#by tix

[bitchys]

RENEE RAPP AS REGINA GEORGE

MEAN GIRLS (2024) dir. SAMANTHA JAYNE, ARTURO PEREZ JR.

[chelemlem]

Oscar on The Anything But F1 Quiz

[sisterdaniela]

pov dan and phil making fun of you for being too obsessed with a couple's youtube channel

[fayewoodss]

Any fans of The Mountain Goats?

[inkskinned]

absolutely enchanted with the glowing, grinning something that rushes over people at a good concert, a froth of wildling glee. how an audience leaves good theatre all friends suddenly, whispering oh my gosh did you see. how we giggle and hum the songs to each other, untuned karaoke. how after a bad movie our first instinct is to look at the person next to us and start deconstructing everything.

love every moment in an museum where you can whisper it's just so lovely! and hear a stranger say i know, i was just thinking the same thing! the swelling, pink-bright cheer that you get when you're in a car full of people loudly singing the song badly. the unchoregraphed dancing-jumping of your friends around your room at 2:30 in the morning.

how even after a somber symphony - you lock eyes with someone and they give you this little smile and nod like i know, this cut through me too. we go see a musical where the characters all die, and afterwards, in the bathroom, the women hand each other tissues, laughing self-consciously, saying i cried too! we go to see a musical where the characters all live and make fast friends with strangers, everyone stunned because how do they dance in those shoes?

there are ways that art is personal. that is unbelievably lovely. i will never really understand what something means to you, nor can you understand for me.

but it's cold out and i see her breath in the air as she bounces through her favorite lines, half-laughing, magic-tinged and happy.

oh, we are birds in our hearts! so beautiful - we love art so much, that love makes us so-quick into family.

[hudders-and-hiddles]

(re)watched in 2024: The Fall Guy

[uwuttaker]

jodie whittaker will be starring in the duchess in the west end!!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Live Nation/Ticketmaster is buying Congress

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?

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taking-on-ticketmaster-67440/

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:

https://www.vox.com/culture/2022/11/21/23471763/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-monopoly

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:

https://prospect.org/power/2024-04-30-live-nation-strikes-up-band-washington/

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):

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/arts/music/fans-first-act-ticket-bill.html

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:

https://thehill.com/business/4431886-live-nation-doubled-lobbying-spending-to-2-4m-in-2023-amid-antitrust-threat/

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:

https://www.bhfs.com/people/attorneys/p-s/mark-pryor

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:

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyists?cycle=2023&id=D000053134

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:

https://www.klobuchar.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2023/4/following-senate-judiciary-committee-hearing-klobuchar-blumenthal-introduce-legislation-to-increase-competition-in-live-event-ticketing-markets

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/30/nix-fix-the-tix/#something-must-be-done-there-we-did-something

Image: Matt Biddulph (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/mbiddulph/13904063945/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

--

Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[sunkissedlouis]

you are my because 💙 | faith in the future world tour in buenos aires, argentina 05.18.24

[watchersleuth]

can I offer watcherinas a drake meme in this chaotic time

[badnewswhatsleft]

scanned the little patrick interview from kerrang winter 2023<3

transcript under cut:

Patrick Stump’s mum is a methodical accountant who likes to plan ahead and think things through. She would bestow this organisational wisdom upon her son when he was growing up. When his band Fall Out Boy got signed, however, thereby kick-starting one of the most exciting trajectories of the past 20 years, Mrs Stump quickly realised there were limits to what she could assist him with.

“She said to me, ‘I can’t help you anymore - you’re beyond my area of expertise,’” Patrick recalls with a laugh.

In the years since, there has been no end of through-the-looking-glass moments for Fall Out Boy, a litany of incredible achievements highlighted by the ever-growing shows the Chicago four-piece - completed by bassist Pete Wentz, guitarist Joe Trohman and drummer Andy Hurley - have played. It’s an upscaling Patrick admits he still can’t fully process.

“I’m probably never going to get used to it, and I think I’m at peace with that,” he admits, taking time out backstage at Hamburg’s Barclays Arena on the band’s epic So Much For (Tour) Dust jaunt, which recently visited the UK.

Thankfully, Fall Out Boy will be back on these shores next summer, having been announced as headliners for Download Festival 2024, alongside Queens Of The Stone Age and Avenged Sevenfold. The news has given Patrick cause to reflect upon the pivotal shows and tours that have made FOB the band they are today, with a self-deprecating appraisal of the good times and the bad, the tiny gigs and the Hella Mega ones.

“A lot of my life makes sense to me, where I understand the various points of what happened and why, but there are moments with the shows we’ve played that make no sense at all,” Patrick reflects. “You go to arenas and they have pictures in the hallway of all the big artists that have played there, then they’ll have pictures of us, which sticks out to me!”

THE BAND’S FIRST-EVER SHOW AT DEPAUL UNIVERSITY CAFETERIA, 2001 “We were playing with some pretty cool math-rock and emo bands. When we got out there, we were horrible - I mean really terrible - and there were about three or four people there. I can’t remember what our band name was at the time - it wasn’t Fall Out Boy, and we were tossing some names around. I remember suggesting one of the names we had in mind to the drummer in one of the other bands and him telling me it sucked. We had a guitar player who I’d only met the week before and I’ve never seen since. I hope he’s doing good things. I heard he became a bike messenger. I cannot imagine a humbler beginning for a first show!”

FALL OUT BOY’S FIRST GIG WITH ANDY HURLEY, 2003 “I think it was with Andy’s other band, The Kill Pill. Andy played in both bands that night. It was a bigger show for us, opening for [Florida melodic hardcore band] As Friends Rust, and we didn’t have a guitar player, so I was playing guitar. It was weird because we were playing some newer songs, which stood out, so it felt like we’d started to actualise the band. I’m a drummer originally, so I was picky about drummers. But when we played with Andy, it was the first time that it felt right. I remember saying to a friend of mine who was there at the time that we were still a bad band then, and she said, ‘You guys couldn’t see it, but even then, it felt like the beginning of something.’”

THE FIRST UK TOUR, 2004 “One thing I remember was going to a Mexican restaurant, ordering tacos, and being unable to describe the things that arrived at the table - and not in a good way. That first UK tour was with Mest, and it was surreal. I think that might have been the first time I’d ever left the States, so going to another country felt like a big deal. When I got there, I realised the UK is similar in a lot of ways - particularly thanks to our shared musical history. One difference was that the venues all felt so much more punk rock than those in the States, with an unhinged basement vibe, which surprised me but was also thrilling.”

HEADLINING DECAYDANCE FEST AT THE HAMMERSMITH APOLLO, 2007 “I look back on some moments and realise they were bigger than I noticed at the time. The other bands on that bill - Panic! At The Disco, Gym Class Heroes, The Academy Is…, Cobra Starship - were all bands we’d played with a lot before that and were friends with, so at the time I thought, ‘Every show we do is Decaydance Fest!’ Then that moment in time was gone and I soon realised that it was crazy that we were able to get all those people together to do that show. You don’t necessarily realise you’re part of a thing when you’re part of a thing, so when I think back now, I’m amazed.”

THE LAST GIG BEFORE GOING ON HIATUS AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, 2009 “It was such a strange show. I had checked out at the time, and was busy thinking about solo stuff, but really I just wanted to make lots of music. One of the things that was crippling was making a record and then going on the road for two years to promote the record. For me, making records is what’s important, so the grind of having to make them so slowly was killing me. I was therefore in a bad space with the band. I think we were out with +44, and I remember Mark [Hoppus] shaving Pete’s head onstage. Pete had the famous haircut and that was the end of it. It was kind of a joke to do that, but it ended up proving to be fairly symbolic, as it really was the end to that whole moment.”

FALL OUT BOY’S FIRST GIG BACK AT SUBTERRANEAN, CHICAGO, 2013 “The whole thing happened so fast and so suddenly! We had a meeting in New York. The four of us met at our manager’s apartment and we talked about maybe getting together and seeing what happened. It was tense, actually, as we hadn’t talked to each other in a long time and there were all these old grievances - but there was also this sense that we were older and wiser. We put together some songs, and one of them was My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (Light Em Up). On the morning of the show, we appeared on a radio show and the whole station felt excited about the song. It felt like the beginning of a rollercoaster. That night, when we played Light Em Up, a song people could only have heard hours ago, the room exploded!”

CO-HEADLINING THE MONUMENTOUR WITH PARAMORE, 2014 “That was one of my favourite tours! Andy and I would do a drum-off, so we got to play together, which was a full-circle thing for me, as I had never got to play drums in front of people with the band before then - so that was fun! I remember thinking on that tour that we were really getting somewhere as a band. Our first show, we were a pretty bad band. For a while in the early days, we wrote better than we played, and we thought better than we wrote. But as time passed things really came together. That tour was a point where we felt that we were really getting somewhere. Plus, the audiences were great on that tour - incredibly excited and giving.”

HEADLINING WRIGLEY FIELD BASEBALL STADIUM IN CHICAGO, 2018 “When I was a kid, the height of my ambition was to play the [1,100-capacity] Metro in Chicago. I never thought in a million years that we’d get to play Wrigley Field - I didn’t even know that bands played there. It’s not a venue, it’s where the Cubs play. I’m still in disbelief that we’ve now played it three times! That doesn’t make any sense to me. The first time we did it was terrifying, but also familiar. We used to have an apartment in Roscoe Village, which is walking distance from Wrigley Field. I remember Pete and I writing [2003 single] Grand Theft Autumn/Where Is Your Boy together, then we went jogging around Wrigley, and a group of drunk Cubs fans shouted ‘Fucking losers!’ at us. Being inside that structure years later, singing that song, was therefore so surreal.”

HAVING A FREDDIE MERCURY EXPERIENCE HEADLINING READING & LEEDS FESTIVAL, 2018 “I think about that regularly. I’m not a natural performer. I used to act, so I could act as a character, but I couldn’t really be me and sing onstage - that never used to be comfortable for me. I have this very specific memory of This Ain’t A Scene, It’s An Arms Race. There was this part where I sling my guitar to the stage and I’m just singing and having the crowd sing with me. The way they responded at that point made me suddenly think, ‘Oh, I can do this!’ I remember running towards the audience with the microphone and the life that came back at me just blew me away. When you have an audience like that, you’re Freddie fucking Mercury! I think about that on an almost daily basis when we’re on tour. That song has a whole different life now because of my experiences at Reading & Leeds.”

PLAYING THE HELLA MEGA TOUR WITH GREEN DAY AND WEEZER, 2022 “I couldn’t have been more obsessed with a band than I was with Weezer in 1998-’99, when I was in high school. Then, years later, they’re your buddies and you’re playing with them and they’re playing some of your favourite songs ever. That is so strange. One of my musical origin stories was in fifth grade, when this kid in the middle of class beckoned me over. We snuck under a table, and he puts headphones on me and he plays Dookie. I was like, ‘What is this?!’ On that tour, Billie Joe Armstrong said I was a really good singer. I’m still recovering from that.”

[silenthillprincess]

🕯️ 🕯️

🕯️ 🕯️

🕯️ new mcr music 🕯️

on halloween

🕯️ 🕯️

🕯️ 🕯️

[assiraphales]

buying concert tickets in 2014: chill I wanted to see [insert relatively well known band] next week & resale tickets are only 37$ for GA floor tix I’m too lazy to go to the box office and check for anything cheaper

buying tickets in 2023: oh? lil baby thought she was going to get tickets? lil baby wasn’t fast enough and now the stratosphere nosebleeds r 300$ on vividseats. there’s a 70$ hidden fee and they’re non refundable. try selling a lung. or cry about it ig

[phillieladybird]

sleeping is just off limits in this phandom.... waking up to seeing the phour leaks feels like im waking up from a coma and the world around me is all on fire

[empressofkalumina]

hands over my knees in a room full of faces

[girlboyburger]

do u fw minecraft

no ❤️

and also completely unrelated do you like my recently revised desk decor