The Cure has top grossing tour and gives the middle finger to Ticketmaster’s price game
In the past few months we often documented how the lead singer of The Cure, Robert Smith, expressed his frustration with Ticketmaster’s mandatory fees shortly after the company implemented a “verified fan” process on March 15 to distribute tickets for the band’s American tour.
The additional layer of security was there to prevent scalping and inflated ticket prices. Ticketmaster in return included extra fees for buyers. Smith was able to convince Ticketmaster to provide modest refunds to verified ticket buyers due to the “excessively high” service fees and thus put a halt to the price gaming.
It’s not the first time Ticketmaster is doing ‘funny things’. Ticketmaster’s ticket resale scheme, also known as the Verified Resale program, allows anyone to sell tickets on their platform at any price they choose. This means resellers can buy tickets in bulk and resell them on Ticketmaster’s site, often at prices much higher than the original face value.
Maybe as a result of protecting fans’ interests, the “Shows of a Lost World Tour” grossed $37.5 million with over half a million tickets sold: 547,000 to be exact.
Side-Line also covered The Cure’s ‘ free cover of The Cure’.
About The Cure
The Cure formed in Crawley, England, in 1976 around schoolmates Robert Smith (vocals, guitar) and Lol Tolhurst (drums), first performing as Malice, then Easy Cure, before settling on the Cure in 1978 and signing to Chris Parry’s Fiction Records. The band released its debut album, “Three Imaginary Boys,” in 1979. Bassist Simon Gallup joined for “Seventeen Seconds” (1980) and, after a mid-catalog departure, returned in 1984 and has remained in the lineup since. Tolhurst, the band’s last other founding member, moved to keyboards before being dismissed in February 1989 ahead of “Disintegration.”
Key albums include “Faith” (1981), “Pornography” (1982), “The Head on the Door” (1985), “Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me” (1987), “Disintegration” (1989) and the UK number-one “Wish” (1992). Keyboardist Roger O’Donnell joined in 1987 and drummer Jason Cooper in 1994; guitarist Reeves Gabrels joined in 2012. The band’s most recent studio album, “Songs of a Lost World” (Fiction/Capitol), was released on 1 November 2024, their first in sixteen years, reaching number one in the UK and the top five in the US. The Cure won its first Grammy Awards in February 2026, for Best Alternative Music Album and Best Alternative Music Performance.
Founding-era member Perry Bamonte, who joined in 1990, died on 24 December 2025 at age 65. The Cure was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. The current lineup is Smith, Gallup, O’Donnell, Cooper and Gabrels. The Cure’s 2023 tour followed Robert Smith’s public dispute with Ticketmaster over service fees on the tour’s general-admission tickets.
Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!
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