The Cure frontman Robert Smith recently said that he was “sickened” by the charges and announced Thursday that Ticketmaster will offer partial refunds and lower fees for The Cure tickets moving forward.
Robert Smith convinced Ticketmaster for refunds
“After further conversation, Ticketmaster have agreed with us that many of the fees being charged are unduly high,” Smith tweeted. Smith said the company agreed to offer a $5-10 refund per ticket for verified fan accounts “as a gesture of goodwill.”
Cure fans who already bought tickets for shows on the band’s May-July tour will get their refunds automatically, Smith said, and all future ticket purchases will incur lower fees.
The announcement came a day after Smith shared his frustration on Twitter, saying he was “as sickened as you all are by today’s Ticketmaster ‘fees’ debacle. To be very clear: the artist has no way to limit them.” In some cases, fans say the fees more than doubled their ticket price, with one social media user sharing that they paid over $90 in fees for a $80 ticket.
Ticketmaster has been bashed by the fans in recent months. Last November, Taylor Swift fans waited hours, paid high fees and weathered outages on the Ticketmaster website to try to score tickets to her Eras Tour. A day before the tickets were set to open to the general public, the company canceled the sale due to “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.”