The answer is capitalism, I know.
But it wasn’t always like this. Why the hell are they allowed to absolutely monopolize all shows and venues? How are there not laws on this?
Is stopping going to any shows the only way to fix this? If so, that wont happen. People are gonna go see their favorite bands (and ticketmonster knows it)
I wish this one was as easy as getting rid of all my streaming services - but they really fucked us over for live shows.
If Pearl Jam couldn’t fix it in the 90s and Taylor swift couldn’t fix it in the 2020s that tells you just how much money is behind them.
It’s not something a single artist can fix. You’d need some kind of mass movement of artists organizing and auctioning their labor as a collective unit, rather than a bunch of freelancers and independent labels competing with one another for space in an increasingly monpolized marketplace.
Big artists are contractually getting a cut of those crazy high resell prices and fees.
Every big artist could do verified fan presales like the second round of Eras tour shows, but the reality is that popular artists would be leaving money on the table.
To be fair, only the richest artists can self produce a US nation wide tour. It’s often not up to the artists themselves.
Unless their managers are exceptionally savvy, they’re not. They get a base rate on ticket sold. Then the broker can operate as seller and re-seller of the allotment of tickets. So Ticketmaster sells tickets to Ticketmaster, guaranteeing Beyonce a sold-out performance. And then Ticketmaster resells the tickets at auction rates to the general public.
Swift had the leverage to cut exceptional deals by promising to expand the size and scope of her performances in exchange for a better rate of return. That’s because her audience is large enough and the venues are small enough that there’s functionally no upper limit on ticket sales beyond her ability to do sequential performances.
For very obvious reasons, most artists don’t get this kind of treatment.
It isn’t a matter of artist wealth so much as the point of market saturation. If you roll into a town with 50,000 fans and the biggest venue only seats 500 people, you can keep throwing sold-out shows, week after week. This is effectively how successful baseball (up to 162 games/year) and basketball (82 games/year) franchises operate.
But if you can’t guarantee a sold-out crowd, you’re effectively paying the venue for the privilege of performing. As more small venues shut down and bigger venues consolidate, artists find fewer places to profitably perform their craft. Its been a rule in the industry for a while that you make money on tour by selling merch (t-shirts, albums, signed drum sticks, whatever) rather than tickets. Ticketmaster complicates this math by effectively promising to buy out the venue (by selling tickets to itself) at a markdown, then auctioning off the tickets at a markup. That shrinks the audience, which shrinks the pool of people buying the merch.
Its a vicious cycle that’s been collapsing the live music industry for over a decade.
And even then, they’d be super limited on where they can play. Any major venues that uses ticketmaster also signs an exclusivity agreement to do so (I guess maybe that might possibly go away depending on how a trial goes in March, but don’t hold your breath), so good luck holding a big show when no arena is going to risk their contract for a single show.
And the grateful dead, selling tickets via mail order from their own office to the end.
Jerry said he hated that income decided who could or couldn’t come hear music.
Can’t have a freak show without the freaks.
T Swizzle is, funny enough, a big chunk of why things have escalated so much. Like her or hate her, she puts on a motha fugging SHOW with incredibly high production values and comparatively limited dates. That drastically increases the baseline price and makes the scalping market start selling their coke filled labubus to get even more seats.
Which, in turn, makes her contemporaries feel the need to put on a comparable show even though they are nowhere near talented or popular enough to make it work. Otherwise you start having very real discussions about why Famous Astronaut Katie Perry is nowhere near as expensive as the Swizzle Stick.
And ticketmaster mostly is just there to help facilitate that scalping and to add obnoxious (and expensive) infrastructure to prevent every single ticket from being sold to the scalpers who stand in line when the booth opens (80s and 90s kids will remember that).
You can very much see this in the pro wrestling space. In a venue that (company full of racist sex traffickers) WWE is a regular at? Basically everyone but AEW is priced out of even having a show and AEW suffers from needing to not be a laughing stock next to WWE on the ticket prices which results in overpriced tickets and blacked out sections of the arena during panning shots. A venue that WWE doesn’t go to very often? You have a lot more genuine indie shows and you can get ringside tickets to an AEW event for under 200 bucks.
And ticketmaster fucking sucks but mostly they are just there to be vultures on whatever demand is already there. They can’t really do much if you have regularly priced tickets going to “actual fans”.
If Taylor Swift tickets start at $200, and then get scalped up to $2000, then that’s just the scarcity market. The problem really is that someone can and will pay that much for a ticket.