ticket sales
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As North America’s largest independent promoter, Gregg Perloff, the co-founder/CEO of Another Planet Entertainment, isn’t the type to ask for permission from the majors before making his next move.
Perloff has learned since selling Bill Graham Presents in the 1990s to the company that would become Live Nation that stealth can be a strategic advantage in the live-music business. That’s especially true when competing against Live Nation and AEG, which each have hundreds of millions of dollars in capital.
So, after three years of secretly negotiating, leasing and remodeling a 45,000-square-foot venue in downtown Los Angeles — AEG and Live Nation turf — Perloff and The Bowery Presents co-founder Michael Swier are about to open The Bellwether. The two-story venue is located west of the 110 Freeway between Third and Fourth streets. The one-city-block-long space is anchored by a 1,600-capacity general-admission theater and features a street-level bar and restaurant, plus a 600-capacity private event space. The venue also comes with provenance: It was once owned by Prince, who named it after his 1992 song “Glam Slam.”
Prince moved out in 1995, and a parade of lesser-known club operators followed. Months before the 2020 shutdown of live music, Swier found it. Instead of buying the building from its current owner, Perloff and Swier — who owns L.A.’s Teragram Ballroom and Moroccan Lounge — quietly worked out a long-term lease and started preparing the building for a 2023 opening. The Bellwether will be booked by long-time Another Planet Talent buyer Nick Barrie.
Perloff pulled off a similar coup in 2007 when he engaged in under-the-radar negotiations with San Francisco officials to secure a permit for the first multiday, after-sundown private festival in Golden Gate Park. Knowing the city badly needed revenue due to budget shortfalls, Perloff and his team kept the talks under wraps and got the agreement signed despite the last-minute protests of his competitors in San Francisco’s Live Nation office. That event, Outside Lands, is today one of the highest-grossing independently owned festivals in the United States.
Basketballs signed by late UCLA Bruins coach John Wooden and Golden State Warriors point guard Steph Curry. Former San Francisco Giants catcher Buster Posey autographed the miniature bat.
Karen Santos
Perloff, who has six decades of experience in the live-music business, sat down with Billboard to discuss his new L.A. venue, his thoughts on the Taylor Swift ticketing debacle, the U.S. Senate’s subsequent grilling of Ticketmaster, and the effectiveness of the U.S. Department of Justice’s 2010 consent decree and the protections put in place to protect Ticketmaster customers.
Let’s hear the big news about your new music venue.
We will be opening our first venue in L.A. in decades: a 1,600-seat music venue just west of downtown. We’re partnering with Michael Swier, who owns some of New York’s most iconic rooms like Bowery Ballroom and the Mercury Lounge. The new venue will have an open floor plan that can host any type of contemporary music act or genre. It’s got perfect sight lines with a wraparound balcony and side lounge where people can relax. We’ve got a d&b [audiotechnik] sound system custom-built for this particular room. When we saw this new space, every one of us said, “Oh, my God. We have to do this.”
Perloff says he bought this sculpture by glass artist Dale Chihuly “at an Oakland children’s hospital music therapy event.”
Karen Santos
Did 2022 meet your expectations in terms of sales?
It was a really good year for us, and our sales in 2023 are so much better than they’ve ever been. I don’t think I’m alone in this. While everyone’s saying there aren’t enough acts out there, the other side of the coin is sales are spectacular. When the end of 2021 came, there seemed to be this built-up demand after the pandemic, and we had a burst of great sales including for our festivals Outside Lands and Life Is Beautiful, both of which sold out. We had a really great 2022 as well. [Billboard parent company PMC Media is a majority owner of Life Is Beautiful.]
Why is sales momentum continuing to build?
Maybe it’s that half the people going to shows right now were ready the day the doors opened back up, and the other half now have joined in. I literally have never seen a situation like this.
Do you worry about business cooling off in late summer?
Not for Outside Lands. It was held during the first week of August and had its best year in 2022. But to your point, I’ve always said that it would be better for everyone if we could figure out how to convince artists to play all year round and go from a six- or seven-month business where everyone’s compressed together to one where artists go out earlier in the year.
Another Planet was one of the few concert companies that did not lay off any of its staff during the pandemic. Why was that important to you?
We were the only concert company that kept 100% of our employees on payroll with no salary reduction during the entire pandemic. It was important that people could continue their lifestyle. I didn’t understand why these big companies didn’t do the same. There was plenty of work to be done from home: new venues, different ways to tell people about our shows and production and building maintenance. When the pandemic ended, we were ready to go.
You’ve been a Ticketmaster client for a long time and stayed with the company after its merger with Live Nation. Over a decade later, do you think the Department of Justice got it right?
I’ll say this: There is supposed to be a firewall in place so that Ticketmaster won’t share your data with the concert promotion side of Live Nation. If anyone believes that Live Nation can’t get numbers from Ticketmaster, they’re very naive. Somehow people seem to know what everybody else’s ticket sales are.
A tambourine depicting legendary concert promoter Bill Graham that Perloff got at an event thrown by his late boss’ memorial foundation.
Karen Santos
Do you agree with the argument that Ticketmaster leverages Live Nation content to land ticketing contracts?
No, and I can’t believe that the Senate keeps fixating on something that is irrelevant. They don’t do it. That isn’t an issue. To listen to the Senate talking about arenas when Live Nation doesn’t even own an arena in this country is just crazy. Secondly, when the Department of Justice said it was going to subsidize AEG’s AXS ticketing to be a competitor to Ticketmaster [in 2010], we all saw how that went — not very good. I’m not sure that most people would pick AXS over Ticketmaster.
Because of Ticketmaster’s dominance?
No. What I’m saying is that it’s hard for me to take the government seriously when they say they want to stop monopolies when there are monopolies in every part of business, from telecom to transportation.
What are your reasons for sticking with Ticketmaster?
I thought Ticketmaster was doing a good job for us. I have nothing bad to say about my competitors. Everyone wants to pick on AEG and Live Nation, but most people have no idea how hard it is to produce a tour. I toured Star Wars: In Concert with LucasFilm around the world for five years and worked on tours with Bill Graham; it’s a completely different game than being a local promoter. AEG and Live Nation do an incredible job and should be applauded for the work they do with Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen. Every five years, you get an artist that’s so popular that you just can’t make everyone happy.
Do you think the Swift ticket sale was mishandled?
I think there were a number of problems with the Taylor Swift on-sale. This might be the first controversial thing I’ll say in this interview: Bands really want to put the whole tour on sale at once because they can advertise the whole tour at once and make a bigger splash.
Fender guitar cases containing instruments won at a benefit auction for The Bridge School, which was co-founded by Pegi Young, the first wife of Neil Young.
Karen Santos
Right, and for Swift, something like 2.2 million tickets went on sale simultaneously.
If someone’s touring for six months, it might make some sense to maybe break the tour into two segments and go on sale with the second part of the tour closer to the dates. But there’s no system in the world — and this is where I have to defend Ticketmaster — that could have handled the onslaught.
Do you think the Senate understands that?
My question for them is, “Why are you picking on Ticketmaster and Live Nation when you should be outlawing brokers?” They are the ones who screw up everything. Does every promoter take a few tickets? Does every venue have a few tickets? Sure. But it’s the scalpers that make it so no one can get a decent seat except the rich. The Senate didn’t do the research they should have done before they started pontificating and acting like they knew what they were talking about.
What’s the best way to stop scalping?
Many years ago, my business partner, Sherry Wasserman, came up with a brilliant system for Prince at the Wilshire in Los Angeles back when I ran the theater. We wanted to completely stop brokering for the show, and we made people line up the day before the show and present an ID when buying tickets. It was foolproof, we thought. And then the next day as people are walking in, here comes Muhammad Ali with tickets and a matching ID. Muhammad Ali certainly wasn’t in line the day before when we sold the tickets, but here he was with a ticket and ID. We didn’t know how, but he managed to beat the system. We just laughed and thought, “We did the best we could do.”
Irving Azoff teed off on scalpers, Stubhub and the federal government in a no-holds-barred panel Wednesday during the Pollstar Live conference at The Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills. Azoff, along with artist Garth Brooks, MSG Entertainment chairman James Dolan and former top Department of Justice antitrust official Makan Delrahim, took the federal government to task for the way it handled last month’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on ticketing. Despite evidence that the problems linked to the ticket sale were the result of a massive bot attack, most senators at the hearing blamed Ticketmaster for service disruptions and tried to link customer dissatisfaction with the ticket sale to antitrust allegations that the company is operating as a monopoly.
Delrahim, who investigated Live Nation and Ticketmaster on behalf of the Department of Justice in 2019, told his fellow panelists that Congress was convoluting two separate issues and “were well intentioned, but didn’t understand the issues” facing the primary ticketing business. Azoff was more aggressive in his comments. He said most problems in ticketing were “likely perpetrated by scalpers” who “steal massive amounts of tickets” and pay lobbyists to “to demonize Ticketmaster, and actually make laws to support and protect scalpers instead of artists or fans.”
The panel was a call for unity within the music business after the senate hearing left many in live entertainment feeling rattled, including many of Live Nation’s own competitors.
The touring community has stayed silent through most of the sector’s controversies in the post-pandemic period – including consumer frustration over high prices for Adele, Bruce Springsteen and Blink-182 tickets – leaving Ticketmaster to take most of the incoming barrage. And the Senate Judiciary Committee revealed — to many people’s surprise — how angry and often misinformed politicians are with Ticketmaster, and by extension, the concert industry writ large.
The panel was held during an annual conference sponsored by Pollstar, a long-running trade publication now owned by Azoff, Tim Leiweke and the Oak View Group. Wednesday’s panel was the concert businesses’ first attempt to create a unified voice between buildings, artists, promoters and ticketing companies and to launch a new offensive targeting scalpers who, as Brooks pointed out, are becoming increasingly effective at using bots to “slow the system down so people get frustrated and immediately head to the secondary markets.” Dolan noted scalpers have made it very difficult to get tickets into the hands of people “who don’t have seven figure incomes.”
No artist “wants their fans to have to pay for a ticket that is exponentially higher than face value,” Azoff said. “I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that Washington isn’t focused on the real issue — screwing artists and their fans. Our government has a long history of screwing artists.” Add in the explosion of fraudulent and misleading ticketing sites and the scourge of speculative ticket listings, and it’s easy to see why Azoff, Dolan and the other panelists are alarmed about the growth of the secondary ticketing business.
They’re not wrong, but the situation may also not be as dire as Azoff and his compatriots want to make it seem. Unlike sports ticketing where nearly all non-season-ticket sales are handled by a small cadre of elite brokers, the concert business has been highly effective at delegitimizing the secondary ticketing industry and preventing sites like StubHub from gaining direct access to ticketing inventory. Brokers have further been stymied by initiatives like Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan and SafeTix, which have proven effective at reducing the number of tickets sold on the primary market. In fact, the primary ticketing business’ success at stopping the secondary industry less than a decade ago is why most scalpers are now resorting to such extreme measures to procure tickets.
This is mostly good news for Azoff. His worst fears about the growth of the secondary ticketing market have not materialized, and today the industry has been marginalized and to the point that some actors have resorted to illegal acts to procure tickets.
As Delrahim explained, there are already existing laws on the books and “all sorts of limits” the government can place on scalpers. Existing securities law regulating the short selling of stocks could be applied to speculative ticket listings, noting that prosecutors with the Southern District of New York have “already brought a number of prosecutions” for what he calls “naked short selling.” There are also Federal Trade Commission laws banning “deceptive and unfair practices” that could be better enforced.
“The FTC should open an investigation against speculative ticket sellers who go online and try to sell tickets way before they have been sold – that’s a clear violation of the artist rights,” he added.
Compelling the government to enforce its own laws is difficult, though, and Live Nation and Ticketmaster are not equipped to slow down the bad behavior of the secondary ticketing industry on its own. Instead, Azoff made a rare plea to the audience of touring business professionals for help.
“If you agree with us,” he said, “you all have work to do because there’s a lot of weird bills being proposed out there and the people in this room have a chance to go out and let fans be heard. Ultimately, this is going to be decided at the local and municipal level and that’s where all of us need to bring the fight.”
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.
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 Queen of Pop’s return to touring was a thunderous success this morning, with more than 23 concerts added to the 37 dates already announced for Madonna‘s The Celebration Tour thanks to massive fan demand.
Only a handful of tickets are still available — the tour is 98% sold out — after fans bought up 600,000 tickets in a matter of hours to see Madonna’s retrospective run in North America and Europe. Additional shows were added today in Los Angeles, Montreal, Boston and beyond to meet the demand.
“It was a huge day for Madonna and a massive success thanks to her fans,” says Arthur Fogel, Madonna’s long-time promoter with Live Nation.
In total, 51 shows went on sale today, with 35 of the shows completely sold out by 5 p.m. EST. Fogel and Madonna’s team added a fourth New York show after the first three sold out in 15 minutes and two additional London shows after the first two concerts at the 02 Arena sold out in 20 minutes. Tickets to see Madonna’s Paris shows sold out in under seven minutes, while her Amsterdam date sold out in 10 minutes.
Fogel says additional dates will be announced for Europe next week before presales begin for ten North American shows that were not part of today’s sale. Presales for The Celebration Tour dates in Denver, Phoenix, Atlanta and more begin Jan. 23, with the general public onsale scheduled for Jan. 27.
Madonna’s last major arena run, the 2015-2016 Rebel Heart Tour, grossed $169.8 million and sold 1 million tickets across 82 shows.
The Celebration Tour begins July 15 at Rogers Arena in Vancouver and will include performances of music from Madonna’s entire catalog, spanning her 40-year career as the best-selling female touring artist of all time.
For more information, and to buy tickets, visit www.madonna.com/tour.
When Taylor Swift sells the remaining 170,000 tickets for her 52-date Eras tour later this month, the U.S. trek will have generated $591 million in sales, Billboard estimates. The average ticket price is $215, according to concert business sources.
This total will make Swift the highest-grossing female touring artist of all time, according to the Billboard Boxscore chart, topping current title holder Madonna whose Sticky & Sweet Tour (of 2008 and 2009) currently holds the No. 1 slot with a gross of $407 million. Swift’s U.S. tour will also put her in fourth place on the all-time Top Tours chart, which is currently led by Ed Sheeran, whose 2017-2019 Divide shows grossed a total of $776.2 million.
Normally with a tour of this scale, artists share some revenue with a promoter and an agent. In this case, Swift will presumably keep a higher share of revenue, because she’s not represented by one of the major booking agencies and because independent promoter Louis Messina is booking the entire tour and providing some of the services an agency normally would.
Other companies involved in the tour won’t do as well as they normally do, either. Ticketmaster and SeatGeek, which handled sales for the tour, normally allow ticket buyers to sell tickets on their secondary markets and take a percentage of that revenue. (Ticketmaster handled sales for 47 shows, while SeatGeek sold seats for the remaining five.) But Swift would not allow the companies who handled primary ticket sales to also sell secondary market tickets. As well, Swift asked Ticketmaster to help make sure tickets went to fans, rather than scalpers, and the company says it used its Verified Fan technology to reduce the number of tickets on resale sites by 75%.
That’s an expensive decision. Ticketmaster makes a much higher margin on resale tickets than primary tickets, since it keeps all of the fees it charges — typically 10% of the sale price for the seller and another 20% for the buyer. The company still charges a 25% service fee for all primary ticket sales. However, it only keeps a small percentage of that money, $3.50 to $5 per ticket, which for this tour will come out to about $7.6 million to $10.8 million. The rest of the fees normally go to venues and promoters. (Ticketmaster, like most ticketing companies, also charges 2.75% for credit card processing, of which it keeps about 10% and pays the rest to credit card companies. The Eras tour generated approximately $13.8 million in these fees, Billboard estimates.) All told, by the time Ticketmaster sells the remaining 170,000 tickets, the company’s total revenue will add up to between $9 million and $12.9 million.
Ticketmaster’s efforts to fight scalpers means that relatively few tickets wound up on the secondary market – but the ones that did are expensive. A month after the presale, on Dec. 14, the average resale ticket price was $1,425, according to TiqIQ, which tracks secondary ticket sales across multiple marketplaces.
TiqIQ estimates that about 1,100 resale tickets are available per show, out of an average of about 50,000. At an average price of $1,425, that would work out to about $1.6 million worth of tickets per show on the secondary market. Assuming that Ticketmaster would have captured about 15%–20% of those purchases, based on 2018 estimates by the United States Government Accountability Office, that means that the company could have brought in an additional $12.5 million to $16.4 million in revenue, of which Ticketmaster would have kept $3.8 million to $5 million in fees, if Swift had allowed the company to sell tickets on its own secondary market.
SeatGeek, which has a 12% share of the secondary market according to its April earnings report, agreed to turn off resale for the five shows it ticketed on the tour, but not the 47 shows sold by Ticketmaster. (Ticketmaster blocked secondary sales for the SeatGeek shows.) That means SeatGeek could make about $9 million from the Ticketmaster shows it lists on its secondary market, although it missed out on about $960,000 in revenue for not allowing secondary sales on the five shows for which it initially sold tickets.
Working with Swift has benefits beyond the financial, of course. In addition to the prestige of working with an artist of that stature — and enduring the embarrassment of the flubs around the Nov. 15 presale — Ticketmaster will presumably see an increase in app downloads and usage of its digital ticket platform, which has been a priority for the company.
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.
The hour Swifties have been breathlessly waiting for finally arrived on Tuesday morning (Nov. 15) when presale tickets for some dates for Taylor Swift‘s 2023 Eras U.S. stadium tour went on sale at 10 a.m. And, as you might expect of Taylor’s first tour in five years, the rush to secure a golden ticket was intense.
In fact, Downdetector reporting a surge in outages on the Ticketmaster site around the time of the on-sale; spokespeople for Ticketmaster and Swift had not returned a request for comment about reported outages at press time. Billboard attempted to log into the TM site and app several times during the on-sale and was unable to load the site amid reports that it was freezing and/or crashing despite fans having pre-sale codes.
A spokesperson for TM told CNN Business Tuesday morning that the “site is not down” and that “people are actively purchasing tickets… Fans who have received a code to the TaylorSwiftTix Presale should login and access the queue through the link they received via text rather than entering through the Ticketmaster homepage. This will ensure an optimal shopping experience.”
The reaction to the reported lags and difficulties securing tickets were well-documented by frustrated Swifties — including this writer’s college-aged daughter, who reported from Vermont that “everyone here is freaking out about getting Taylor Swift tickets… no one is getting them… in my lecture if you looked around everyone was on Ticketmaster.”
“The Taylor Swift ticket presale is proof that the Hunger Games could actually happen in real life,” read one tweet about the frenzied sale, while another frustrated clicker was less polite, writing, “if anything will force ticketmaster to finally get their s–t together it’ll be hundreds of thousands of angry taylor swift fans willing to murder someone in cold blood for eras tour tickets.”
The singer added 17 more shows to the now-52-date tour that will celebrate all 10 of her studio albums released since 2006. The massive outing will now set up shop in some cities for two or three nights, including multiple nights in Glendale (AZ), Las Vegas, Arlington (TX), Tampa, Houston, Atlanta, Nashville, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Denver and Los Angeles (where she’ll play five nights). The U.S. leg is currently slated to kick off on March 18 at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona.
While some tried to have a good attitude about the issues, including one who wrote, “taylor swift really wasn’t lying when she said ‘i vowed not to cry anymore if we survived the great war’ about getting tickets for the eras tour,” others were livid that things didn’t work out as they’d expected. “Can Taylor Swift fans have a redo on tickets sales?” one asked. “@Ticketmaster clearly wasn’t prepared for this amount of traffic, and all verified fans with actual presale codes are unable to buy tickets. The site has done nothing but crash.” The TM Fan Support account posted an update nearly 11 a.m. ET, telling Swifties, “We are aware fans may be experiencing intermittent issues with the site and are urgently working to resolve.”
Though some joyfully posted about scoring the sought-after tickets, others just wondered what was going on. “Did anyone actually get Taylor Swift tickets,” a fan wondered. Swift hasn’t hit the road since 2018, when she launched her best-selling Reputation Tour. She had planned to go out again after dropping 2019’s Lover for a series of stadium shows she dubbed Lover Fest, but the gigs were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
For those keeping score at home, this means that Tay has six albums-worth of material that she’s never played live — if you include the previously unreleased vault tracks on 2021’s Fearless (Taylor’s Version) and Red (Taylor’s Version). Studio albums Folklore, Evermore and, of course her latest, Midnights, which have all also been released in the time between Lover and the Eras Tour.
Check out some of the reactions to the “Eras” presale madness below.
We are aware fans may be experiencing intermittent issues with the site and are urgently working to resolve.— Ticketmaster Fan Support (@TMFanSupport) November 15, 2022
did anyone actually get taylor swift tickets— gill (@contactabrother) November 15, 2022
Can Taylor Swift fans have a redo on tickets sales? @Ticketmaster clearly wasn’t prepared for this amount of traffic, and all verified fans with actual presale codes are unable to buy tickets. The site has done nothing but crash.— Lexi (@LexiHernnandez) November 15, 2022
if anything will force ticketmaster to finally get their shit together it’ll be hundreds of thousands of angry taylor swift fans willing to murder someone in cold blood for eras tour tickets— james 🕛| fan account (@fearIessummers) November 15, 2022
The Taylor Swift ticket presale is proof that the hunger games could actually happen in real life— Abi (@abiwilk_) November 15, 2022
ticketmaster: we expect the demand for taylor swift tickets to be overwhelming 🙂ticketmaster when the demand for taylor swift tickets were, in fact, overwhelming: pic.twitter.com/ZYhJq52R1F— syd 🪩 (@sydstweeter) November 15, 2022
taylor swift really wasn’t lying when she said “i vowed not to cry anymore if we survived the great war” about getting tickets for the eras tour— The Eras Tour (@tswifterastour) November 15, 2022
hot take: ticket access should’ve been determined based on how much bullying you endured for being “The Taylor Swift girl” growing up— gracie 🦋 (@soitgoesgrace) November 15, 2022
Fans waiting to buy tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras tour next week should expect two things: high demand and high prices. After all, it’s been five years and four albums since Swift toured, with her newest album, Midnights, on track to be the best-selling record of the year — earning Swift the title of first artist to ever have 10 songs dominate the top 10 of the Hot 100 chart.
That popularity means that Swift can set high prices for her tickets — most seats will be priced between $200 to $400, with floor tickets going for as much as $800 a piece. Platinum tickets will cost even more with some selling for thousands of dollars per ticket.
If there’s any consolation for the impending sticker shock, though — which has caused outcry over recent Bruce Springsteen and Blink-182 tours as well — it’s that unlike with some of Swift’s past tours, most of that money will be going into her pocket, and not scalpers.
Much like with album marketing and record-breaking sales, as well as revolutionary stances around artists owning their masters and streaming royalties, Swift has had a profound effect on the concert ticket market over the years. Throughout much of her early career, Swift was a master of pricing and marketing and distributing concert tickets to her growing fan base, who eagerly bought up tickets to tours arounds hit albums like Fearless and Red. Unfortunately, scalpers were buying up tickets too. By 2015, with her tour supporting Swift’s crossover pop album 1989, average prices on the secondary market were going for two to three times face value.
In 2016, promoter Louis Messina — who has been working Swift since she was 17 — had been celebrating the mega-successful 1989 tour, which grossed a staggering $250 million worldwide, when a well-known entertainment executive and friend bragged that he had made more on the tour than Swift or Messina. The executive enjoyed a far more profitable haul from the tour thanks to his ownership in a ticket scalping business that was selling 1989 tickets at a four-to-five-times markup. Messina and Swift had priced the tickets so low, and fan demand was so high that anyone flipping tickets for the concert was bound to make a big return.
The nexus between ticket prices at the box office and what ticket flippers can sell them for on sites like StubHub was also a problem that Live Nation chief executive Michael Rapino wanted to solve. Working with then Ticketmaster president Jared Smith, newly hired head of music David Marcus and company product engineers, the team developed an aggressive pricing strategy to make more money for artists by pricing tickets closer to what they would sell for on the secondary markets.
After piloting the program with Jay-Z in early 2018, Ticketmaster began implementing its new pricing strategy for Swift’s Reputation Tour later that year. Compared to the 1989 tour, the Reputation Tour average ticket price was only about 10% more, but the best seats in the venue were priced significantly higher than in past years, thanks to new Ticketmaster tools that allowed it to optimize a venue’s seat map on a seat-by-seat basis. Ticketmaster also created a fan identification tool for Swift called SwiftTix, which had fans register in advance for an opportunity to buy tickets during the show’s presale, with their place in line partially boosted by purchasing fan merch and posting about the Reputation tour online. Today, the pricing strategy Swift used has become a staple of how most major tours are priced to capture more profit for artists, while advance registration has become a staple of most high-demand shows. For the Eras tour, for example, fans who register in advance get first crack at tickets while those held onto tickets for Swift’s canceled 2020 Lover Fest shows received even higher priority access for the Nov. 16 onsale.
Swift initially faced massive backlash over higher-than-expected ticket prices for the Reputation Tour, as well as criticism that SwiftTix was a money grab at the expense of fans. She was excoriated in the press, bashed on Twitter and targeted by ticket brokers for allegedly ruining her career. Not long after tickets went on sale, Gary Adler, executive director of the North American Ticket Brokers association penned a piece called “Why Taylor Swift’s Reputation Tour Is a Total Disaster” saying Swift’s sales scheme was the “best example of how not to sell tickets to a large tour.”
Adler could not have been more wrong. By avoiding the urge to price tickets so that they would immediately sell out, Swift’s long game, higher priced approach brought in $345.7 million, making it one of the highest grossing tours of all time.
When Swift’s tickets go on sale next week, millions of fans will be waiting for a confirmation email to notify them when it is their turn to buy tickets and fans will collectively spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying up seats. Based on the size of the tour, the popularity of Swift and the five years since Reputation, some fans will not be able to get the seats they want or will not pay the asking price, either because they can’t afford it or because they do not think it’s worth the money.
Again, angry fans will go on Twitter to complain about soaring prices, rage at Ticketmaster and lament about how things used to be, when tickets cost less — and, as they’re likely to forget, when scalpers bought them up in a frenzy. And they can thank their favorite “Anti-Hero,” Swift, for helping to develop a ticketing model that shifted more money into the pockets of artists, instead of scalpers — raising upfront prices for fans in the process. Whether that’s a solution or a new problem altogether, those who do buy tickets are likely to be applauding next year anyway when she sings, “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.”