Ticketmaster has been taking advantage of artists, venues, and fans for decades now.
In an earlier article, I mentioned how I could write a whole article about Ticketmaster and all of its issues. This is that article.
Generally, my experience with Ticketmaster, and other ticket reselling companies, has been a little rocky. According to the Wall Street Journal, over the past ten years, concert ticket prices have almost doubled.
In the summer of 2023, a 14-year-old Valentina Sandoval worked her butt off at a job, just to be able to attend one of the dates at Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour here in Los Angeles. Every day, I’d wake up and go to work at 7am just for the hope of joining all of the other Swifties at SoFi Stadium.
A day before her first night in LA, I was watching ticket sales on Gametime, a site that partners with Ticketmaster, and ticket prices were almost all over $700 for a decent seat. When I saw a ticket for $400, I jumped at the opportunity to purchase it. They also had a fee of $146 for each ticket, and this was a seat almost behind the stage. Now, maybe at the time I was just a little bit too excited to see Taylor Swift, but those tickets should never have been sold for over $500 each.
The whole Eras Tour Fiasco was a concert-goer’s nightmare. When tickets went on sale in 2022, the site had 3.5 BILLION site requests. It’s safe to say the site crashed, and fans were obviously left unhappy. And when tickets went on sale, a good majority of those tickets didn’t end up with actual fans, but in the hands of scalpers.
One TERRIBLE example of scalpers occurred during Taylor Swift’s last stop on the Eras Tour in Vancouver, where they sold listening-only tickets behind the stage for $15. Not a bad price to just get to be there and get to experience the live music experience, right? But of course, scalpers bought them all up, and within the hour, these discounted tickets were available on resale sites for over three thousand dollars!
Ticketmaster has devastated many fans by allowing scalpers the chance to purchase tickets and rack up the prices at anywhere from two to ten times the original cost. One thing about reselling tickets is that Ticketmaster doesn’t have any incentive to stop scalpers unless there is a united public outcry. They make even more money when the ticket gets sold twice, since they can charge their service fees for a second time.
In a 2023 interview with the Los Angeles Times, the former CEO of Ticketmaster, Fred Rosen, stated, “I have no sympathy for fans crying over high ticket prices.” He has said things like this on multiple occasions, telling The LA Times in 1985, “Money is some of it, but it’s the game. I want to win.”
Ticketmaster has tried different ways to prevent ticket scalping, including a system called “Verified Fan,” where you sign up with your email beforehand. They first check whether or not you’re a bot, and you get access to different “Fan Presales”. But many argue that this isn’t secure enough, and oftentimes, real fans get waitlisted, while the actual bots scoop up all the tickets.
The company also uses something called “Dynamic Pricing,” which essentially adjusts ticket prices in real time, based on demand. When thousands of fans are attempting to buy tickets all at once, ticket prices can rise by almost ten times their original amount. This was an attempt to prevent scalpers from getting tickets, but more often than not, it just causes tickets to be more expensive for the fans who actually want them.
Back in the day, artists used to release an album, then go on tour to promote it. Now, in the age of streaming, which doesn’t pay nearly as much as physical album sales, artists release an album to go on tour and make their money that way. When Ticketmaster makes the process so hectic, it makes it harder for both bigger and smaller artists to earn money.
Another way that Ticketmaster gets you is through hidden fees, which are often more than 30% of the original ticket price. There was once an incident between Ticketmaster and the band Pearl Jam in the early 1990’s. One of the band members asked Ticketmaster to keep the service fees the same as what they were used to, as well as print the service fees on the tickets so their fans could see how much they were actually paying.
Pearl Jam attempted to sell their own tickets at a lower price, and when Ticketmaster heard about this, they threatened to take legal action and forced venues to not host the band for their concerts. Pearl Jam ended up canceling their tour due to the big headache of not using Ticketmaster, as they had so much power over the industry.
Another thing Ticketmaster does is that they deliberately give tickets to “Ticket Brokers”. These are essentially just scalpers; they buy, or are given, tickets and sell them on other sites for a higher price.
When Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation in 2010, the FTC (or Federal Trade Commission) set forth a few new rules, one of which was that Ticketmaster cannot retaliate against any venue or artist that chooses not to work with them. One example of them blatantly ignoring this was in 2013, when Matchbox Twenty decided not to use Ticketmaster to sell its tickets. The next year, Live Nation punished the venue by lowering the price of the arena’s tickets.
The incidents that ignited me to write this article were that My Chemical Romance is still on tour and is coming back to LA, as well as Ticketmaster is now being sued by the FTC. As of right now, I don’t really have any money to spend on concert tickets, but I promised myself that, after seeing them the first time, I would have floor tickets the next time My Chemical Romance came to LA. So eventually, I’m gonna have to spend a good chunk of my money on resale tickets to go see them next year. As for the lawsuit, the FTC’s main goal is to split Live Nation and Ticketmaster into two separate companies and to dismantle their monopoly on the live music experience.
Ticketmaster has gone unchecked for too many years. The reason they’ve been able to get away with this for so long is because of their iron grip on the live-music industry. I hope some good will be able to come out of this lawsuit against them and that fans, venues and artists alike will be able to benefit from it.
