#Ticketmaster

[eurydicees]

she ticket on my master till i fucking murder an executive for these prices

[overlyspecificmcrmemes]

it’s time to find resellers and hunt them for sport

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #19

May 17-24 2024

President Biden wiped out the student loan debt of 160,000 more Americans. This debt cancellation of 7.7 billion dollars brings the total student loan debt relieved by the Biden Administration to $167 billion. The Administration has canceled student loan debt for 4.75 million Americans so far. The 160,000 borrowers forgiven this week owned an average of $35,000 each and are now debt free. The Administration announced plans last month to bring debt forgiveness to 30 million Americans with student loans coming this fall.

The Department of Justice announced it is suing Ticketmaster for being a monopoly. DoJ is suing Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation for monopolistic practices. Ticketmaster controls 70% of the live show ticket market leading to skyrocketing prices, hidden fees and last minute cancellation. The Justice Department is seeking to break up Live Nation and help bring competition back into the market. This is one of a number of monopoly law suits brought by the Biden administration against Apple in March and Amazon in September 2023.

The EPA announced $225 million in new funding to improve drinking and wastewater for tribal communities. The money will go to tribes in the mainland US as well as Alaska Native Villages. It'll help with testing for forever chemicals, and replacing of lead pipes as well as sustainability projects.

The EPA announced $300 million in grants to clean up former industrial sites. Known as "Brownfield" sites these former industrial sites are to be cleaned and redeveloped into community assets. The money will fund 200 projects across 178 communities. One such project will transform a former oil station in Philadelphia’s Kingsessing neighborhood, currently polluted with lead and other toxins into a waterfront bike trail.

The Department of Agriculture announced a historic expansion of its program to feed low income kids over the summer holidays. Since the 1960s the SUN Meals have served in person meals at schools and community centers during the summer holidays to low income children. This Year the Biden administration is rolling out SUN Bucks, a $120 per child grocery benefit. This benefit has been rejected by many Republican governors but in the states that will take part 21 million kids will benefit. Last year the Biden administration introduced SUN Meals To-Go, offering pick-up and delivery options expanding SUN's reach into rural communities. These expansions are part of the Biden administration's plan to end hunger and reduce diet-related disease by 2030.

Vice-President Harris builds on her work in Africa to announce a plan to give 80% of Africa internet access by 2030, up from just 40% today. This push builds off efforts Harris has spearheaded since her trip to Africa in 2023, including $7 billion in climate adaptation, resilience, and mitigation, and $1 billion to empower women. The public-private partnership between the African Development Bank Group and Mastercard plans to bring internet access to 3 million farmers in Kenya, Tanzania, and Nigeria, before expanding to Uganda, Ethiopia, and Ghana, and then the rest of the continent, bring internet to 100 million people and businesses over the next 10 years. This is together with the work of Partnership for Digital Access in Africa which is hoping to bring internet access to 80% of Africans by 2030, up from 40% now, and just 30% of women on the continent. The Vice-President also announced $1 billion for the Women in the Digital Economy Fund to assure women in Africa have meaningful access to the internet and its economic opportunities.

The Senate approved Seth Aframe to be a Judge on the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, it also approved Krissa Lanham, and Angela Martinez to district Judgeships in Arizona, as well as Dena Coggins to a district court seat in California. Bring the total number of judges appointed by President Biden to 201. Biden's Judges have been historically diverse. 64% of them are women and 62% of them are people of color. President Biden has appointed more black women to federal judgeships, more Hispanic judges and more Asian American judges and more LGBT judges than any other President, including Obama's full 8 years in office. President Biden has also focused on backgrounds appointing a record breaking number of former public defenders to judgeships, as well as labor and civil rights lawyers.

[tswiftupdatess]

Ticketmaster has released no stage view seats for the final 3 shows of The Eras Tour, for $15! (November 25, 2024)

[reasonsforhope]

Yesterday [April 30, 2024], a bipartisan collection of US Senators introduced the Fans First Act, which would help address flaws in the current live event ticketing system by increasing transparency in ticket sales, and protecting consumers from fake or dramatically overpriced tickets.

Today, the artists and Congressmen allege, buying a ticket to a concert or sporting event requires negotiating a minefield of predatory practices, such as speculative ticket buying and the use of automated programs to buy large numbers of tickets for resale at inflated prices.

The legislation would ban such practices, and include provisions for guaranteed refunds in the event of a cancellation.

The political campaign organizers, calling themselves “Fix the Tix” write that included among the supporters of the legislation is a coalition of live event industry organizations and professionals, who have formed to advocate on behalf of concertgoers.

This includes a steering committee led by Eventbrite [Note: lol, I'm assuming Eventbrite just signed on to undermine Ticketmaster and for PR purposes] and the National Independent Value Association that’s supported by dozens of artistic unions, independent ticket sellers, and of course, over 250 artists and bands, including Billie Eilish, Dave Matthews, Cyndi Lauper, Lorde, Sia, Train, Fall Out Boy, Green Day, and hundreds more which you can read here.

“Buying a ticket to see your favorite artist or team is out of reach for too many Americans,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).

“Bots, hidden fees, and predatory practices are hurting consumers whether they want to catch a home game, an up-and-coming artist, or a major headliner like Taylor Swift or Bad Bunny. From ensuring fans get refunds for canceled shows to banning speculative ticket sales, this bipartisan legislation will improve the ticketing experience.”

Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), Roger Wicker (R-MS), John Cornyn (R-TX) and Peter Welch (D-VT) also signed on to the Fan First Act.

In the House, parallel legislation was just passed through committee 45-0.

[Note: That's a really good sign. That kind of bipartisan support is basically unheard of these days, and rare even before that. This is strong enough that it's half the reason I'm posting this article - normally I wait until bills are passed, but this plus parallel legislation with such bipartisan cosponsors in the senate makes me think there's a very real chance this will pass and become law by the end of 2024.]

“We would like to thank our colleagues, both on and off committee, for their collaboration. This bipartisan achievement is the result of months and years of hard work by Members on both sides of the aisle,” said the chairs and subchairs of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.

“Our committee will continue to lead the way on this effort as we further our work to bring this solution to the House floor.”

“The relationship between artist and fan, which forms the backbone of the entire music industry, is severed,” the artists write. “When predatory resellers scoop up face value tickets in order to resell them at inflated prices on secondary markets, artists lose the ability to connect with their fans who can’t afford to attend.”

-via Good News Network, May 1, 2024

[alex-pierrot-fan]

Well, I only saw one fanart of the ticketman, and from the beginning, I couldn't help but compare the two. For those who don't know, the one below is called Kagekao, and it's a creepypasta. And to be honest, I laughed so hard while making the fanart. I hope @nekoboydreams sees the fanart because I loved making it XD

[daisiesonafield-blog]

Submit your input about how Ticketmaster’s monopoly has negatively affected you

Source of video

Submit comment here

[political-us]

[roscoe-me-and-this-fuckin-kid]

cost PER ticket

[lydiardbell]

Reddit on Nine Inch Nails ticket prices

[foggysirens]

shot and wounded on the beaches of ticketmaster

[eurydicees]

ticketmaster charging a service fee is such a joke girl your service sucks and if i could drain the life from your body i would

[voxina]

By their own admission, 2024 was a rough year for the Black Keys. After releasing their 12th studio album, Ohio Players, the band was looking forward to a North American arena tour following successful shows in Europe. Instead, they canceled the entire tour, reportedly due to low ticket sales, and subsequently fired their management — which included industry heavyweight Irving Azoff — and PR team. Two weeks later, in a since-deleted tweet aimed at Azoff, drummer Patrick Carney wrote, “We got fucked. I’ll let you all know how so it doesn’t happen to you.” (In another deleted tweet, Carney sarcastically wrote of Azoff, “So great to know you are always looking out for the artist.”)

Short of a few shows — more on the group’s “America Loves Crypto” gig in their hometown of Akron, Ohio later — the band went relatively quiet, establishing a semi-frequent Nashville residency for their all-vinyl “Record Hang” dance parties but not speaking publicly on the fracas that both fans and the music industry watched closely.

Last July, the duo did what they usually do when faced with adversity: They hit the studio, spending the better part of last summer and fall writing and recording more than 15 songs for their upcoming album, No Rain, No Flowers. (The group is still deciding how many tracks will make the final cut and will release the album later this year.) On first single “The Night Before” (written with Daniel Tashian, who co-wrote and co-produced Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour), the group leans into its upbeat pop-rock side. “It was very organically [done] in the studio together,” singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach tells Rolling Stone. “The three of us just came up with it together on the spot.”

Earlier this week, the duo announced their long-awaited rescheduled tour dates, swapping arenas for smaller amphitheaters and theaters. “The whole music industry obviously has changed over the last 15 years,” Carney says. “We’re still trying to figure out how it works and feels authentic.”

In their first interview since the tour cancellation and management split, Carney and Auerbach spoke to Rolling Stone from the group’s Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville for both a post-mortem of the past year and optimistic look ahead.

Can you talk a little about the significance of the album title No Rain, No Flowers? Dan Auerbach: Well, we wrote the [title] song with [Grammy-winning songwriter] Rick Nowels, and it was just an expression that I’d heard, and we turned it into this tune that seemed to sum up how we envisioned ourselves getting over the situation that we’d just been through.

Patrick Carney: Rick likes to start with a title, and that was the title Dan had written down in his phone. You got to take it on the chin sometimes to move forward, and that’s kind of what the last year was for us.

How would you sum up the past year for you guys? Carney: Pretty enlightening and eye-opening. Dan and I have a pretty good grasp on the music industry, but to be exposed firsthand to how things have changed, it was pretty shocking to understand what’s actually going on. I think trying to avoid getting jaded and totally flustered, we took the opportunity to reassess how we’re doing things and to make a record that’s mostly on this positive tinge.

What specifically was shocking to you? Carney: To generalize: to see how consolidated the industry has gotten and how connected things have become. It’s mind-blowing. And there’s just a lot of shared interests across the business side of this. When you’re an artist trying to interface with that and trying to receive helpful and constructive strategy and business input, you realize that that whole world is more deeply connected than I had ever really thought.

Dan, how would you categorize the past year? Auerbach: A lot of ups and downs, a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of 2 a.m. phone calls, a lot of worry and stress, a lot of heartache, but also an incredible amount of creativity. I feel really excited about the music we’ve been making. It feels like the creative juices are flowing in a really positive way, and I’m kind of loving it.

Let’s get into some details. Two weeks after the tour was canceled, a rep for Azoff Management said the split was “an amicable parting.” Is that how you would characterize it? Carney: [Pauses.] I mean, we fired their ass. Shit happens. We spent a lot of time making Ohio Players and turned it in in October 2023 and had all this time to plan how we were going to tour. Things got off to this weird start where I was waiting for these European dates to pop up because our plan was to go to Europe first. We ended up getting nine shows sent to us [on] a three-week tour. There’s absolutely no way to make money [from] that.

We kept having to move shit around for a Manchester show because there was a venue that our management company co-owned and wanted us to play, and it wasn’t ready. After going to Europe 30 times in our career for tours, this was the most poorly orchestrated tour we had been on. The shows were incredible, but [it] just became the first sign that maybe there was some poor organization happening.

When did the relationship with Irving Azoff sour? Carney: The ultimate answer to this is that it’s a broader thing. I don’t even want to mention that guy’s name. I want to look at this from a bigger perspective. The essential thing that we learned here was how many management companies are directly connected to a company that runs every single aspect of promotion in this country. This whole industry is so intertwined from ticketing to promotion to the management company. But essentially as artists — and this is the thing that we care the most about — it’s almost impossible to talk about this…. You’re dealing with management companies that co-own festivals with this other company. You’re at the [whims] of these people who have other interests.

So when you’re called into a manager’s office and he suggests something to you, I was naive enough to think that that was on the up-and-up. And more and more, it’s just not. So it’s a hard thing because I don’t think Dan and I want to sit here and look like whining bitches. But we got a little bamboozled here.

Patrick, last year you tweeted: “We got fucked. I’ll let you all know how so it doesn’t happen to you. Stay tuned.” How do you feel you got “bamboozled”? Carney: Well, I had to delete it, so I didn’t get sued.

Who threatened to sue you? Carney: No one threatened, but it was a big no-no to even talk about what’s going on here. There’s a concentration of connectivity that eliminates competition. [For] a capitalist society to function, there has to be competition. And if everything’s connected and all the interests are shared on one side, there’s no way to compete. Our tour, we had about 10 [arena] shows that were not doing great. They were just in rooms that they shouldn’t have been in.

So in any situation like this tour, we might’ve had to take one on the chin and find new venues to play in certain cities, but instead we were advised to cancel the whole tour. We were told … there were other venues being booked, and it was all going to get into more intimate rooms, and it would be great. But that wasn’t accurate. That didn’t exist.

It’s all very fucked up, and the bottom line is that we can’t even really talk about it because we won’t be able to work.

Dan, did you know Patrick was going to tweet that? Auerbach: No, I woke up to that one.

How did you feel when you saw it? Auerbach: I understood the intensity of it.

Anything else? Auerbach: No.

Did you two ever personally consider scaling down the tour rather than cancel, or are you claiming that wasn’t even an option? Carney: No, it was told to me by someone that we ended up parting ways with that the dates were being rebooked into rooms that were scaled down. So we could cancel this tour and we would re-announce dates in a couple days in these better rooms. But the plan wasn’t there because there were no holds on rooms. It was bullshit. I don’t want to use the term “lie” because I don’t want to get fucking sued, but what was presented didn’t exist.

There’s certain cities where we know we can [sell] … but you want to look to your management to make these decisions. We spend so much time making the music [and] figuring out promotional shit. This is what you lean into for management, and you hope that there’s decisions that are made on the up-and-up so that they help everybody. That’s just harder and harder to come by.

Now I’m curious about your thoughts on the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Live Nation, claiming the company is a monopoly. (Live Nation vehemently denied the claim when the lawsuit was filed.) Carney: When [the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger closed in 2010], Obama said, “This is so close to a monopoly. You need to watch this.” And the reason why it was allowed to go through — because it was a monopoly — the argument was artists aren’t signed into long contracts. The artists can always just opt to go to someone else … But at this point, if you don’t work with a certain company, where are you going to work?

The thing that most people don’t understand is that when you control ticketing, promotion, and all this stuff, and then you get into owning the venues and then having shared interests with management, it just becomes harder and harder [for artists] to do business. This isn’t something that’s unique to the music business. All across this country, things are getting so intertwined [and] so consolidated that it’s harder to compete in general.

It was widely reported that ticket sales for the tour were weak, with The New York Times saying last year, “Some tours like the Black Keys may simply be a matter of the band overestimating demand.” Is that a fair statement? Carney: I don’t know, but all I know is this: After the tour was canned, I went through my email, and I had one email from Ticketmaster about the tour on the day it was announced and nothing else in my inbox for six weeks. When I finally went through the numbers after the tour was canceled, we had sold nearly $10 million worth of tickets, and we had four months till the first show. We just had to take one on the fucking face.

After the tour was announced, more than a few fans complained about high ticket prices, and it’s the artist that typically sets those prices. Nosebleed seats were reportedly going for $100 at some venues. Carney: We weren’t even asked about the ticket prices on the last tour. We didn’t set them. On this [next] tour, we realized that we have to be more involved in this. The last thing Dan and I want to do is gouge a fan on a ticket.

But in retrospect, would you have tried to lower the ticket price? Carney: Yeah. This is this ongoing thing where it’s like when we did the El Camino arena tour [in 2012-13], the average upper bowl ticket was $40 or something. And then after scalping and stuff, those tickets were $65, so scalpers were making more money off those tickets than we were. Which I think is disheartening because the fans are paying it and it’s not getting to the band.… The cost of going on tour now versus 2012 is 3.5 [times higher]. Our ticket prices haven’t gone up that much.

You fired your management and PR team after the tour was canceled, but not the agency that actually booked the tour. Why is that? Carney: [Pauses.] Because I think a lot of these deals are done between management and another bigger company.

You did play a few live shows last year, including a show called “America Loves Crypto,” whose goal was to “rally the 5 million crypto owners that might just decide the 2024 election.” How did that gig come together? Carney: It was very simple: We had lost all of our income for the year. We had retainers for people that we were working with. We got offered a lot of money to play a show, and we saw that the Black Pumas had done the same event and we were like, “Book it.” It’s that simple, bro.

I was going to ask if you guys consider yourselves crypto enthusiasts. Carney: We’re Crisco enthusiasts.

You did get a fair share of criticism, though. The top comment on your own fan Reddit is, “LMAO. It’s a PAC that has endorsed all the worst candidates from both parties. What the hell are they even doing?” Did you talk about the optics of doing this gig? Carney: Of course we saw all the shit coming in, but it was like, “What are you going to do?” We were told it was a bipartisan thing. It was what it is. It was very small. It was in our hometown, so we got to go home and see our folks. I’ve definitely seen my name in bad light in the press before, so it wasn’t anything fucking new … If us playing a concert for 300 people is going to sway the whole state’s vote, then we have bigger fucking problems, bro.

Given the past year, does your mindset change going into the next tour? Carney: The most important thing for us right now is to just put on good shows that the fans enjoy. We’ve been looking to bands whose records maybe don’t chart well, but they connect with their fans in a deep way. We’ve been on this creative streak where we’ve released four albums in five years. We might just be saturating the fucking market, but it’s like while it’s happening, you just have to do it.

We’re both in our mid-forties. We’ve been doing this for 20 years. We have a greater appreciation now for what we have together than ever before. And over the last year, we’ve seen people we care about get sick. Life isn’t a guaranteed thing. So if you have this thing that’s working, why not just fucking move on it?

It’s important for people to know we got a little bit complacent with the business shit because we’ve been so busy with the creative shit, and so we just got reminded that we have to pay attention to both things.

When you look back on the five-year period between 2014’s Turn Blue and 2019’s Let’s Rock, when you guys weren’t really speaking, do you think it cost you any momentum or potential success? Carney: I looked at it like this, dude. Back then, we were literally printing money, and we were miserable. Now we’re just making tons of songs, and we’re in a much better place. The gigs were coming in, and we weren’t able to make music as often as we wanted, and that’s where the break came from … We just wanted to make some music, and so that’s where we’ve been trying to navigate that road since. We’ve picked out rooms that seem like the fans will enjoy the most, that we’ll enjoy the most, and we’ll just see what the fuck happens. Hopefully, people show up.

Patrick was always the more business-minded end of the group. Dan, did the events of the past year make you want to become more involved in the business side? Auerbach: We just have to focus on what we do best, and each of us have talents in certain areas. We just put trust in each other, and that’s the most important thing right now, and that’s what we’ve been doing. It’s funny because it’s probably a direct result of all this trauma that we just went through the last year, but we’ve been hanging out together more than ever. We’ve been getting obsessed with music and collecting records, and hanging out more is making the music better and the business better. 

What exactly do you mean by “trauma”? Auerbach: Going through all the work to put this whole thing together to be able to present it to our fans, and then going out and supporting it on the road and playing shows for our fans, and then to have all of that taken away and mess up the connection that we had to our fans for so many years right when we felt like we were really in a great place. Like we said with those shows in Europe, even though the business side of the tour was so bad, the actual shows were amazing, and we expected the same when we went back to the States.

We’d been opening up our sets, doing covers, and we had plans for doing more of that too. And to just have all that completely pulled out from under us, it was not something we’d ever experienced before in 20-plus years of doing it. So yeah, it was traumatic. But I guess we’re feeling more thankful than ever that we’re able to go out on the road and play shows and be able to see our fans again.

It sounds like mentally, you guys are in a better place than you were six or nine months ago. Carney: Yeah. We’re competitive, and we like to work. And when it seems like the rules have been changed to the point where the game isn’t winnable, that’s when we start getting fucking flustered. We’ve been looking to people who play a different game. They don’t get caught up in that bullshit. Their version of winning is more about how they connect with their fans. That’s the inspiration.

[Full article here]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ticketmaster jacks us for billions so it can pocket millions

NEXT WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Corruption is a system of concentrated gains and diffused costs: cheaters make a lot of money, and their victims each lose a little. The cheater has a much larger pool of money to spend on keeping the scam going, and the victims need to pay again to fight the cheater.

Actually, it's worse. The victim pays once when they are cheated, then, they pay a second time (in time and/or money) when they fight back against the cheater.

But in order to fight back effectively, the victims need to band together – it doesn't make sense for one victim to pony up to counter the cheater, because the cheater stole from a lot of people and can therefore spend far more than the victim lost and still come out ahead.

This is the third time the victim pays: they pay the "collective action" tax of locating other victims, agreeing to a common strategy for fighting back, and then coordinating with all those co-victims to keep the campaign up.

But actually, it's even worse. Because most corruption isn't just dishonest, it's incredibly wasteful. Corruption involves stealing ten dollars from you to make a dime for the cheater. The polluter who gives you cancer rather than cleaning up their industrial process costs you millions in medical bills – and maybe costs your family the lifelong trauma and expense of living with your death. They pocket an infinitesimal fraction of those costs. The rest is just wasted. They're setting your house on fire to spare themselves the cost of a match to light their cigar.

This is yet another way in which the deck is stacked in favor of corruption. A victim of corruption is placed in a condition of precarity and misery from which is it difficult to marshal a counteroffensive. The cheater, meanwhile, is made stronger and more comfortable by their corrupt activities. Immiserated victims must undertake the hard, ongoing work of acting together to be effective against the cheater. The cheater answers only to themself, avoiding the collective action costs that the victims pay every time they seek to act.

All of this is why we have governments. A government is (said to be) a democratically accountable way to meet the concentrated power of the corrupt with the concentrated power of the victims of corruption. Governments are many things, but they are especially a way of solving the collective action problem of enforcing the rules against cheaters. This is partially in service to justice – no one likes to be cheated, and a society of rampant and routine cheating is unstable and prone to collapse.

But it's also a matter of efficiency. While it makes a certain kind of selfish sense for the cheater to liquidate our dollar to make their penny, from a societal perspective, it's a catastrophe. Letting Wall Street slumlords corner regional markets in single family dwellings makes large amounts of money for their investors, but it costs those cities unimaginable amounts in public services as their housing stock decays, homelessness spikes, and schools and public services crumble for want of local taxes.

The paltry sums that Flint's creditors extracted by insisting on switching to a chlorinated water-supply that leeched lead out of the city's water infrastructure are crumbs compared to the vast, lifelong costs of giving an all the children in a city lead poisoning, to say nothing of the costs to the city as a city nor forever tainted by this unspeakably evil crime.

This is why inequality – and its handmaiden, monopoly – is so dangerous. The more concentrated private wealth becomes, the harder it is for the state to police, and the more likely it is that this private wealth will corrupt our officials. We see this all around us – for example, when Supreme Court justices receive lavish gifts from billionaires whom they later rule in favor of:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/06/clarence-thomas/#harlan-crow

Through the neoliberal era – the past forty years of billionaire-friendly Reaganomics – we've seen increasing concentration in wealth, coupled to increasing collusion between the wealthy and the government to protect the corrupt against the public. Think of the IRS's long decay, in which it turned a blind eye to increasingly blatant tax evasion by the ultra-wealthy, while training its fire on working people who fudge a few bucks on their returns:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/13/taxes-are-for-the-little-people/#leona-helmsley-2022

Likewise, think of the governmental obsession with "welfare cheats," no matter what the cost to families who are kicked off food stamps and Medicaid:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/medicaid-enrollment/

All this in the midst of a corporate crime-wave that is not only unpunished, it's utterly unremarked-upon:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/07/solar-panel-for-a-sex-machine/#a-single-proposition

This emphasis on benefits cheating and indifference to corporate crime really highlights the drag that corruption places on a society's efficiency. Even if you believe that there's a lot of welfare fraud (there isn't!), the dollar in "undeserved" food stamps spent by a cheater costs society…a dollar. Meanwhile the dollar that a corporate criminal makes by skimping on workplace safety costs society thousands of dollars to care for the worker who is then maimed on the job.

This is very easy to see in the world of corporate environmental crime. The "social cost of carbon" measures the total cost of pollution: the injuries caused by marinating in fossil fuel extraction, processing and combustion byproducts; as well as the loss of life and property from climate events. These costs are blistering, so high that every MWh of renewable power we bring online saves us $100 in social carbon costs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon

Governments that sleep on corporate crime are objectively governing badly. That's why the antitrust failures of every US presidential administration from Carter to Trump are so damning: they set the stage for later corruption that would not only be carried out on a larger scale than smaller firms could accomplish, but also for those large firms to corrupt the political process.

This is the Ticketmaster story. The superpredator that is today's Ticketmaster is the end-point of a series of ever-more corrupt mergers, waved through by every-more pliable presidential administrations. It was bad enough when Bush I allowed Ticketmaster to gobble up Ticketron in 1990. After all, the company had already proven itself to be a cesspit of corrupt, bullying activity.

The Ticketron acquisition kicked off a two-decade-long corporate crime-spree that produced a mountain of evidence proving Ticketmaster's nature as an inherently corrupt enterprise that acquired power for the purpose of abusing that power, at the expense of creative workers, the public, and the owners of venues:

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

Despite this, the Obama administration waved through an acquisition that was obviously far more dangerous that the Ticketron caper: the 2010 merger between Ticketmaster and the concert promoter Live Nation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Nation_Entertainment#History

After a decade and a half of vertical monopoly power – Ticketmaster/Live Nation controlling ticketing, promotion and venues – the company has grown from a dangerous octopus with its tentacles twined around the industry into a kraken that is strangling every kind of live event and everyone who earns a living from them. This has produced an ever-more obvious string of scandals, most notably the company's assault on Swifties:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/20/anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-will-eventually-stop/

A combination of mounting public outrage (with Swifties at the vanguard) and the Biden administration's generational enthusiasm for smashing corporate power has led, at last, to a reckoning with the Ticketmaster kraken:

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

Ticketmaster is a famously opaque organization. When Rebecca Giblin and I were working on Chokepoint Capitalism, our book on monopoly and creative labor markets, we were able to speak on the record to insiders from every part of the industry, except live performance:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

As soon as we raised Ticketmaster/Live Nation with club owners and other events industry insiders, they'd go pale and quiet and tell us that they didn't feel comfortable staying on the record. TM/LN has a well-deserved mafia-style reputation for savage retaliation against snitches.

With the DOJ Antitrust Division chasing Ticketmaster through the courts, we're starting to get a rare, on-the-record glimpse of TM/LN's operations, as its internal documents find their pay into court records. In response Ticketmaster's spokesliars have embarked on an epic spin campaign, to "contextualize" these damning numbers and paint the company as a weak, low-margin business that has been unfairly set-upon by the bullies at the DOJ.

In his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller offers a spectacular, must-read breakdown of these documents and the ensuing spin:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/is-ticketmaster-telling-the-truth

Stoller starts with Ticketmaster's insistence that it is barely profitable. Though this is true on paper, the numbers just don't add up. For one thing, anyone who's bought a ticket can see, printed on its face, TM's junk fees: "a 'service fee' without any obvious service [and] a 'convenience fee' that is anything but convenient."

Far more damning is a comparison between the price of a Ticketmaster ticket in the US vs the EU. The EU has legally mandated competitive ticketing, and the tickets there are far cheaper. A US ticket to see Taylor Swift will run you $2,600 – the same ticket costs $340 in the EU. As Stoller writes:

An American could fly to Paris, spend a few nights at a nice hotel, see a Taylor Swift concert, and fly back, for less than it costs to see that same show in the U.S.

How to make sense of this contradiction? How can Ticketmaster show such a low profit margin on its books but somehow end up costing event-goers such an absurd premium?

Start with the fact that Ticketmaster has three businesses, not just one. They sell tickets, but they also promote concerts (that is, front the money for personnel, travel and marketing), and they also own a bunch of the largest and most profitable venues in the country.

This allows them to play a shell-game that's very similar to (and possibly not actually different from) money-laundering, where money is shuffled between entities in order to shield it from creditors, suppliers or tax agents:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/explosive-new-documents-unearthed

But this presents a problem for Ticketmaster. They're a publicly traded company and their investors demand high returns. And unlike performers or venue owners, investors have power over Ticketmaster management. Keeping "margin per ticket" number as low as possible lets Ticketmaster minimize the revenue it has to share with the people who actually do the work and invest the capital in live performances. But for investors, they need to show another number, one that's as high as possible, to keep the investors happy.

That number is "Adjusted Operating Income" or AOI. While gross margins are the difference between the face value of a ticket and the sum remitted to the venue and the performer, AOI factors in all the other revenue TM/LN books from that ticket, like kickbacks. TM/LN's AOI is very healthy: it's 37% on tickets and 61% on promotions.

Those sums delight TM/LN's investors, and they express their joy through lavish executive compensation packages. CEO Michael Rapino is America's fifth-highest paid CEO, at $139m/year (that's eight times the Fortune 500 average). His sidekick Joe Berchtold is America's highest paid CFO, at $54m. The total AOI for TM/LN is $732m/year – and 19% of that is being paid to two of its execs.

But LN/TM has a third line of business: operating venues. The AOI for these venues is just 1.7%. If this were a normal, cutthroat business, you'd expect those same return-focused investors to insist on their handsomely compensated execs selling off that low-margin turkey. But nevertheless, TM/LN keeps those venues on its books.

When those execs talk to the public, they use the poor profit margins of ticketing and the poor AOI on venues to plead poverty: "how can we be a monopoly when we're barely scraping by?"

But when they talk to the investors who decide whether to pay them 800% of the S&P500 average, they are more forthcoming.

Keeping the margins low on tickets – and making up the money with kickbacks and other corrupt payments – means that potential rival ticketing firms can't afford to get into the business. Without the venue and promotion business, those rivals wouldn't be able to command kickbacks. They'd have to subsist on the rock-bottom margins that are competitive with Ticketmaster.

Likewise those venues: ownership of key venues lets Ticketmaster/Live Nation force out credible rivals in important markets, and keep new ones from emerging, because again, they'd have to make a living on that paltry 1.7% AOI (or the even lower profit margins!).

As Joe Berchtold, the highest-paid CFO in America, told an analyst:

I don't think Concerts AOI per fan is a logical way to look at it. I think if you look at how we've talked about our business, we've talked about our business across the multiple pieces. So you have to look at it, what's the concerts plus sponsorship plus ticketing AOI per fan.

Berchtold is paid roughly $26,000/hour. Those words take roughly 25 seconds to utter, so that's a $7.20 explanation, but it contains a wealth of information – it's basically the DoJ's case in a nutshell.

But Stoller points out a curious fact that isn't captured here. Remember when I told you that TM/LN's NOI is $732m/year? What I didn't mention is the company's gross revenue: $16.7 billion.

When TM/LN talks about how shitty their business is, and therefore they can't be a monopoly, this is the trump card. How could a company creaming off a mere $732 million off $16.7 billion in gross revenue be a monopolist with "pricing power"?

This is where understanding corruption helps clarify our understanding and cut through the bullshit. Corruption is vastly wasteful. In order to extract $732m from $16.7b, TM/LN has to engage in a lot of wasteful and corrupt activities. They have to bribe other key players in the system, spend vast fortunes on lobbying, and generally do a lot of unproductive things with their money.

This is concentrated gains and diffuse losses. In order to command the highest salary of any American CFO, Berchtold has to cook up and maintain this process. In order to earn his $139m/year, Rapino has to play mafia don and keep everyone is his supply chain sufficiently terrorized or sufficiently greased to maintain omerta.

These two men take home a fifth of Ticketmaster's net income because they possess a rare and valuable skill. They are able to obfuscate a corrupt arrangement, enrobing it in layers of performative complexity, until the average musician, concertgoer, or lawmaker, can't understand it. Any attempt to unravel it will induce a deadly, soporific confusion. The investment industry term for his is MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over), the weaponization of complexity. A skilled MEGO artist can convince you that the pile of shit they're peddling is so large that there must be a pony under it somewhere.

Here's Stoller, de-MEGOfying the TM/LN story:

Live Nation has a giant capital intensive unprofitable division of putting on concerts, from which it skims for its real cash flow. But this leverage among different subsidiaries means that it has an incentive to push up the cost of concerts overall, not just for its own profit. This incentive operates in two different ways. One, since ticket fees are based on the price of a ticket, Live Nation seeks higher prices for tickets so it can move more cash to its Ticketmaster subsidiary. And two, since Live Nation itself gets rebates by overpaying for venues, it has the incentive to push up the cost of shows. No one can undercut Live Nation, as it’s a monopoly.

You might think that this is a lot of mental energy to expend on understanding live performances. If you're not trying to see Taylor Swift, does any of this matter?

It assuredly does. Understanding how Ticketmaster's shell-game works is critical to understanding the similar shell-games played by many other kinds of monopolists, who have wrapped their tentacles around all the other parts of our lives. As David Dayen and Lindsay Owens write for The American Prospect, the companies that avoided monopoly prosecution by ripping off suppliers have bled those suppliers dry, and now they're coming for their customers:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-03-age-of-recoupment/

From groceries to plane tickets, rent to cab rides, Amazon to Ticketmaster, we are living through the "Age of Recoupment," when the long con of lowering prices to secure monopolies flips enters it final stage: greedflating the shit out of customers, and using the monopolist's power over regulators to avoid consequences.

Today, everywhere consumers turn, whether they are shopping for groceries at the local Kroger or for plane tickets online, they are being gouged. Landlords are quietly utilizing new software to band together and raise rents. Uber has been accused of raising the price of rides when a customer’s phone battery is drained. Ticketmaster layers on additional fees as you move through the process of securing seats to your favorite artist’s upcoming show. Amazon’s secret pricing algorithm, code-named “Project Nessie,” was designed to identify products where it could raise prices, on the expectation that competitors would follow suit. Companies are forcing you into monthly subscriptions for a tube of toothpaste. Banks have crept up the price of credit, so customers who cannot afford price-gouging in their everyday transactions get a second round of price-gouging when they put purchases on credit. Expedia is using demographic and purchase history data to set hotel pricing for an audience of one: you.

When these companies end up in front of angry attorneys general, DOJ lawyers, or an FTC investigation, they'll use the Ticketmaster/Live Nation playbook to try and wriggle off the hook. They'll point to some barely-profitable (or money-losing) part of their business and say, "How could a monopolist possibly be running a business this shitty?"

If the DOJ makes its case against Ticketmaster, it will set a precedent, both in court and in policy circles, for understanding how a monopolist's corruption works. Monopolists aren't always businesses with gigantic margins. Like other criminals, their corruption can produce spectacular wealth and spectacular waste at the same time.

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/2024/06/03/aoi-aoi-oh/#concentrated-gains-vast-diffused-losses

[tswiftupdatess]

Taylor Swift has added a new date for the ‘Eras Tour’ in Toronto for November 24th! (Via Ticketmaster)

August 2, 2024

[cairsns]