide to swallow hard and purchase a ticket, it will be hard to shake the knowledge that all this cash won't be going to fund cancer treatment research, and it won't be going to any members of The Tragically Hip. Instead, my money will go to some 21st Century thug who found a way to profit off this most unfortunate of events. I can't help but think there's a better way to streamline the ticketing process so that the artists profit the most from their works. It would have been great to buy tickets directly from The Hip and pay hundreds instead of paying thousands to digital scalpers, and the fact that the fans are getting excluded from this process is a market flaw that I hope one day will be addressed and eliminated. It's just too bad that Gord Downie won't live to see that day.