Ticketmaster just sucks, man.
Some odd things I've noticed about Live Nation lately and hm isn't that interesting.
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Today I’d like to talk to you about a little multi-billion-dollar events company called Live Nation and their ticket distribution service Ticketmaster.
Now, friends, I am but a lowly newsletter writer. People much smarter than me have reported on the stronghold Ticketmaster and Live Nation are increasingly having on live music. I’m just pointing in the general direction of a few things that have happened in the vicinity of Ticketmaster and Live Nation recently and saying to myself hmmmm isn’t that interesting now that I think about it hmm yeah I guess it kind of is.
Let’s start with Lizzo. The singer’s celebrity grew very quickly this year. She went from buzzy underdog to mainstream success story in a matter of months. Funny side note: I know of a guy who was in charge of a record label and had Lizzo pitched to him years ago but he passed. He made, no joke, $32 million that year and here I am writing an email newsletter. Aaaaaanyway… My point is, a lot has happened to Lizzo over the course of this year, causing her concert draw and her value to rise significantly.
Wayyy back in April, longtime fans like Natalie Jean bought tickets to Lizzo’s October 20 show at the Hollywood Palladium. But four months later, shortly after Lizzo’s celebrated VMA performance, Natalie complained on Twitter that Ticketmaster sent her and her friends an email notifying them that their order had been canceled and, upon calling the customer service line, they were informed that the order violated their terms of service because it came from a shared IP address... their office.
Hmmm, having your ticket purchase randomly cancelled four months after placing it. This seems inconvenient, especially considering they charge you something called a convenience fee. But Natalie’s story must have been an anomaly though, right? I mean, who buys concert tickets, which often go on sale at noon, from their WORK COMPUTER? Surely, most people are not at work at 12 in the afternoon! Wait, what’s that? I’m being informed that people are in fact at work in the middle of the day? Yes, apparently so, since others chimed in that they faced similar problems:
After a complaint thread started making its way around on Twitter, many of these people later posted updates saying that their tickets were reinstated. Now, I am not here to cast aspersions, but it sure does seem like mayyyybe Ticketmaster was trying to pull a fast one and cancel these ticket orders in an effort to upsell them at a higher price and hmmmm wouldn’t that be interesting if that were indeed the case yeah I guess it would be.
OK, but we’re jumping to conclusions here. Certainly Live Nation has never done this sort of thing before. Jacking up prices via resellers is a really scummy thing to do to customers and why would a big company like them do this and I’m not sure if it’s coming through but I’m being very sarcastic and am about to point to an example of them doing this exact same thing previously and what’s that you say they have done this before?? They were caught admitting as much earlier this year, were they? Hmmm interesting!
It seems that in a secretly recorded phone call obtained by Billboard, Live Nation’s president of US concerts admitted that the company helped “about a dozen artists” like Metallica transfer tens of thousands of tickets to resale sites like StubHub between 2016 and 2017. Sounds good to me! I mean, StubHub profits off the transactions. Ticketmaster/Live Nation get a cut of the marked-up ticket sales. The artists get paid more and have the benefit of playing dumb about the whole thing with their fans by saying Ticketmaster did whaaaaa we had no idea we’ll talk to our management team at once wink wink! Everybody wins here! Hmm except one person. Who am I forgetting that does not win here? Who is it that’s getting royally fucked in this exchange? Oh right the fans who paid $500 for fucking Taylor Swift tickets!
But surely, artists must have a desire to do right by their fans, and Ticketmaster is respectful of that relationship, right? Well, last month, The Black Keys came off a long hiatus and played a lil warmup gig at The Wiltern in LA. The Los Angeles Times reported that a woman brought her two kids to the concert after paying $700 for tickets on StubHub and th—wait hang on. Gotta be a typo there. There’s no way someone was willing to pay the monetary equivalent of plane tickets to Hawaii to hear a song they could find on any given car commercial and hm no that’s correct, $700, weird. But when the family got to the front of the line they were told their tickets were no good. (Pro tip for ticketholders: Always check that the tickets you’re holding are authentic and not printed on some sort of cracker.)
This happened to so many Black Keys fans on the line that the ensuing shitshow outside the venue drew news helicopters. There was a lot of fingerpointing among all parties involved in the days following the incident, and no one wanted to take the blame. Ticketmaster claimed that the tickets were meant to be non-transferrable and that “bad actors took advantage of this situation.” (Hey let’s leave John Travolta out of this!) StubHub claimed that the tickets were legitimate, and that Live Nation and Ticketmaster were at fault. The band kind of threw up their hands over the mess and claimed that they just wanted the show to be an intimate performance geared towards their fan club and had requested that ticket prices to be kept to $25. And the venue certainly didn’t want to take responsibility for turning away dozens of irate people with NPR tote bags.
Alright. Well, that all amounted to a bad PR month for Ticketmaster/Live Nation, but thankfully all that’s over now and we can mov—hm I’m being told it is most definitely not over and that there are still many more miles covered by this shitstorm. It seems that, in the midst of all this, the Department of Justice is examining Live Nation under suspicion of possibly violating antitrust laws. Live Nation chief Michael Rapino addressed this last month at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia conference and OH CHRIST THE GOLDMAN SACHS COMMUNACOPIA CONFERENCE ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME WITH THAT NAME FUCK OFF. Bah, where was I? I was thrown off by how much that string of words made me want to throw my laptop off a cliff. But basically Rapino used a lot of music biz phrases like “ticketing platforms” and “competitive markets” and other douche-speak that would imply that he stopped caring about what music fans actually want long ago.
But this bit in particular struck me. Please, for added effect, feel free to read it in the voice of your favorite TV mob boss. I chose Anthony “Fat Tony” D’Amico from The Simpsons, but any greasy goombah will do (Please note: I’m 100% Italian and am allowed to say things like that):
“The decree gets a lot of misconception,” he continued. “I negotiated it and it’s very simple: It says we can’t threaten venues. We can’t say to a Ticketmaster venue that says they want to use a different ticketing platform, ‘If you do that, we won’t put shows in your building.’ It also says we can do what’s right for our business, so we have to put the show where we make the most economics, and maybe that venue [that wants to use a different ticketing platform] won’t be the best economic place anymore because we don’t hold the revenue.”
Ohhh ayyy c’mon. We’re not threatening these venues wink wink. That’d be illegal and unbefitting of my associates’ extremely legitimate business operation. No, no, we’re just sayin’, ya know, it’s a nice venue you got here and it’d be a real shame if you didn’t choose to use our native ticketing service, at which point, we might have no choice but to take our very lucrative business elsewhere, capisce?
But again, I’m just a lowly newsletter writer calling your attention to some things I’ve noticed recently that hmmm are interesting now that I think of them. I’m sure I’m just crazy and speaking out of turn here. After all, you’re a music fan, and you’ve probably had nothing but pleasant experiences with Ticketmaster… right?