I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me THURSDAY (May 2) in WINNIPEG, then Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!
Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. Monopolies are intrinsically destabilizing and inevitably implode…eventually. Guessing which of the loathesome monopolies that make us all miserable will be the first domino is a hard call, but Ticketmaster is definitely high on my list.
It's not that event tickets are the most consequential aspect of our lives. The monopolies over pharma, fuel, finance, tech, and even beer are all more important to our day-to-day. But while Ticketmaster – and its many ramified tentacles, like Live Nation – may not be the most destructive monopoly in our world, but it pisses off people with giant megaphones and armies of rabid fans.
It's been a minute since Ticketmaster was last in the news, so let's recap. Ticketmaster bought out most of its ticketing rivals, then merged with Live Nation, the country's largest concert promoter, and bought out many of the country's largest music, stage and sports venues. They used this iron grip on the entire supply chain for performances and events to pile innumerable junk fees on every ticket sold, while drastically eroding the wages of the creative workers they nominally represented. They created a secret secondary market for tickets and worked with ticket-touts to help them run bots that bought every ticket within an instant of the opening of ticket sales, then ran an auction marketplace that made them gigantic fees on every re-sold ticket – fees the performers were not entitled to share in.
The Ticketmaster/Live Nation/venue octopus is nearly impossible to escape. Independent venues can't book Live Nation acts unless they use Ticketmaster for their tickets. Acts can't get into the large venues owned by Ticketmaster unless they sign up to have Live Nation book their tour. And when Ticketmaster buys a venue, it creams off the most successful acts, starving competing venues of blockbuster shows. They also illegally colluded with their vendors to jack up the price of concerts across the board:
https://pascrell.house.gov/uploadedfiles/ful.pdf
When Rebecca Giblin and I were writing Chokepoint Capitalism, our book about how tech and entertainment monopolies impoverish all kinds of creative workers, we were able to get insiders to go on record about every kind of monopoly, from the labels to Spotify, Kindle to the Big Five publishers and the Google-Meta ad-tech duopoly. The only exception was Ticketmaster/Live Nation: everyone involved in live performance – performers, bookers, club owners – was palpably terrified about speaking out on the record about the conglomerate:
https://chokepointcapitalism.com/
No wonder. The company has a long and notorious history of using its market power to ruin anyone who challenges it. Remember Pearl Jam?
But anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. Not only is Ticketmaster a rapacious, vindictive monopolist – it's also an incompetent monopolist, whose IT systems are optimized for rent-extraction first, with ticket sales as a distant afterthought. This is bad no matter which artist it effects, but when Ticketmaster totally, utterly fucked up Taylor Swift's first post-lockdown tour, they incurred the wrath of the Swifties:
All of which explains why I've always given good odds that Ticketmaster would be first up against the wall come the antitrust revolution. It may not be the most destructive monopolist, but it is absurdly evil, and the people who hate it most are the most famous and beloved artists in the country.
For a while, it looked like I was right. Ticketmaster's colossal Taylor Swift fuckup prompted Senator Amy Klobuchar – a leading antitrust crusader – to hold hearings on the company's conduct, and led to the introduction of a raft of bills to rein in predatory ticketing practices. But as David Dayen writes for The American Prospect, Ticketmaster/Live Nation is spreading a fortune around on the Hill, hiring a deep bench of ex-Congressmen and ex-senior staffers (including Klobuchar's former chief of staff) and they've found a way to create the appearance of justice without having to suffer any consequences for their decades-long campaign of fraud and abuse:
Dayen opens his article with the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which is always bracketed by a week's worth of lavish parties for Congress and hill staffers. One of the fanciest of these parties was thrown by Axios – and sponsored by Live Nation, with a performance by Jelly Roll (whose touring contract is owned by Live Nation). Attendees at the Axios/Live Nation event were bombarded with messages about the essential goodness of Live Nation (they were even printed on the cocktail napkins) and exhortations to support the Fans First Act, co-sponsored by Klobuchar and Sen John Cornyn (R-TX):
Ticketmaster/Live Nation loves the Fans First Act, because – unlike other bills – it focuses primarily on the secondary market for tickets, and its main measure is a requirement for ticketing companies to disclose their junk fees upfront. Neither of these represents a major challenge to Ticketmaster/Live Nation's control over the market, which gives it the ability to slash performers' wages while jacking up prices for fans.
Fans First represents the triumph of Ticketmaster/Live Nation's media strategy, which is to blame the entire problem on bottom-feeding ticket-touts (who are mostly scum!) instead of on the single monopoly that controls the entire industry and can't stop committing financial crimes.
Axios isn't Live Nation's only partner in selling this distraction tactic. Over the past five years, the company has flushed gigantic sums of money through Washington. Its lobbying spend rose from $240k in 2018 to $1.1m in 2022, and $2.38m in 2023:
The company has 37 paid lobbyists selling Congress on its behalf. 25 of them are former congressional staffers. Two are former Congressmen: Ed Whitfield (R-KY), a 21 year veteran of the House, and Mark Pryor (D-AR), a two-term senator:
But perhaps the most galling celebrant in this lavish hymn to Citizen United is Jonathan Becker, Amy Klobuchar's former chief of staff, who jumped ship to lobby Congress on behalf of monopolists like Live Nation, who paid him $120k last year to sell their story to the Hill:
Not everyone hates Fans First: it's been endorsed by the Nix the Tix coalition, largely on the strength of its regulation of secondary ticket sales. But the largest secondary seller in America by far is Live Nation itself, with a $4.5b market in reselling the tickets it sold in the first place. Fans First shifts focus from this sleazy self-dealing to competitors like Stubhub.
Fans First can be seen as an opening salvo in the long war against Ticketmaster/Live Nation. But compared to more muscular bills – like Klobuchar's stalled-out Unlock Ticketing Markets Act, it's pretty weaksauce. The Unlocking act will "prevent exclusive contracts between ticketing services and venues" – hitting Ticketmaster/Live Nation where it hurts, right in the bank-account:
It's not all gloom. Dayen reports that Ticketmaster's active lobbying in favor of Fans First has made many in Congress more skeptical of the bill, not less. And Congress isn't the only – or even the best – way to smash Ticketmaster's criminal empire. That's something the DoJ's antitrust division could power through with a lot less exposure to the legalized bribery that dominates Congress.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Riots, Impeachments & Night Thoughts: Ed Whitfield and Wallace Shawn
Published on Sep 13, 2017
Dreams and defiance. This week on The Laura Flanders show we are joined by award winning playwright and essayist Wallace Shawn, who has a new book of essays he calls his Night Thoughts, meditations and speculative dreams for a better world from the Tales of Genji to libraries and the power of fiction. And Ed Whitfield, from The Fund for Democratic Communities in Greensboro, North Carolina, has a few thoughts on cooperatives, consumer politics and impeachments. All that and a commentary from Laura on monuments - where are the monuments to the motley crew?
This plenary opened the the Next System Project's NYC Convening March 10-12, 2016. http://thenextsystem.org/
Sarah Leonard, Senior Editor, The Nation (Moderator)
Frances Fox Piven, Distinguished Faculty, CUNY Graduate Center
Ed Whitfield, Co-Managing Director, Fund for Democratic Communities
Gar Alperovitz, Co-Chair, The Next System Project
Deyanira Del Rio, Co-Director, New Economy Project
Autumn Marie, Activist, Black Lives Matter NYC
The House Ethics Committee said Friday that it is looking into potential ethics violations by two congressmen, Reps. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., and Ed Whitfield, R-Ky. The Chicago Sun-Times and the non-profit Better Government Association in Chicago have reported that Rush is being examined because of allegations about his use of campaign funds and for his handling of a $1 million grant. Whitfield said in a statement that his case pertains to his work on behalf of animals.
...[T]here are three conceptions of power... we need to understand... One is that power can crush you, and you need to resist it. That's absolutely true: It can, and you must -- but that's not enough. The other is that power could help you, and you need to direct it, and that guides a lot of the public policy and advocacy work that people engage in... The third is that you, we, can BE power, and in that case WE NEED TO ORGANIZE. When we organize then we don't allow and simply accept the existence of existing power that we either direct or resist, but we say we want to see new forms of power come into being...
Props to Ed Whitfield for delivering a proper takedown in the tightly written “Film Review: The Hobbit—The Desolation of Smaug.” E-Whit stays true to film criticism despite his concerns and certainly doesn’t abandon the reader by leaving them in Smaug limbo. Nobody wants that, and the critic understands his responsibility by looking after legions of Whitfielders.
The writing of Whitfield is strong in The Desolation and never comes across as whiny or pouty. LOTR nerds may disagree, but certainly can’t deny the content of the piece. The running time of the film is pondered, and the critic virtually pokes Peter Jackson as if to say “Hey, pal. What’s with all the fluff?” Readers will surely be moved by Whitfield’s yearning for better Smaug.
The Desolation is quite entertaining and Whitfield brings the comedic goods by taking on the personality of Peter Jackson with a hilarious commentary on all the “scale and stuff.” E-Whit obviously didn’t enjoy all the padding.
Despite the powerful takedown, Whitfield accuses J. R. R. Tolkien of caring little for women and “non-whites”, which seems out of place especially since he doesn’t offer any evidence. Connoisseurs will likely hyperventilate and Hobbit-heads may simply cry.
Ed Whitfield doesn’t back down from criticism in The Desolation, which speaks volumes of his devotion to the craft.
Add Ed Whitfiled’s name to the growing list of critics who are offering contrarian views on the latest Hunger Games film. “Film Review: The Hunger Games – Catching Fire,” finds the critic as wonderfully outraged as ever, this time at the mere thought of having to endure another young adult adventure movie.
Whitfield has an impassioned readership at the Ooh Tray, and often the comments section is more interesting than the review itself. He chooses to engage these readers (who seem to be predominantly moronic fanboys) and hilarity ensues. He’s like a curmudgeonly, put-upon Grandpa whose grandkids just won’t leave him alone.
On to the review. The prose has enough clarity to bring his frank and unapologetic style to fruition in very satisfying ways and Whitfield feels completely at home in his role as party pooper. Also, any review that uses the word “cock-a-hoop” correctly in a sentence deserves some kind of recognition.
The critique suffers a bit though. In all his ranting about the direction and Hollywood’s ineptitude, Whitfield neglects to discuss the actor’s performances, the production design, or the cinematography in any meaningful way.
Tirades are fun, but you’ve got to make sure your bases are covered before you begin the rampage. Sadly, Whitfield hasn’t done so here.
