GarageSpin

Let's talk about selling out, shall we?

Any starving musician or cubicle-bound musician-wannabe wouldn't mind extracting a little extra coinage for the old album fund.  If you're included in that group, four words:  Scalp Hannah Montana tickets.  Just kidding.  (Though apparently, some parents are shelling out up to $2,000 - $3,000 for a pair.  Insane.)

If scalping isn't your style, there's another option -- TicketMaster recently launched an affiliate program that will pay you a commission for any sales that occur through your site via banners, search boxes, and text links they provide you.  (See example below)  If you have a band/music blog, chances are, your readers are interested in music, and may very well be shopping for tickets. Here's the rub -- the commission rates suck: 1% - 1.5% on a ticket sale price, with a cap at $5.  To illustrate the suckiness, if you bought a ticket worth $20 through the search box below, I would earn a whopping $0.25; if you upgraded to a $500 ticket, I would get $5.

Why so Scrooge-like?  Ticket master's penny-pinching ways were explained to me by a friend thus (paraphrased by me):

ALL of the price of a ticket goes to the venue and artist.  Ticketmaster gets about 50% of the service charge.  (I hate service charges.)  So, say, on a $100 ticket with a $20 service charge, the artist and venue split the $100, the promoter/venue, and ticketmaster split the $20 service charge, and there's also the additional 3% CC charge on the whole sale of $3.  At the end of it all, poor old TM gets $7...so the 1% commission of the $100 is sort of 10% of their sales, in that case.

Interesting.   But it's still hard for affiliate marketers (and bands) to swallow when sites like StubHub (a great 'after market' site for buying and selling (er, scalping?) tickets) offers an 8% commission fee, for example.

So, a final word -- you'll do less work and earn more money towards that next guitar amp if you just go with my first tip: scalp Hannah Montana tickets.  ;)