#livenation

[daisiesonafield-blog]

The touring business, ticket costs, artists’ revenue and the Ticketmaster + Livenation monopoly. Aka how touring works.

What this looks like per ticket:

So the band gets about 17.86% of each ticket sale.

Link

[dimension20official]

Dropout & LiveNation present: Dimension 20 Live: Gauntlet at the Garden! A one-night only live event at Madison Square Garden in New York City happening on January 24th, 2025! Pre-sale tickets will be available starting Wednesday, April 10th (code: GAUNTLET), and general sale tickets on Friday, April 12th, at LiveNation.com. Featuring Brennan Lee Mulligan, Emily Axford, Ally Beardsley, Brian Murphy, Zac Oyama, Siobhan Thompson, and Lou Wilson, Gauntlet at the Garden will be an event unlike anything you've ever seen! A video recording of the event will also be available on Dropout at a later date.

[purlty23]

Ghost fans when nothing happens: omg what if terzo was aliveeeee haha

Ghost fans when Secondo has received new merch, is on the tour poster, has done an official puck drop, and was photographed in Detroit by an official venue with the help of Livenation staff two months ago:

[polarblazma]

(czy maynard sie chował? czy mnie od tego koncertu popierdoliło? czy to jest przełom czy refren mojego życia? czy ja sie kiedyś uspokoje?)

tool

kraków 2024

[oneuldoh]

I am holding it all together since yesterday- juggling work and meetings in between. I don't know anymore. It's a bit unfair and sad that I can't get tickets when I now have the means.

At this point, I'd rather pay for a membership (something like WeVerse) just to secure tickets during membership pre-sale and get that membership perks.

LiveNationPH membership is useless when everyone is free to sign up. That UnionBank pre-sale? Bulok. Bukod sa mga scalpers, may under the table pa ang LiveNationPH.

Kumpletuhin natin name ng organizer na ito. Grabe. Ang sahol. I cannot stay in stan tweet without getting angry at the tweets I'm seeing. People lined up on-site, queued online. 6 tickets lang ang pwede i purchase (isa pang problem to. Limited lang dapat per person.) pero may nakita ako na nakapag check out ng 10 tickets. Sa 4 tickets per person nga nadadamihan na.

I have 3 tabs opened still in 45k queue number. Baka midnight na ako makapasok sa site. Siguro dapat iannounce nalang ng LiveNationPH na sold out na, hindi yung naghihintay kami sa wala.

Anyway. I am really hoping for a Day 2. Pero if wala, siguro mag team labas nalang ako.

Also, I am hoping na the next time 2NE1 go here, they choose an organizer na hindi ganito kasahol. I have experiences with Wilbros and Pulp palang. Pero ito yung pinaka worse. Sila din ba nag handle ng Day6 and Guts ni Olivia? 😂 Ah. What a shitty organizer.

Tickets are being sold thrice the original price (they are selling the GenAd na 3k lang, to 10k). LiveNationPH allowed this. I hope, all artists (not just K-pop acts) skip this organizer. Sa iba nalang. Dumagdag pa yung SM Tickets na bulok ang website.

[hyunhoverse]

I still remember the days when livenation would announce the ticket prices before the ticket sale

[elceeu2morrow]

LiveNation: When Louis Tomlinson leads singalongs 🤩

#FaithInTheFuture #FaithInTheFutureNYC

[wearemozzerians]

ONLY 10 more days-!!!

LOW TICKET WARNING! 🚨

An extreme limited amount of tickets remaining for Morrissey’s show at The House of Blues Las Vegas on Thursday, August 1st. Get them before they’re gone!

Get tickets:

[rockerfemme]

aerosmith farewell tour tixx are STARTING at $200. the ticket industry needs to be shut down

[fairyglitterpuke]

👽 ᴏʟé, ᴏʟé, ᴏʟé, ᴏʟé ʏᴇᴀʜ ᴡᴇ'ʀᴇ ᴅᴏɪɴɢ ɪᴛ ᴀʟʟ ɴɪɢʜᴛ ʟᴏɴɢ

[hollywoodonmic]

[dimension20official]

🚨If you're looking for tickets for the Dimension 20 live shows in 2025 in Los Angeles (The Hollywood Bowl), Seattle (Climate Change Arena), or Las Vegas (MGM Grand), general ticket sales have begun! Just head over here.

Disclaimer: there will be 150 tickets for the Hollywood Bowl show that will be subject to dynamic pricing. These are charity tickets where the 100% of the uplift (minus fees) is donated to LA County Parks Foundation.

And if you're still looking to get tickets for the Madison Square Garden show in NYC - great news: Dimensioneer Tickets submissions are now open! Here's how it works - we're offering 400 tickets for a mere $35 each (and that's ALL-IN pricing, fees and taxes included) to ensure there are accessible and affordable tickets making their way to fans. All you need to do is submit your payment information and the number of tickets you'd like (limit of 2). A week before the January 24th show, the winners will be notified and the tickets purchased automatically using the pre-entered payment information! The late notice is to discourage ticket reselling and encourage local fans. Password to unlock tickets is “D20MSG”

UPDATE: We are aware of the issue with submissions to the Dimensioneer Tickets page! Ticketmaster is working on the issue now and it should be resolved shortly!

[keeyahtay]

Today #willienelson turns 90. I feel lucky that I was able to photograph him- I was the only approved for this show and I love this photo I was able to grab. No one is a bigger badass than Willie // #keeyahtay #music #mediumformat #myfujifilmlegacy #throwback #livenation https://www.instagram.com/p/CroSAKJuxQ0/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[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/

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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

[darkevolnrg]

Amon Amarth Joins Pantera for "The Heaviest Tour of the Summer" – Tickets on Sale Now! ⚔️🔥

📅 Tour Dates: July 15 – September 13, 2025🎟️ Tickets Available Now: amonamarth.com/tour 📸 Photo by Tomas Gidén Viking Metal Meets Heavy Metal Titans Sweden’s Amon Amarth is set to unleash a storm of Viking fury alongside the legendary Pantera for The Heaviest Tour of the Summer! 🔥⚔️ Produced by Live Nation, this massive amphitheater tour kicks off July 15 in Burgettstown, PA, and will ravage…

[1991diamondaries]