The answer is capitalism, I know.
But it wasn’t always like this. Why the hell are they allowed to absolutely monopolize all shows and venues? How are there not laws on this?
Is stopping going to any shows the only way to fix this? If so, that wont happen. People are gonna go see their favorite bands (and ticketmonster knows it)
I wish this one was as easy as getting rid of all my streaming services - but they really fucked us over for live shows.
Why is <fill in company> so shitty? Why is <fill in bank> so shitty? Why is <fill in politician> so shitty? Because we fucking suck balls at any type of informed decision-making and it’s fucking snowballed to this current shit show.
If Pearl Jam couldn’t fix it in the 90s and Taylor swift couldn’t fix it in the 2020s that tells you just how much money is behind them.
And the grateful dead, selling tickets via mail order from their own office to the end.
Jerry said he hated that income decided who could or couldn’t come hear music.
Can’t have a freak show without the freaks.
It’s not something a single artist can fix. You’d need some kind of mass movement of artists organizing and auctioning their labor as a collective unit, rather than a bunch of freelancers and independent labels competing with one another for space in an increasingly monpolized marketplace.
Big artists are contractually getting a cut of those crazy high resell prices and fees.
Every big artist could do verified fan presales like the second round of Eras tour shows, but the reality is that popular artists would be leaving money on the table.
To be fair, only the richest artists can self produce a US nation wide tour. It’s often not up to the artists themselves.
To be fair, only the richest artists can self produce a US nation wide tour. It’s often not up to the artists themselves.
And even then, they’d be super limited on where they can play. Any major venues that uses ticketmaster also signs an exclusivity agreement to do so (I guess maybe that might possibly go away depending on how a trial goes in March, but don’t hold your breath), so good luck holding a big show when no arena is going to risk their contract for a single show.
Big artists are contractually getting a cut of those crazy high resell prices and fees.
Unless their managers are exceptionally savvy, they’re not. They get a base rate on ticket sold. Then the broker can operate as seller and re-seller of the allotment of tickets. So Ticketmaster sells tickets to Ticketmaster, guaranteeing Beyonce a sold-out performance. And then Ticketmaster resells the tickets at auction rates to the general public.
Every big artist could do verified fan presales like the second round of Eras tour shows
Swift had the leverage to cut exceptional deals by promising to expand the size and scope of her performances in exchange for a better rate of return. That’s because her audience is large enough and the venues are small enough that there’s functionally no upper limit on ticket sales beyond her ability to do sequential performances.
For very obvious reasons, most artists don’t get this kind of treatment.
To be fair, only the richest artists can self produce a US nation wide tour.
It isn’t a matter of artist wealth so much as the point of market saturation. If you roll into a town with 50,000 fans and the biggest venue only seats 500 people, you can keep throwing sold-out shows, week after week. This is effectively how successful baseball (up to 162 games/year) and basketball (82 games/year) franchises operate.
But if you can’t guarantee a sold-out crowd, you’re effectively paying the venue for the privilege of performing. As more small venues shut down and bigger venues consolidate, artists find fewer places to profitably perform their craft. Its been a rule in the industry for a while that you make money on tour by selling merch (t-shirts, albums, signed drum sticks, whatever) rather than tickets. Ticketmaster complicates this math by effectively promising to buy out the venue (by selling tickets to itself) at a markdown, then auctioning off the tickets at a markup. That shrinks the audience, which shrinks the pool of people buying the merch.
Its a vicious cycle that’s been collapsing the live music industry for over a decade.
If only there was a branch of the government dedicated to ensuring the free market stays competitive and free of trusts…
Lots of governments don’t actually care.
I wonder if the EU will ever do anything, but I doubt it.
I know. I was sure the EU would stop the DuPont-Pioneer/Dow merger, or the Bayer/Monsanto merger, but alas, these two companies now control seed production for over 60% of the world.
Regulatory capture is a motherfucker
T Swizzle is, funny enough, a big chunk of why things have escalated so much. Like her or hate her, she puts on a motha fugging SHOW with incredibly high production values and comparatively limited dates. That drastically increases the baseline price and makes the scalping market start selling their coke filled labubus to get even more seats.
Which, in turn, makes her contemporaries feel the need to put on a comparable show even though they are nowhere near talented or popular enough to make it work. Otherwise you start having very real discussions about why Famous Astronaut Katie Perry is nowhere near as expensive as the Swizzle Stick.
And ticketmaster mostly is just there to help facilitate that scalping and to add obnoxious (and expensive) infrastructure to prevent every single ticket from being sold to the scalpers who stand in line when the booth opens (80s and 90s kids will remember that).
You can very much see this in the pro wrestling space. In a venue that (company full of racist sex traffickers) WWE is a regular at? Basically everyone but AEW is priced out of even having a show and AEW suffers from needing to not be a laughing stock next to WWE on the ticket prices which results in overpriced tickets and blacked out sections of the arena during panning shots. A venue that WWE doesn’t go to very often? You have a lot more genuine indie shows and you can get ringside tickets to an AEW event for under 200 bucks.
And ticketmaster fucking sucks but mostly they are just there to be vultures on whatever demand is already there. They can’t really do much if you have regularly priced tickets going to “actual fans”.
If Taylor Swift tickets start at $200, and then get scalped up to $2000, then that’s just the scarcity market. The problem really is that someone can and will pay that much for a ticket.
It’s a symbiotic relationship. Ticketmaster takes the heat for adding cost, the venues get some kickback and don’t have to have an expense on their books. Everyone is complicit.
Small venues maybe, but Ticketmaster owns all the larger ones.
Oh sure, that, too. That was their phase two, buying up venues.
The wheels are in motion, but they are slow, indeed. https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-live-nation-ticketmaster-monopolizing-markets-across-live-concert
That was Biden’s DOJ. Americans voted to keep monopolies and raise prices last year.
We were warned in the 90’s.
Ticket Ghost of Ticket Future: “Don’t buy from Ticketmaster”
Me, in the Present: “Okay, but I still want to go to the concert”
Ticket Ghost: “You’re going to feel weird in ten years, when you find out what Kanye gets up to. But you do meet someone at the event to hook up with, have an on-again off-again relationship for three years, the sex is amazing but you’re on totally different career tracks. You end up seeing other people, and now you live in the same neighborhood and your kids are friends. Which is nice but also a bit weird at parties.”
Me: “Wow. That’s… a lot to take in.”
Ticket Ghost: “Sorry, bro. I tried to warn you two weeks ago not to take those edibles because they’d give you psychic premonitions, but you hadn’t taken the edibles yet so you couldn’t listen…”
Me: vomiting sounds as I clutch the toilet
Vedder said do better.
“Can’t find a better man.”
There are laws and they’re probably in violation of them, but if you expect Trump’s DOJ to go after monopolies, you’ll die waiting.
It’s an open market. People will pay what people will pay. Ticketmaster knows this and plays on this to optimise their revenue. I’m not sure you can do anything apart from explicitly cap ticket prices. At which point venues and more importantly artists will kick off and refuse to play.
Do you think Beyonce is going to be happy with her tickets selling for $50 capped? I don’t think so. Children gotta eat!
Fucking what?
It’s a captured market. People will pay what they have no choice in paying because regulators have abdicated their responsibilities. This system wasn’t built to last. It won’t.
Break up live nation using tried and true antimonopolist legislation. Better yet make a publicly owned alternative.
😅. Sorry what I meant was that if you don’t want to pay then you don’t have to. Nobody is forcing you to go see Taylor Swift… are they? And Ticketmaster know that if you don’t pay someone else will.
What type of market is that? I’m not an economist.
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It’s not just Taylor Swift concerts, it’s virtually all concerts, and literally all concerts at the medium-large venue size.
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A monopoly of a non-essential product/service is still a monopoly, and bad for consumers.
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Monopoly.
A monopoly is the opposite of an open market
No, a monopoly is the inevitably of an open market.
No it isn’t.
Someone should make a children’s board game to prove this point.
The thing with that particular board game, is that all players start out equal. It is only luck that gives you a leg up, then some skill. Reality is very similar, as being born rich is lucky and out of your control. The only difference is that in reality, you can have no skill with enough money, and still come out on top.
It’s an open market.
Libertarians who don’t understand monopsony are a dime a dozen.
Do you think Beyonce is going to be happy with her tickets selling for $50 capped?
Beyonce will just as happily take 50% of a $50 ticket as 5% of a $500 ticket. But she draws big crowds, which means the venues she can play are limited to the giant (municipally subsidized) stadiums. These stadium owners have conditional arrangements with Ticketmaster as a vendor for a whole host of business and political reasons. So Beyonce can’t perform in Houston at a location that seats over 10,000 without negotiating through Ticketmaster.
Since so many of these stadiums are publicly subsidized, one might argue that the public has an interest in regulating (or, if we want to go balls-to-the-wall socialist, owning and operating) the locations. At that point, the state or federal government might even have an interest in building and operating an exchange for booking venues and buying/selling tickets. And all of this could be done at-cost, which might allow the public to enjoy the benefits of entertainment venues without paying an enormous rent to private landlords.
But why kill the golden goose? The only people who really benefit from such a system are the worthless fucking proles, who don’t really matter and who can all get fucked. Social power brokers benefit immensely from the wealth these choke points in the entertainment economy create and from the exclusive access to popular artists that this leverage provides.
Basically, through mergers and acquisitions they’re dominating the venue market. It used to be that there were many actors, but now everything is everything under the Ticketmaster umbrella.
It’s convenient for artists, as they only have one point if contact needed per location in terms of booking, ticket sales, merch, and everything else around the concert/event.
It’s convenient for venues, as Ticketmaster brings in business. However, it’s a double edged sword: Do something Ticketmaster doesn’t approve of, such as use a competitor, and you’re not getting the big headliners.
It’s awful for the rest of us, as we then have to deal with a monopoly pushing up the prices.
I am cautiously optimistic about the long term outlook, though: The Ticketmaster hate is widespread to the point where some artists refuse to work with them, as they feel their fans are getting robbed with the band getting the blame. And they are the ones with the leverage to turn things around - artists with integrity will put their fans first, and that is what will hopefully bring long term change for the better.
So basically, they’re the mob.
Uh Ticketmaster owns most of the venues. I guess that is convenient for then too.
Also scalping their own tickets is convenient as well
- A competent government would see Ticketmaster and LiveNation as the effective trust/monopoly that they are, and break them up into multiple smaller, competing companies.
- To his credit, Biden passed executive action to ban bullshit “junk fees” that get tacked on to ticket prices (among other things). I’m honestly not sure what became of that rule once Trump got into power, but it is absolutely a rule that we need.
- We need like 50x more scrutiny on corporate mergers and collusion of corporate entities to jack up prices.
Consumers could fix it by boycotting them until they cease to exist, meanwhile buy merch from the artists you like.
But this requires people to temporarily sacrifice their desires and experience some FOMO, so it’s unlikely to ever happen.
Very true. Too bad there’s no other way.
Especially for kids who really like any older music, those bands will not be around long (many bands on the sick new world fest for an example are 35+ years old). So yeah I guess whole generations just have to miss out on that music they love.
Why? As with most awful things in America, the answer is Ronald Reagan.
The same problem exists world wide.
Because of Ronald Reagan obviously.
This isn’t a problem that’s unique to “capitalism”. It’s a monopoly problem. Even in other economy types this problem would exist. For example, with communism almost everything would be a monopoly.
A free market is supposed to provide us multiple options to take our business, but we need regulation to keep capitalism in check.
We do have laws against monopolies, and there is already a case against Live Nation/Ticketmaster:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Live_Nation_EntertainmentThe way to really fix this is through our legal system and representatives. We need to pressure our representatives to pass better laws to prevent this from happening again as well as electing officials who actual care about issues like this.
Got to smaller shows at local clubs
This is the way. I’ve seen so many great bands at clubs before they blew up. Why spend hundreds of dollars to see a show produced for mass consumption at a stadium when you can drop $20 and see a hungry up-and-comer pour out their heart and soul to a hundred people. It’s a way better experience.
You must live in very artistically rich city ! Im glad for you. Sadly around here its washed up metal (with lots of fake backing tracks) and rapping to a backing track, mixed in with bad country covers.
Yeah, San Diego, but I’ve lived in other cities with decent music scenes as well. Most major cities I’ve lived in have had a decent music scene.
Ah, thats 7 times bigger than my city haha. No wonder you have great opportunities!
Also bands that aren’t so famous any more are great to catch at smaller venues.
Oh i do. But the music around here mostly sucks, and the sound guys are lazy and terrible. Im one of the best sound guys here that actually tries, and I hardly ever do it as a side gig (way too many projects). I actually just studied sound (and the blade) and know how it works, unlike many (small time) sound guys today. And before you ask, I dont do it for a job because I already have a very good job. I have thought about offering classes on the subject locally.
People want to see pro bands with an actual good audio setup and talent. Sadly, youre not getting that at a local level unless you live in a metropolis or somewhere where the local water creates amazing talent from nothing.
I simply won’t go. I won’t stream their live shows either, because charging for that is also very lame.
There is still plenty of live music to be had, by decent performers at a local scale. Although even then, lots of small venues use AXS to sell tickets which is the second largest global ticket company so it is not much better.
It is harder and harder to find $10 at the door in cash, but they are out there.
Capita… gosh darn it
