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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:
Pompey’s promotion fate is not a Marathon…it is TWO sprints
By Will Fisk
Like most EFL clubs, Pompey’s 2020/21 campaign has been condensed in the extreme.
Having started the season a full 5 weeks later than otherwise would have been the case, yet finishing at the same time as usual amidst the backdrop of a global pandemic always meant that this kind of fixture backlog and congestion was likely.
With Saturday’s game against Crewe Alexandra postponed due…
It’s a strange time to be a football fan, isn’t it? Whilst the world has been in dire need of entertainment, football hasn’t been the same game we know and love.
The absence of the fans at stadiums highlights their importance to the beautiful game. The atmospheres, the rivalries, the traditions – fans are the one true constant throughout football yet their contributions and…
Ticketing and scalping are words so intertwined you would think when the first ticket was invented to be sold that a scalper was part of the deal. While there are many stories in the past about ticketing and the nebulous world of scalping, an organization called Fans First Coalition was formed in 2011 to basically protect fans in their ticket purchase for an event.
Now, in a startling trend, scalpers are pushing for legislation that would pad their pocketbooks to the detriment of fans and local business ... or maybe it is not so startling. Either way, Michael Marion, CFE, General Manager of the Verizon Arena in North Little Rock, AR, will moderate a panel session, Fans First: Ticketing, Scalpers and the Future, on Monday, July 23, during VenueConnect.
Panelists will include David Balcer, Box Office Manager, Target Center, Minneapolis, MN; Fielding Logan, Q Prime, Nashville, TN; Manager for Eric Church and "The Black Keys" and Jared Smith, COO, Ticketmaster.
"Far too many consumers are being misled by scalpers who do not act in the best interest of the fans," said Marion. "In fact, in recent months, we've seen an increase in the number of direct fan complaints and media stories documenting fans' experiences and the degree that they fell victim to unscrupulous scalpers and unsavory business practices."
This panel will give an update on the legislative battles that have occurred this year in states across the U.S. - where scalpers have tried to manipulate the state laws to give them an advantage in obtaining tickets for resale. You will hear reports on legislative efforts in Florida, Minnesota, and Tennessee to ban paperless ticketing and require inventory disclosure before an event goes on sale. You will also hear about artist's effort to thwart scalping thru paperless ticketing and forced will-call.
"We are taking a stand to improve the ticket-purchase experience for fans by helping to provide greater access to reasonably-priced tickets and enhanced protection against fraudulent business practices," said Marion. "Our goal is to ensure that fans get what they deserve — a good event experience, from ticket purchase through the final out or encore."
Question of the moment:
What are the pros & cons of the secondary ticketing market for fans, artists and/or venues?
