The Ticket Master
If you wanted to score concert tickets when I was a kid, you lined up outside your local record store first thing Sunday morning and hoped the teenager working the Bass Ticket terminal was a fast typer. Things seemed more fair back then. Bass stood for Bay Area Seating Service. Ticketing was local. You were competing against other wannabee concert goers. You had to do the actual work to get there first. These days, your concert ticketing adventures pit you against thousands of other people (and a lot more bots) refreshing a website. And increasingly, those tickets are being sold by the same company, one that often promoted the concert, owns the venue, and manages the artist. Is LiveNation too big? The Justice Department thinks so. WaPo (Gift Article): U.S., states sue to ‘break up’ Ticketmaster parent Live Nation. “The landmark case — joined by 30 state and district attorneys general — could dramatically reshape an ecosystem that has long sparked outrage from artists and fans alike, whose frustrations erupted in 2022 when high fees and site outages disrupted early sales for Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour. Live Nation is an entertainment titan: It is a concert promoter, artist manager, venue owner and ticket seller and reseller, constituting a sprawling empire that its executives publicly herald as the ‘largest live entertainment company in the world.’ Last year alone, Live Nation produced more than 50,000 concerts and other musical events, and it sold more than 620 million tickets globally.” Maybe it would be better if we had to line up outside our record store again. But the record store is gone.
+ “It’s no wonder music fans are disheartened and furious. Of course, the fact that the biggest music promoter and ticketing service is one single, giant company that has a lot of control over how tickets are bought and sold definitely doesn’t help matters … But while it’s easy to blame just one party for the chaos and the cost, the reality is that there’s a complicated concoction of reasons why obtaining tickets to a major concert has gotten so dire, and dealing with so much demand isn’t easy, either. Millions of fans want to attend a Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, or Harry Styles concert — and there are only so many shows and seats. Who should get to go?” Vox: The real reason it costs so much to go to a concert.
