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.”
Why don’t all of these artists pull their cash to an LLC and the buy Ticketmaster (or rather, Live Nation), fire the people in charge, and change the business?
Does Live Nation have the value or capital to combat a coalition of major artists?
While almost certainly the change you describe would be good, it doesn’t curb the ability of resellers to do their reselling outside of the Ticketmaster/Live Nation ecosystem.
According to Google, live Nation is worth approximately 30.86B. it would take a lot of artists to do this.
Absolutely. It’s doable though.
I just wonder how/why this company was allowed to become what it has.
It is so bad these days. People have been complaining about it for a long time, and Ticket Master is doing this themselves.
Bill Kreutzman of the Grateful Dead said in 2009:
“I hate that scalping thing. It’s one of my pet peeves. It’s legal robbery. There should be a law against it. I’m not going to mention names, but the bigwigs in the business, the promoters—whatever you want to call them—one of them now owns a ticket company, and they were going to try to take a whole lot of tickets and scalp them, and we got them to stop that. It’s asking our fans to pay too much money for something that really should almost be free. Garcia always said, “Music is so good for you, it should be free.” That’s a famous Jerry quote. It’s a sore subject with me. Our ticket prices are 80 bucks, and that seems like a fortune to me. I mean, in today’s market, “Am I buying food for my family or gas? Am I taking my kids to school, or am I buying outrageously expensive tickets?” It doesn’t make much sense to me.”
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.”
Shut the fuck up, you lying sack of shit. Ticketmaster is one of the biggest reasons we have to deal with impossibly expensive tickets these days, they created a semi monopoly with the explicit goal to squeeze every possible cent out of concert goers. Concert avenues are forced into doing the business with them and them alone, and I could go on for a while.
The company should be disbanded and it’s C suite jailed. I’m not even kidding about this statement.
Fuck you, Ticketmaster 🖕
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 really want to keep music affordable and accessible. Unfortunately, the resale marketplace that we designed and profit from is totally out of our control, otherwise we’d totally make music affordable like we wish we could”
Fuck off and die
Yeah exactly. Ticket master is one of the culprits, they allow the scalping right on their own site/app. They also collect fees on the front and back. Fucking racket.
We need more artists calling them out in public like this. Also, artists should demand that resales should be capped at the original ticket price. Not sure how to do it with 3rd party sites, but ticketmaster should be able to do it on theirs.
artists should also refuse to use Ticketmaster
I realize that will be difficult. life is difficult. doing the right thing is difficult. Ticketmaster should be boycotted by artists, it’s not like fans can make the artist play somewhere else
I tried to look up prices for tickets recently (for other artists) and it’s really hard to figure out which tickets are originals and which are resale tickets. It’s all so convoluted. And frankly, it doesn’t seem that we can ever afford to see anything… ever. Ugh.
I know folks who if they aren’t going to a bar or local concert will fly to Europe to see larger bands because it’s cheaper and easier overall. The fact that ticket master is allowed to exist is a fucken travesty, a pointless middleman who helps no one and makes everyone’s lives worse.
It’s so simple. If you don’t buy from scalper, ever, they will go away…it’s literally THAT easy.
I’ve never bought from a scalper in my life…yet they still exist and it means I am shut out from many things.
So simple! 🤡
You don’t = everyone.
Duh, that’s exactly how pacific resistance works: you intentionally lose something to make a point.
If everyone refused to buy from scalpers, you wouldn’t even able to refuse, because scalpers wouldn’t exist in the first place.
Edit: seems like I didn’t get my point across clearly. I’m not expecting everyone to have the same attitude, I’m saying that protesting, even with your wallet, implies some degree of inconvenience. That’s how it works.
Ok well I’m not being ironic… I’ve been doing it my whole life. I’ll just miss out on shit forever tho. Like I’m doing it with everything. So it’s just pure denied experiences left and right. I just don’t think it’s as simple as that. Even tho I do it in principle it’s disingenuous to say it’s as “simple” as that.
This is dumb. If everyone was happy and friendly we wouldnt need laws. Reselling juat needs to be outlawed. Thats the only solution.
Relying on something that requires everyone. Good luck with that.
There will always be people with more dollars than sense.
I agree with her sentiment but she chose to use ticketmaster. WTH did she expect?
It sure looks hypocritical to me to voluntarily use them and then complain about it. Put your money where your mouth is, etc etc.
AFAIK they’re inarguably a monopoly. Unless you only play small venues you’re dealing with Ticketmaster.
so only play small venues. as long as artists keep using them, they’ll keep doing it
people go where the artists are. people don’t get to choose the venue
Artists don’t really have a choice. Ticketmaster owns exclusivitty deals with venues. If any artist wants to play at a specific venue, they HAVE to deal with Ticketmaster.
Sure, they can choose to play smaller shows at smaller, independent venues. but those venues are usually too small for well-known artists who have a big following.
Ticket Master is a massive monopoly in the US, and has exclusivity contracts with most of the popular concert venues, meaning if you want to perform anywhere of even mediocre popularity/size, you have literally no choice as an artist.
No she didn’t
Ticketmasters strategy from the start has been to become a monopoly, forcing avenues to do business with them or never get any artists at all. Similarly, for artists, if you want to do a concert, it’s extremely hard to exclude Ticketmaster if you want fans to see you at all
Fuck everything about this evil company, the C suite belongs in jail
I agree, TM is crap but it sure looks like she’s just feeding the problem and complaining about it.
If she’s just about the money, fine, but to try to play the ethics card while raking it in…. is gross.
I mean, the hypocrisy of everyone involved is just staggering. Ticketmaster got their monopoly only because artists (through their management and booked venues) let them - nobody is forcing Olivia Dean to use Ticketmaster, and their policies have been known for ages.
Ticketmaster, on the other hand, sells you the resale ticket just as if it were new. I don’t think you can even exclude resale tickets from a search, let alone make it the default, which would be the bare minimum of making tickets more affordable.
And then, sadly, there is also our own hypocrisy. We all want to go to the same three concerts when there is a universe of music to explore. I wanted to see Imagine Dragons, but the tickets were 700 a pop. I went to see Caravan Palace instead - totally different music, but the concert was awesome and cost 50.
nobody is forcing Olivia Dean to use Ticketmaster
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.
Ticketmaster/Live Nation has a monopoly on the market as far as ticket sales go. It’s far different than 40 yrs ago when we would stand in line for days sometimes to get tickets to a hot concert.
Venues control who sells tickets, not artists
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I’m not sure what kind of statement this is. Sandwiched between “don’t buy from scalpers”, a fine message, is something about the artist not caring about you. Let me ask you, do you care about the artist more than their art?
I think live touring is often how artists get more than just selling their music, which seems to be going to many business people. This artist in this article seems to care enough to do something about it, granted that is rare.
