Live nation
Page: 14
In December, Barclays Center and BSE Global chief executive Sam Zussman arranged a meeting with officials at SeatGeek and offered the ticketing company an ultimatum: Either terminate the seven-year contract they signed with his predecessor, John Abbamondi, the year before, or else Zussman would publicize SeatGeek’s tech failures as they happened, multiple sources tell Billboard.
SeatGeek quietly complied and the ticketing company’s third NBA contract would come to an end, losing one of New York’s most popular venues. Starting this month, all new concerts at the arena are now ticketed by the team’s previous ticketing provider, Live Nation’s Ticketmaster — the world’s biggest ticketing service — under a deal term that runs for three to five years, according to sources familiar with the situation.
“The Barclays Center team met with our execs to figure out a way to amend the contract which would offer us the ability to continue ticketing the teams, but not third party events,” a SeatGeek spokesperson told Billboard in a statement. “Several months later we offered Barclays the opportunity to simply end the agreement, in consultation with our other clients, on good terms.”
A separate statement from Barclays Center confirmed that BSE Global and SeatGeek’s partnership would “wind down” beginning with the New York Liberty’s 2023 season in May. “SeatGeek provided our fans with a first-class gameday ticketing experience,” the statement reads, “and we’re appreciative of the time and energy they put into our work together.”
“They Just Aren’t Designed for High-Demand Ticket Sales”
A Barclays Center representative would not comment on the reason behind the arena’s dramatic turn face, or why Zussman had been frustrated with SeatGeek’s fulfillment of its contract — most ticketing agreements have clearly defined “service level agreements” governing response expediency and site uptime — but an incident from October 2021 provides insight into the issues SeatGeek may have been struggling to rectify.
Booking agents Jared Arfa and Marsha Vlasic at Artist Group International whose agency represents New York indie rock icons The Strokes, claim SeatGeek mishandled an October 2021 presale that cost the group several hundred thousand dollars. That concert, originally scheduled for Dec. 31, 2021, was postponed to April 2022 due to concerns over the omicron COVID-19 variant and ended up selling 13,548 tickets and grossing $1.57 million. That total was 2,000 tickets and $400,000 less than the band’s 2019 New Year’s Eve show at Barclays Center, which Arfa and Vlasic blame on SeatGeek’s user interface— not The Strokes’ popularity.
“They just aren’t designed for high-demand ticket sales, like concerts,” says Arfa, who describes SeatGeek as “a secondary ticketing company that dabbles in primary ticket sales” and struggled during large sales. “There’s things that we have become accustomed to in the music business that SeatGeek can’t do that as well.”
By contrast, says one prominent Brooklyn concert promoter familiar with both ticketing systems, “Ticketmaster has a ton of marketing power and reach in New York” through its huge email lists, search engine optimization and decades of work in the city. “For better or worse,” the booker adds, “Ticketmaster sells the most tickets in New York hands down.”
This wasn’t a one-time instance, either. Sources tell Billboard that concert promoters S2BN booked and then cancelled a Genesis 2022 tour date for Barclays Center due to issues with SeatGeek. The show, which was to be a surprise fourth New York date of the band’s Last Domino run (Genesis played two nights at Madison Square Garden and one at UBS Arena in Belmont), suffered from technical issues after going on sale and never came close to hitting the promoter’s sales goals.
The SeatGeek Deal Points
SeatGeek officials dispute the claims about problems with their system, telling Billboard in a lengthy statement, “Being the fastest growing tech company and a newer entrant to the primary ticketing space, SeatGeek is unencumbered by legacy technology, historical relationships, and outdated biases, allowing us to invest where the most impact can be felt.”
“In the last twelve months,” SeatGeek’s statement continues, “we’ve bolstered our entertainment team with key hires and have completely revamped our entertainment product offering, including making a number of fan-friendly strides in how we handle onsales, from utilizing state-of-the-art 3D view-from-seat imagery to providing ‘similar seat’ recommendations when multiple customers are vying for the same inventory.” The changes have resulted in “resounding appreciation from both AEG and Live Nation’s teams.”
Abbamondi signed the SeatGeek deal in 2021 with a $10 million signing package, sources say, that included cash, savings on the fees SeatGeek charged and a lucrative sponsorship agreement. The contract was seen as a means of helping reduce owner and Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai’s $50 million to $100 million annual losses operating the team and arena since he bought out majority owner Mikhail Prokhorov in 2019. Just seven months later, however, Tsai agreed to accept Abbamondi’s resignation, despite the executive signing a record number of sponsorship agreements for the Nets that brought in an additional $30 million in annual revenue.
For SeatGeek, one of the largest ticket resale services in North America, the Barclays Center deal marked a major win in the company’s move from secondary ticketing into the primary, direct-to-consumer ticket business. Partnering with venues for primary ticketing services also drives significant traffic to SeatGeek’s secondary marketplace. That’s because ticket buyers don’t generally know if they are buying tickets from the team or from a reseller, since all primary and secondary tickets are listed together without any differentiation. The company’s other clients include the NBA’s New Orleans Pelicans and Cleveland Cavaliers, the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys and Arizona Cardinals, most of Major League Soccer and a growing number of Broadway theaters due to an alliance with Shubert Tickets.
Ticketmaster Regains Control
Ticketmaster has been under scrutiny this week, following a high-profile hearing before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, examining competition in the ticketing industry and the company’s disastrous Nov. 15 ticket sale for Taylor Swift’s record-breaking The Eras tour. SeatGeek chief executive Jack Groetzinger testified during the hearing that Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s 2010 merger should be unwound due to a monopolistic behavior, saying it “it stifles competition completely.” (He was not, however, asked about his company’s own outages selling tickets to five of the concert dates for which the company has exclusive deals — including one reported instance where it charged a woman’s credit 14 times for $9,000 in total.) With Barclays Center’s move back to Ticketmaster, and the opening of the UBS Arena in late 2021, Ticketmaster now tickets all four of New York’s major arenas.
Barclays Center’s switch is likely to be examined by the Department of Justice, which monitors Ticketmaster as part of a 13-year-old consent decree dating back to Live Nation’s 2010 merger with Ticketmaster. One area of inquiry will likely be the drop in the number of concerts brought to Barclays Center in 2022, compared to 2019, the last full year of concerts prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Six months after signing with SeatGeek, Barclays Center saw the number of especial events and concerts at the building drop 13% from 2019 to 2022. The number of Live Nation concerts at the building fell 23% compared while the revenue generated from those Live Nation 2022 shows — $14.6 million — was less than half of the $31 million Live Nation concerts generated at Barclays Center in 2019.
The precipitous drop in Live Nation content, if done to retaliate against the venue for signing with Ticketmaster, could be a serious violation of the consent decree and could be grounds for challenging the merger in court.
Billboard found that other major buildings experienced similar fluctuations, though, including Madison Square Garden, which saw its total show count from 2019 to 2022 drop 11%. Revenue from Live Nation touring shows dropped 20% during that same period, while the number of touring shows brought to the arena was only down 2%. The 02 Arena in London, Scotiabank Arena in Toronto and FTX Arena in Miami each also experienced double-digit event night declines at their venues in 2022 compared to 2019.
The arena shows that Live Nation did bring to Barclays Center were some of the company’s most popular tours, according to Boxscore data, including Kendrick Lamar ($3.7 million gross), My Chemical Romance ($4.4 million gross) and Arcade Fire ($1.3 million gross). Barclays Center was also likely impacted by the opening of the OVG-managed UBS Arena, which booked $50 million in shows in 2022. Often the opening of a new venue can temporarily affect older venues as touring shows line up to be among the first to play the new facility. Barclays Center was able to make up for much of the loss caused by the decrease in Live Nation shows with higher grossing events from other promoters. By doing so, executives were able to minimize the venue’s drop in revenue from 2022 to 2019 to a difference of only $2 million, according to Boxscore data. Among those were Elton John’s March 1-2 concerts that generated $4.9 million in sales and Tame Impala’s March 14-15 shows that generated $1.9 million in sales, both promoted by AEG Presents. As well, Bad Bunny’s March 19-20 dates from Latin promoter Henry Cardenas generated more than $7.9 million in sales.
Looking ahead to 2023, Barclays Center already has three of the year’s biggest shows on the books – Madonna, as well as Blink-182 and Bruce Springsteen. Blink and Springsteen are both Live Nation tours booked at the venue prior to the switch back to Ticketmaster.
Live Nation is not legally responsible for a deadly 2014 shooting backstage at a Young Jeezy concert, a California appeals court says, because such an attack was not the kind of event that the concert giant should have seen coming.
In a ruling issued Tuesday (Jan. 24), the California Court of Appeal refused to revive a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of Eric Johnson, Jr., an event promoter who was shot to death during an August 2014 stop at a San Francisco-area venue during Jeezy’s Under the Influence of Music tour.
Johnson’s family claimed that Live Nation had been legally negligent because it didn’t have enough security measures in place to prevent the shooting, but the appeals court ruled that the attack was not “foreseeable” — a key requirement in proving such allegations.
“A violent attack by and between artists and their guests in the backstage area of a performance is not a foreseeable occurrence against which Live Nation should have provided preventative measures of the nature plaintiffs suggest,” Justice Stuart R. Pollak wrote in Tuesday’s opinion.
In its ruling, the appeals court suggested that Live Nation likely had good reason to be worried about incidents involving the crowd, citing reports that fights had broken out at previous events. But the court said those same red flags did not exist for potential violence backstage.
“The reports did not … indicate that any of the artists or their entourages engaged in or posed any danger of violence during the tour,” the judges wrote in the ruling. “The head of security also indicated that in her more than 10 years at the amphitheater, there had not been any violent incidents backstage.”
Attorneys for Johnson’s family did not immediately return requests for comment on Thursday. A representative for Live Nation also did not return a request for comment on the ruling.
The ruling in favor of Live Nation came as the company is facing a similar case over the high-profile stabbing death of Drakeo The Ruler at the Once Upon A Time in L.A. music festival in December 2021. Filed by the late rapper’s family, that case also centers on security measures Live Nation took — or didn’t take — that might have prevented a fatal assault backstage.
Johnson, 38, was shot and killed backstage on Aug. 22, 2014, at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, Calif., a venue leased and operated by Live Nation. According to his family’s lawsuit, Johnson had been at the event to “discuss his business arrangements for Young Jeezy to appear at a concert after-party” in nearby San Jose.
According to press reports at the time, Jeezy (real name Jay Jenkins) was taken into police custody in the wake of the shooting and charged with illegal possession of a weapon. But that charge was later dropped and no additional charges were ever filed against the rapper over the incident.
“Mr. Jenkins should not have been arrested and this case should not have been prosecuted,” Jeezy’s attorney told Billboard at the time. “We are pleased it has been dismissed, although frustrated that it took the police and prosecutors months to do the right thing.”
Court records indicate that no murder charges have ever been filed against anyone over Johnson’s killing.
Earlier versions of the civil lawsuit filed by Johnson’s family directly accused Jeezy of committing the shooting, but those claims were later dropped. They were replaced by allegations similar to those made against Live Nation, claiming the rapper’s allegedly negligent conduct was partly to blame for the attack taking place.
On Tuesday, in addition to rejecting the allegations against Live Nation, the California appeals court also dismissed the claims against Jeezy. The court ruled that the family had waited too long to bring the claims, and were thus barred by the statute of limitations.
Jeezy’s attorney declined to comment on the decision.
Read the full ruling here:
Could Taylor Swift be responsible for breaking up Live Nation and Ticketmaster?
For anyone watching the three-hour U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, aside from frequent quotes of her lyrics, the connection between the pop star and the politicians’ probe is probably starting to feel tangential. And despite Live Nation president and CFO Joe Berchtold’s efforts to shift blame for Swift’s disastrous (yet record-breaking) ticket sale from Ticketmaster to scalpers and bots, most everyone else involved was focused on the m-word — monopoly.
The senators’ line of thinking is that if the Live Nation-owned platform didn’t have such market dominance (around 80% of large venues in the U.S. have exclusive Ticketmaster deals), greater competition would force the company to innovate and improve its services — potentially avoiding the kinds of issues that spoiled the Swift sale last November. But while disruptions to Swift’s highly anticipated North American Eras tour caused such a commotion that Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) felt compelled to call this hearing, by Tuesday it seemed only Berchtold wanted to explore the immediate problems that brought down the sale.
Instead, the lawmakers see taking on Ticketmaster as a winning political issue and an opportunity to reach constituents who have long complained about the ticketing giant. During the hearing, for example, Klobuchar railed against high ticket prices, saying, “To have a strong capitalist system, you have to have competition.” But would competition in ticketing actually drive down ticket prices when it’s the artists who set the price, as Berchtold said, and not Ticketmaster?
For the senators, it hardly matters. Perception is reality and poor perception could lead to serious issues for Live Nation and Ticketmaster. Whether or not the companies’ dominance is a problem in the market, Ticketmaster is widely so despised that it has clearly become an easy target for rare bipartisan political action propelled by incredible public support.
About an hour into the hearing, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) laid out a potential path for Democrats in the Senate, potentially with support from Republicans, to force Live Nation into divesting its holdings in Ticketmaster.
Since merging in 2010, the combined companies have been operating under a consent decree, promising not to leverage Live Nation’s touring content in a way that would punish venues for not signing up for Ticketmaster’s services. A Department of Justice intervention, in which the assistant U.S. attorney for antitrust goes to a federal judge with evidence “of monopolistic and predatory abuses,” Blumenthal said, would be the most obvious path toward an intervention forcing Live Nation to divest Ticketmaster. There’s recent precedent for this, too. In 2019, the DOJ punished Live Nation for the six violations by extending the term of the decree five years and forcing the company to pay the reimbursement of millions in investigatory and litigation costs. The DOJ also appointed an independent monitor and required Live Nation to install an internal antitrust compliance officer. If the DOJ caught Live Nation violating the decree again, the government would have a strong case to take before the government showing that the consent decree wasn’t effective and that the merger would have to be unwound.
Hinting that DOJ anti-trust attorneys appointed by Biden are once conducting another review of the company’s compliance with the consent decree, Blumental warned that any violations found during the current review would be grounds for splitting the company in two.
“If the Department of Justice uncovers violations of the consent decree,” Blumental said, “unwinding the merger ought to be on the table.”
Other senators during the committee threatened to take legislative action if the DOJ didn’t do something about Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s combined strength. Government witness Kathleen Bradish, vp for legal advocacy at the American Antitrust Institute, however, testified that any legislative remedy — like legislation to enhance and clarify U.S. antitrust laws and a regulatory framework to clean up the mostly unregulated ticketing market — would have to be coupled with strong antitrust enforcement action through existing antitrust law in order to break up the company.
Even if there is the political will to unwind Live Nation and Ticketmaster, that outcome is likely still a long shot. Still, even if the companies survive the DOJ probe and can eventually end the consent decree, it’s difficult to see how they repair their image going forward. To most senators on the panel, the company is an illegal monopoly openly operating in defiance of the world’s most powerful legislative bodies. And to most aggrieved fans, it’s screwing up their ticket buying and gouging them to see their favorite acts.
Live Nation investors were either nonplussed or unmoved by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s political theatrics Tuesday (Jan. 24), probing the causes behind a disastrous ticket presale to Taylor Swift‘s Eras tour last November hosted on the company’s Ticketmaster platform. While Live Nation president and chief financial officer Joe Berchtold was being grilled by lawmakers about Ticketmaster’s technology and market power with a focus on monopolistic behavior, Live Nation’s share price rose as much as 2.3% to $77.71 before closing at $76.67, up 1.4% on the day, on about half of the average daily trading volume.
With that modest gain, Live Nation beat the Dow Jones Industrial Average (+0.3%), S&P 500 (-0.1%), Nasdaq composite (-0.3%) and Russell 2000 (-0.3%). It also outperformed two competitors, MSG Entertainment (+0.6%) and Germany’s CTS Eventim (-1.1%), that weren’t subjected to Congressional questioning.
Congressional oversight was already priced into Live Nation’s share price to a degree, though. Live Nation shares fell 7.8% to $66.21 on Nov. 18, 2022, after Sen. Amy Klobuchar, chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition, Antitrust and Consumer Rights, penned a letter to Ticketmaster about her concerns regarding its “system failures, increasing fees and complaints of conduct that violate the consent decree” under which Ticketmaster and Live Nation operate.
The hearing, titled “That’s the Ticket: Promoting Competition and Protecting Consumers in Live Entertainment,” turned Live Nation and Ticketmaster into punching bags for senators who, as Sen. Richard Blumenthal noted, were brought together “in an absolute, unified case.” The legislators’ pointed questions and obvious frustration on behalf of their constituents made it clear Ticketmaster is one of the more loathed companies in the U.S. One witness, Kathleen Bradish, vp for legal advocacy at the American Antitrust Institute, called Live Nation and Ticketmaster “a very traditional monopoly” with a dominant market position that results in higher fees to consumers and less innovation.
Exactly what will come from the hearing is far less certain. While there may be some appetite amongst the senators to undo the 2010 merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, or implement some other structural remedies, Sen. Klobuchar said the committee will wait for a Department of Justice report before moving forward.
Some senators proposed non-legislative measures. Sen. Joe Kennedy suggested the person in charge of the ticketing presale should be fired. Sen. Marsha Blackburn called the bot-related service outages “unbelievable” and told Berchtold that the company “ought to be able to get some good advice” for better dealing with these kinds of issues.
The full Senate Judiciary Committee has opened its hearing on competition within the ticketing industry this morning and a number of witnesses have already set high stakes for the congressional probe, calling for drastic action in the ticketing space.
Moments after Live Nation president Joe Berchtold shared lengthy remarks on the causes of the Taylor Swift ticket crash, SeatGeek CEO Jack Groetzinger, one of Ticketmaster’s main competitors told Congress, “Live Nation controls most popular entertainers, routs most of the tours, tickets most of the concerts and owns many of the venues,” noting “this power allows Live Nation to maintain its monopolistic influence over the primary ticketing market.”
The 2010 consent decree governing the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster created “has not worked at all and violated the consent decree since its inception,” Groetzinger said.
“The only effective remedy is a structural one – the disillusion of the common ownership of Ticketmaster and Live Nation,” he testified.
Amy Edwards and Parker Harrison demonstrate against the live entertainment ticket industry outside the U.S. Capitol January 24, 2023 in Washington, DC.
Drew Angerer/GI
Jerry Mickelson, longtime promoter with Jam Concerts in Chicago who spoke out against the merger during Congressional hearing in 2010, called the deal “a vertical integration on steroids” and said its arena promotion business has decreased 90 percent since the merger.
Berchtold argued that the company’s marketshare of the concert market is close to 50 to 60 percent, not 80 percent as many have claimed. He also denied allegations that the company used its market size to punish competitors.
“It is absolutely our policy to not pressure, threaten or retaliate against venues by using content as part of the ticketing discussion.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) encouraged critics of the company and people who are fed up with the system that exists right now to “continue your criticism” as the Department of Justice takes a third look at Live Nation following a 2019 inquiry into the company.
“If the Department of Justice establishes violations of the consent decree, unwinding the merger ought to be on the table,” Blumenthal testified. “If the Department of Justice establishes facts that involved monopolistic and predatory abuses, there ought to be structural remedies that include breaking up the company.
Before taking his turn asking questions to witnesses, outspoken Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told Berchtold: “I’m not against big, but I am against dumb and the way your company handled Ms. Swift’s tickets was a debacle. Whoever at your company was in charge of that should be fired.”
This is a developing story — check back for updates.
Don’t expect Live Nation’s Joe Berchtold to be quoting Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on ticketing Tuesday. Unlike the pop star’s “I’m the problem it’s me” chorus-turned-meme, the company’s president and CFO plans to take aim at who he says are the real culprits behind Swift’s disastrous Nov. 15 presale — scalpers.
While the Live Nation-owned Ticketmaster was villianized for weeks following the presale for Swift’s upcoming The Eras tour that both broke single-day sales records and threw fans into a fury over service issues, according to a prepared opening statement reviewed by Billboard, Berchtold plans to lay much of the blame on scalpers who used illegal bots to attack the online sale. The statement, to be delivered Tuesday in Washington, D.C., to the committee led by ranking member Dick Durbin (D-Ilinois), details Ticketmaster’s ongoing “arms race” against scalpers illegally using autonomous software to disrupt and attack high profile ticket sales. Country music legend Garth Brooks is lending his support to Berchtold’s testimony as well, with a letter defending Ticketmaster and attacking ticket scalpers who use illegal methods to buy up tickets.
“We knew bots would attack [Swift’s] onsale, and planned accordingly,” reads Berchtold’s planned statement. “We were then hit with three times the amount of bot traffic than we had ever experienced, and for the first time in 400 Verified Fan onsales they came after our Verified Fan access code servers. While the bots failed to penetrate our systems or acquire any tickets, the attack required us to slow down and even pause our sales. This is what led to a terrible consumer experience that we deeply regret.”
Following the Nov. 15 presale, Ticketmaster eventually canceled its general onsale for the remaining 170,000 tickets to Swift’s tour. In December, the company announced a new strategy to sell the passes over the course of four weeks and recently concluded that effort. At the time, the company said “historically unprecedented demand” caused the failure, but blamed bots then, too — saying, 14 million fans and more than 3 billion bots hit the site. That excuse did little to satisfy the more than 100,000 fans who kicked out of line during the bot attack, and even the singer spoke out blaming the company. With many fans calling for Ticketmaster’s punishment, Berchtold also plans to apologize directly to Swift and her followers.
“As we said after the onsale, and I reiterate today, we apologize to the many disappointed fans as well as to Ms. Swift,” his statement reads.
While Berchtold notes Ticketmaster “accepts its responsibility to be the first line of defense against bots in this ever- escalating arms race,” he intends to shift the hearing’s focus to policy changes that could tamp down on scalpers.
“In this forum where we are here to discuss public policy, we also need to recognize how industrial scalpers breaking the law using bots and cyberattacks to try to unfairly gain tickets contributes to an awful consumer experience,” his statement reads. “We are doing everything we can to fight the people who attack our onsales and steal tickets meant for real fans, but we need help passing real reforms to stop this arms race.”
Brooks, in his statement, supports this notion.
“The crush of bots during an on-sale is a huge reason for program failure NO MATTER WHO THE TICKET SELLING COMPANY is,” writes the country icon in his letter addressed to Congress. “And the one who ALWAYS pays for this atrocity is the customer, the LAST one on whom that burden should fall.”
Brooks notes in his letter that he forced Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones to allow him to use Ticketmaster to sell tickets to his April concert at AT&T Stadium, instead of SeatGeek which held the exclusive contract to ticket the stadium.
“I had grown to love and trust the people at Ticketmaster so much,” he explained in his letter, noting, “this was not because of Ticketmaster, but a choice I made.”
Berchtold will be joined on the witness stand by SeatGeek chief executive Jack Groetzinger and longtime Chicago promoter Jerry Mickelson with JAM Productions, along with recording artist Clyde Lawrence and representatives from the James Madison Institute and American Antitrust Institute.
Ticketmaster officials are expecting a pile on, both from Congress and the other testifying witnesses. SeatGeek has filed a number of complaints against Ticketmaster with the Department of Justice for alleged anti-trust violations, and Mickelson testified before Congress in 2010, condemning the merger between Live Nation and Ticketmaster. While company officials aren’t expecting any standing ovations, Berchtold’s testimony will be an important preview of the company’s framing of the challenges facing the business over the next couple of years and promises to be the most detailed defense of Live Nation by an executive in its 18-year history.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) originally called for this hearing in response to public anger over the technical failures of the Taylor Swift Eras ticket sale. But the witness list and the name of the hearing, “That’s the Ticket: Promoting Competition and Protecting Consumers in Live Entertainment,” released Monday (Jan. 23) suggest that the hearing is more likely to focus on long-simmering dissatisfaction over the 2010 consent decree governing the merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation. That consent decree has had mixed success creating a level playing field for competition in the ticketing business, and critics consider it a failure because it didn’t prevent Ticketmaster from becoming the dominant ticketing company it is today.
“We hear people say that ticketing markets are less competitive today than they were at the time of the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger. That is simply not true,” reads Berchtold’s statements, claiming Ticketmaster’s market share has decreased since the DOJ estimated it held 80% of the market in 2009.
At the time, Ticketmaster “did not face the level of competition we face today from new competitors including SeatGeek, AEG’s AXS, and Eventbrite, along with established competitors including Tickets.com and Paciolan,” Berchtold continues. “Today, there is intense competition for every ticketing contract that goes out to bid — far more than there was in 2010. Ticketmaster has lost, not gained, market share, and every year competitive bidding results in ticketing companies getting less of the economic value in a ticketing contract while venues and teams get more. The bottom line is that U.S. ticketing markets have never been more competitive than they are today, and we read about new potential entrants all the time.”
Berchtold plans to present the threat posed by bad actors and malicious software as an issue both the government and the private sector must address together. The strategy shifts part of the criticism for the Taylor Swift ticket debacle onto the Senate — which unanimously voted to pass the BOTS act in 2016, effectively outlawing automated ticket-buying technology. Since its passage, the law has only been enforced twice by the FBI and the Federal Trade Commission, despite pleas from Ticketmaster officials that bot attacks on high profile ticket sales are increasing in frequency and complexity, sources tell Billboard. Berchtold also plans to detail how the company has spent more than $1 billion developing technology to prevent bot attacks on the company’s ticket sales using software like Verified Fan and digital ticketing.
A ‘blame the bots’ strategy is not likely to satisfy the members of the Senate Judiciary committee, which include such conservative and liberal firebrands such as Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), John Kennedy (R-Louisiana), Diane Fienstein (D-California), Corey Booker (D-New Jersey) and Richard Blumenthal (D-New Jersey). Anti-Ticketmaster sentiment and criticism of the 2010 merger between Ticketmaster and Live Nation is one of the few issues of bipartisan agreement on Capitol Hill.
Berchtold will end his testimony laying out calls to action he believes Congress can take to combat bad actors in the ticketing industry: First, is empowering private parties like Ticketmaster to bring civil actions against ticket sellers who knowingly sell tickets obtained by bots. Second, Berchtold believes Congress should act to outlaw deceptive sales practices like speculative ticket sales “offering for sale tickets you don’t own or have an existing right to obtain,” or deceptive sites that mislabel themselves as “the official” ticket seller for shows they aren’t contracted to work with.
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s “That’s the Ticket: Promoting Competition and Protecting Consumers in Live Entertainment” begins at 10 a.m. EST on Tuesday. Click here to watch the hearing live.
The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on Jan. 24 at 10 a.m. EST examining the ticketing industry and Ticketmaster’s handling of the Taylor Swift ticket sale, Senator Amy Klobuchar‘s (D-MN) office announced.
Titled “That’s The Ticket: Promoting Competition and Protecting Consumers in Live Entertainment,” the hearing will look at accusations of anti-competitive behavior in the ticketing space and examine the history of the 2010 Department of Justice consent decree governing the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster.
The merger has long been criticized by members of both parties with Klobuchar recently identifying the Swift crash as an example of how “Ticketmaster’s power in the primary ticket market insulates it from the competitive pressures that typically push companies to innovate and improve their services.”
The Nov. 15 sale crash, which affected both Ticketmaster and its competitor SeakGeek, was the result of massive demand from Taylor Swift fans and an illegal bot attack, Ticketmaster wrote in a Nov. 15 blog post.
Klobuchar, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, will be joined at the hearing by ranking member Mike Lee (R-UT) for the hearing before the full Senate Judiciary Committee with Chair Dick Durbin (D-IL) and incoming ranking member Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
“The issues within America’s ticketing industry were made painfully obvious when Ticketmaster’s website failed hundreds of thousands of fans hoping to purchase tickets for Taylor Swift’s new tour, but these problems are not new. For too long, consumers have faced high fees, long waits, and website failures, and Ticketmaster’s dominant market position means the company faces inadequate pressure to innovate and improve,” Klobuchar said in a statement. “At next week’s hearing, we will examine how consolidation in the live entertainment and ticketing industries harms customers and artists alike. Without competition to incentivize better services and fair prices, we all suffer the consequences.”
“American consumers deserve the benefit of competition in every market, from grocery chains to concert venues,” Lee added. “I look forward to exercising our subcommittee’s oversight authority to ensure that anticompetitive mergers and exclusionary conduct are not crippling an entertainment industry already struggling to recover from pandemic lockdowns.”
“It’s been more than a decade since Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation, and competition in the ticketing and live entertainment industries has only gotten worse. Too often, consumers are the ones who pay the price for this market failure,” said Durbin. “I look forward to this hearing to explore what led to this environment, as well as steps we can take to bring competition back to these industries in a way that puts fans and artists first.”
“I’m glad to see the committee will look into the Ticketmaster debacle,” said Graham. “I look forward to hearing more about how we got here, and identifying solutions.”
A witness list has not been released for the Jan. 24 hearing. A spokesperson for Ticketmaster did not comment when asked about the upcoming hearing.
Madonna is planning a massive 40th anniversary tour later this year with her longtime concert promotion partner and producer Live Nation and music manager Guy Oseary, sources tell Billboard.
The 64-year-old pop icon will perform music from her entire catalogue, dating back to her 1983 self-titled debut album through her most recent studio album, 2019’s Madame X. The world tour will be Madonna’s first ever career retrospective, featuring a compilation of her biggest hits across four decades of music and will reportedly include a multi-night run at the O2 in London.
“It’s going to be the biggest tour she’s ever done,” one executive familiar with her plans tells Billboard. The tour will include both stadium and arena dates, the source says, and include over-the-top production that delivers both “Material Girl” kitsch and occasionally outrageous sex appeal with plenty of show-stopping moments made for social media.
Billboard has also learned that Oseary will continue to serve on Madonna’s management team, despite stepping down from his role at mega-management collective Maverick in 2020 and splitting with longtime clients U2 in 2022.
The tour buzz comes just months after the “Hey You” singer released her career-spanning compilation album Finally Enough Love: 50 Number Ones, spanning her entire dance club career, featuring remixes by top producers including 20 rare recordings officially released for the first time. In 2021, Madonna signed a deal with Warner Music Group for an “extensive, multi-year series of catalog releases that will revisit the groundbreaking music that made her an international icon.”
Madonna last toured in 2019 and early 2020 on her Madame X tour, a theater run that was struggled through production delays and Madonna’s recurring hip and knee injuries. While the Madame X tour earned strong critical reviews in the press, its habitually late start time often angered ticket holders and prompted two class actions lawsuits from fans.
When it comes to choosing her nightly set list for this new tour, Madonna will have no shortage of songs to choose from with 57 titles charting on the Billboard Hot 100, 38 top 10 hits and 12 No. 1s, including 1990’s “Vogue,” and 2000’s “Music,” released a decade apart and each spending 24 weeks on the Hot 100. Madonna’s “Borderline” from 1984 spent 30 weeks on the Hot 100. She followed that impressive feat a decade later with the ballad “Take a Bow,” which held the No. 1 spot on the Hot 100 for seven weeks.
Madonna’s 2008-2009 Sticky and Sweet Tour is the highest grossing tour by a female artist ever, according to Billboard Boxscore, netting $407 million. Her most recent Madame X theater run grossed $36.4 million with 124,655 ticket sold.
Reps for Madonna could not be reached for comment at time of publishing.
Less than three weeks after two dozen Taylor Swift fans sued Live Nation over Ticketmaster’s disastrous presale of tickets to her Eras Tour in November, another similar lawsuit has been filed against the concert giant in California federal court.
Filed Tuesday (Dec. 20), the class-action lawsuit, brought by Swift fan Michelle Sterioff, accuses Live Nation and subsidiary Ticketmaster of violating federal antitrust and unfair competition laws and “intentionally and purposefully” misleading “millions of fans into believing” Ticketmaster would prevent bots and scalpers from participating in presales for the tour.
Similar to the lawsuit filed earlier this month, Tuesday’s lawsuit alleges that Live Nation and Ticketmaster, which merged in 2010, represent a monopoly in both the primary and secondary ticketing markets and have used that alleged monopoly power “in a predatory, exclusionary, and anticompetitive manner.” According to the complaint, this monopoly is used to charge “supracompetitive” ticketing fees that can increase the price of tickets “by 20-80%” over their face value.
“Ticketmaster…has violated the policy, spirit, and letter of [antitrust] laws by imposing agreements and policies at the retail and wholesale level that have prevented effective price competition across a wide swath of online ticket sales,” the complaint reads, adding that the company “is only interested in taking every dollar it can from a captive public.”
Sterioff claims that she registered for the Eras Tour presale on Nov. 1, 2022, and “relied” on Ticketmaster’s claim that its Verified Fan program “would ‘level the playing field’” so that more tickets would go to real fans over bots. However, she claims she was unable to secure a ticket during the presale on Nov. 15 or Nov. 16, forcing her to purchase tickets “through an alternate secondary ticketing service provider” after Ticketmaster canceled the general public sale, citing widespread service delays and website crashes as millions of fans tried -– and many failed –- to buy tickets.
Additionally, Sterioff says the amount she paid for her ticket on the secondary market was subject to Ticketmaster’s “monopolistic prices” due to the company’s dominance in the secondary ticketing market as well. She cites a Ticketmaster technology that limits ticket purchasers from transferring tickets unless they’re resold through the company’s secondary ticketing platform — essentially making it all but impossible to purchase a Swift ticket outside the Ticketmaster ecosystem. That allows the company “to charge monopolistic ticketing fees every time a single ticket is resold,” the complaint adds.
There are a total of eight counts listed in Sterioff’s complaint, including violation of California’s Consumers Legal Remedies Act; intentional misrepresentation; common law fraud; fraudulent inducement; antitrust violations; violation of California’s Unfair Competition Law; violation of California’s False Advertising Law, and quasi-contract/restitution/unjust enrichment.
Sterioff is asking the court for injunctive relief, statutory damages, punitive or exemplary damages, costs of bringing the lawsuit and more.
Reps for Live Nation and Ticketmaster did not immediately return a request for comment.
In the wake of the Swift ticketing controversy, Ticketmaster apologized to fans and pinned the blame on a “staggering number of bot attacks” and “unprecedented traffic.” But that explanation has seemingly not been enough for many of the company’s critics, who have resurfaced longstanding complaints about the outsized power Ticketmaster and Live Nation have wielded in the market for live music since they merged.
In November, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and her counterpart on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), jointly announced they would be holding a hearing to examine the effects of consolidation on the ticketing industry. Live Nation and Ticketmaster are also reportedly under investigation by the Justice Department over whether the companies represent an illegal monopoly, though that probe is said to have predated the Swift incident.
After massive technical problems marred the Nov 15. pre-sale for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, forcing some fans to queue for several hours to buy tickets or fail to buy them entirely, Ticketmaster is changing tactics to sell the remaining 170,000 seats for the artist’s 52 shows. The company, hoping to avoid long fan wait times and site crushing web traffic from bots and Swifties, is going back to an older technology: The 20-year-old Ticketstoday platform, modeled after The Grateful Dead’s own fan club system and still used by jam bands like Phish and Ween. The system has been updated in recent years and even deployed for artists like Ed Sheeran and Madonna, although it’s never handled 170,000 tickets for a single sale.
The move, coupled with Ticketmaster’s agreement to not participate in secondary ticket sales for the Eras tour, shows how eager ticketing companies are to work with a mega earner like Swift while avoiding the crush of traffic that disastrously caused widespread disruptions to her Nov. 15 presale. The record-breaking sale is now the subject of multiple congressional inquires around the Live Nation-owned company. These include a request from Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) to Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate the crash and a call from her counterpart on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), to hold a hearing on the “lack of competition in ticketing markets.”
The decision to use Ticketstoday — originally built for Dave Mathews Band’s fanclub platform MusicToday by manager and Red Light Management founder Coran Capshaw in the early 2000s and sold to Live Nation in 2008 — would significantly reduce fan wait times and the potential for another site crash by gating off the most vulnerable parts of the ticketing platform to uninvited fans and bot attacks thought to be responsible for the disruption issues. Instead of making fans queue up again to order their tickets, this will essentially assign tickets to them based on their preferences.
Despite receiving an unprecedented level of negative publicity, Billboard estimates Swift’s Nov. 15 presale generated approximately $554 million in sales for Ticketmaster (which ticketed 47 dates on the Eras tour) and Seat Geek (which ticketed five dates as the primary ticketing company for the Arizona Cardinals and Dallas Cowboys).
The 170,000 remaining tickets not sold during the presale have a cumulative face value worth $37 million, Billboard estimates. Once Swift completes the sale of her remaining tickets for the Eras Tour, Billboard estimates that she will have generated $591 million in the U.S. alone. Based on projection, Taylor would easily capture the title of Billboard Boxscore’s highest-grossing female touring artist of all time, topping the current title holder Madonna who’s Sticky & Sweet Tour (2008-09) currently holds the No. 1 slot grossing $407 million, and the number four slot on the all-times tour chart, currently topped by Ed Sheeran, whose Divide tour from 2017-2019 grossed $776.2 million.
Typically, Ticketstoday helps artists sell a small portion of their available tickets – usually about 8% per show — directly to their most loyal fans, much like a lottery system. Fans receive an email about a limited number of VIP or high demand tickets available for sale for an upcoming show, and then those who want to buy the tickets select a pricing option and provide their credit card information in advance. If there are more fans wanting tickets than tickets available, a digital lottery is held and the fans selected have their credit cards automatically charged.
While Ticketmaster stayed online during the attack and sold a record 2.2 million tickets in 12 hours, the site could barely handle the traffic created by 14 million fans and billions of bots the company claimed hit the site. This system using Ticketstoday will pace out the sales, and they will be processed away from the public, avoiding any similar potential issues. To determine which fans would get to participate in the upcoming sale, Ticketmaster used its Verified Fan platform . Fans who bought tickets to the 2020 Lover Festival, canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, have been prioritized, as well as those who bought select Taylor Swift merchandise, like a “F— the Patriachy” keychain that went on sale in August. Participating fans will be sent an email requesting their credit card number and choice of tour seating options representing various price ranges and seat locations. Ticketmaster will then work to match fans with their purchase request and charge their card on file. The entire process will take about four weeks and is expected to be completed by Dec. 23.