“The public brought all this on itself … I have no sympathy for people whining about high ticket prices … They helped create this situation where artists have to make all their money on tour. Artists and the market set the prices, and you can’t pay a Motel 6 price and stay at the Four Seasons.” —Fred Rosen, former Ticketmaster CEO
On the first night of her Australian Eras Tour, Taylor Swift performed in front of a record 96,000 ticketed attendees at Melbourne Cricket Ground—the biggest concert of her career—shattering her previous record of 74,000. Besides fewer sequined jumpsuits and glitter fedoras, MCG, 31 years earlier, looked more or less the same to Madonna—the last female artist to headline the venue before Swift—during her “Girlie Show” tour in 1993.
The world is no stranger to big concerts—Live Aid, Woodstock, Isle of Wight. Excluding festivals and open-admissions for a fairer comparison, Paul McCartney at Macaranã in 1990 had 184,000 ticketed attendees. Bruce Springsteen in Berlin: 160,000. Queen, Sao Paulo: 131,000 heads. Michael Jackson at Warsaw, The Stones in Prague, the list goes on.
In the past five–or–so decades, not much has changed in terms of demand: hundreds of thousands, now armed with iPhone flashlights instead of lighters, still pour into the same venues to watch their favorite artists take the big stage. But where the Deadheads of the world got their tickets from Pomeroy’s or their best friend’s cousin’s older brother, the Swifties of today find themselves stalled in over 12 hours of internet traffic.
Try as you might to beat the rush, frozen screens and an endless queue of more than 2,000 people are ever victorious—a roadblock in today’s live music market that wasn’t around to plague the concertgoers of years past. Rosen, victim–blaming aside, was not entirely wrong when we consider the reality of today’s live music market, which is, in a nutshell, corporate.
Ticketmaster is the one–stop, soul–sapping live music monopoly of our nightmares. It’s price–hiking, it’s profit–churning … it’s indispensable. The world’s biggest names in music need it—because when it comes to revenue sources and industry earnings, it’s live performances that settle the debt. The bulk of return for leading artists comes not from streaming—the emergence of which, in place of physical sales and paid downloads, has brought about a massive commercial shift in the music business—but revenue from the live music market.
The trade is even tougher on the superstars; while streaming accounts for 80% of total recording industry revenues, it’s less than six percent of Swift’s total annual earnings, and girl’s gotta pay for that Falcon 900 somehow. In response, the performance industry has rapidly expanded to compensate not for consumer demand, as Rosen so heartwarmingly suggested, but its new role as the primary driver of revenue for large artists, and this transition has been far from effortless.
In 2009, Ticketmaster entered into an agreement to merge with the world’s largest event promoter, Live Nation. The following year, Live Nation Entertainment was formed, resulting in the biggest live music conglomerate in the industry since, well, ever. According to consumer organizations, this dynamic duo controls over 70% of the primary ticketing and live event venues market. The lack of competitive pressure, compounded by insufficient alternative revenue sources, explains the company’s notoriously substandard service and exorbitant prices.
Everybody’s getting their tickets from one place, and the traffic far exceeds the internet’s current bandwidth capacity. Despite a record breaking 2,000,000 Eras Tour tickets being sold that Nov. 15alone, the Ticketmaster website crashed within the hour. Ticketmaster attributed the crash to heavy site traffic, but additional reports of customer service issues and the massive number of tickets purchased by scalpers to be sold on resale sites led many fans to brand the conglomerate deceitful—a sentiment that has since been echoed by consumer groups and United States Congress members alike since the merger.
Across the Atlantic, similar events have spurred an investigation into the conglomerate’s business practices, most notably Oasis’s long–awaited Reunion tour, which struck a response comparable to Swift’s. Swap boas for bucket hats, and Ticketmaster was stuck navigating a similar influx of buyers. Their response? Only a teeny–tiny breach of consumer protection law. Tickets to the tour were subject to an unclear “in–demand” pricing model, catapulting £148 standard tickets to more than double their original value. The surge stunned fans and Oasis themselves, who later stated even they were not informed of Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing.
This is an interesting phenomenon: Fans are dissatisfied, artists feel marginalized, and what remains is a yawning chasm between producer and consumer. The backlash severe and the stakes high, the performance industry continues to evolve; methods of ticket-purchasing evolve with it. The challenge lies in ensuring that live music is not lost to the machinations of corporate interest.
Diversity and competition are paramount to preserving the intimacy of a delicate and ever–expanding industry, but Ticketmaster’s near–monopoly on the live music market is a case study in antitrust failure. The fallout of the Eras and Oasis Reunion tours expose the merger as a massive blunder for the Justice Department, who, 14 years ago, was so right to suspect this as a consolidation of power, and so wrong to allow it to happen regardless.
