Last night I was at the Fillmore Detroit to see Dethklok and Mastodon. One of my friend scored the tickets from work, and we were treated to a VIP booth and free drinks courtesy of Adult Swim. Nice. Dethklok stole the show, for sure. I’m only a sometimes-fan of metal, and one of the guys I went with is definitely not a fan of metal, but at the end of the night, we all agreed it was a good show.

Anyways, I saw the posters for upcoming concerts, and there were a few I wanted to check out. I haven’t been to a concert in quite a while, and I usually go in spurts—three or four in a relatively short amount of time, and then nothing for a long time. So today I went to LiveNation to look up tickets for AFI.

I have four questions:

1. What in the hell is a “ticket fee”?
2. If this “fee” is designed to offset costs of doing business, why is it charged on a per-ticket basis, rather than a per-order basis (since the marginal cost of additional tickets is exactly zero).
3. Why isn’t this “fee” simply built in to the price of the ticket in the first place?
4. Why is said “ticket fee” approximately 40% of the ticket’s face-value?