Ticketmaster has given fans of Olivia Dean partial refunds after the British singer condemned ticketing companies for allowing touts to relist tickets for her North American tour at more than 14 times their face value.
After the tour sold out in minutes on 21 November and tickets appeared on resale sites at prices in excess of $1,000, Dean addressed the major ticketing companies on Instagram: “@Ticketmaster @Livenation @AEGPresents you are providing a disgusting service,” she wrote. “The prices at which you’re allowing tickets to be re-sold is vile and completely against our wishes. Live music should be affordable and accessible and we need to find a new way of making that possible. BE BETTER.”
In a statement, Michael Rapino, CEO of Ticketmaster’s parent company Live Nation Entertainment, said: “We share Olivia’s desire to keep live music accessible and ensure fans have the best access to affordable tickets. While we can’t require other marketplaces to honour artists’ resale preferences, we echo Olivia’s call to ‘do better’ and have taken steps to lead by example.”
sigh I really really wish you were right about this, but I think you’re grossly overlooking one important detail.
Ticketmaster is owned by a company called LiveNation. LiveNation paritially owns or signed licenses to almost every single large venue. If you’re a big band, you’ll unfortunately need a large venue and the only company able to provide that service in most of the United States (ignoring Los Angeles, New York, or other huge metro areas) is LiveNation.
So the gambit that Ticket Master has employed: 1 - Bail out almost every huge stadium with financial investment, but with intent to sign a special license which gives them ticket priority (so LiveNation gets the tickets first) 2 - Sell these tickets on TicketMaster, with 1/4th being intentionally given to ticket resellers with the intent of inflating the market (each transaction on the “used” market is actually redirected to TicketMaster).
I’ve looked and in my city (Portland, Oregon) there’s only a 2 venues that are large enough for a popular artist to play at that aren’t owned or invested into by live nation, and these venues might not always be appropriate for acoustic needs. You can read more about this here but, to put a point on it, I actually don’t think artists are to blame for needing to sell tickets on ticket master due to how hard it is to find a large venue in every city across the United States. Otherwise, you’ll end up paying ticket master more for venue access anyway, from my understanding. Granted, all of this is hard to know for sure, as you’d actually have to have experience with managing a multi-million dollar band or singer to really understand the scope of the problem here.