Ticketmaster will refund some fees after The Cure’s Robert Smith says he was ‘sickened’ by the prices

Robert Smith of The Cure said Ticketmaster would refund some of the money to fans after the rocker ripped the company for charging what he believed to be excessively high fees.

Smith posted a series of tweets on Tuesday and Wednesday, writing in all caps that the band wanted to keep tickets to their “Shows Of A Lost World Tour” reasonably priced.

Before tickets went on sale, the band said they had a range of prices at each show and worked with ticketing companies to shut down resellers, minimize resellers, and keep ticket prices at face value.

But some fans have taken to social media to share photos of service fees, setup fees and order processing fees that have sent prices skyrocketing. A photo showed that the fee alone totaled more than the $80 the person would pay for four tickets.

In a separate post on Thursday, Smith said he had further conversations about fees and that Ticketmaster had agreed to refund fans who had already purchased a ticket. Going forward, tickets will have lower fees, he posted.

Ticketmaster said it does not control the fees but keeps part of the operating costs. In most cases, sites set and retain fees, the company said in a Feb. 7 blog post.

“Similarly, venues have a lot of expenses including hiring staff and tracking rising costs to run shows, including building upgrades, insurance, paying vendors and more. If these fees were to decrease, venues may have to charge performers higher rent for the night, which would likely result in an increase in face value ticket prices,” the Ticketmaster post said.

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.

Ticketmaster has come under intense scrutiny in recent months as fans struggle to get tickets. In November, it canceled general sale tickets for Taylor Swift’s tour because demand for verified fan sales was too high and resulted in “insufficient remaining ticket inventory”. Fans sued Live Nation Entertainment, the parent company of Ticketmaster, in December.

Following the fiasco, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing to examine Ticketmaster’s role in the ticketing industry and questioned whether its merger with Live Nation in 2010 had unfairly harmed customers.