Ticketing
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Tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour are being protected by some of the most advanced ticketing technology ever created, but it’s done little to stop some Swifties from falling victim to fraud.
With what’s likely to be the year’s most in-demand tour has come a wave of online scams that mix high-tech identity theft with low-tech social engineering to target frustrated fans unable to buy tickets during the initial sale in November. Now ticket prices are going for up to 10-times face value on secondary sites and many fans are desperately looking for more affordable options. That’s also leaving them vulnerable to too-good-to-be-true swindlers selling fake tickets. In many cases, the fans don’t even realize they were ripped off until they get to the show.
Nationwide, consumer fraud was up 30% in 2022 over 2021, according to the Federal Trade Commission, costing consumers $8.8 billion. Fake ticket scams fall under what the FTC labels as “imposter scams,” second in total cost only to investor scams according to the FTC, which notes that individuals aged 30-39 are the most likely to be defrauded in 2023 with social media sites listed as the most common place where fraud occurs. The targeting of Taylor Swift fans and offering cheap tickets the seller doesn’t have (and then disappearing on the buyer after they send over the money) is in part due to enormous publicity around the tour and the huge demand for tickets and low supply.
“Con artists will seize any opportunity to rip people off and as soon as the tours for Taylor Swift or artists Beyoncé or The Cure were even announced, scammers trying to figure out ways to capitalize on people’s desperation to get tickets,” says Teresa Murray, a consumer watchdog with the Denver-based Public Interest Research Group. Murray says her group saw an uptick in forged barcodes, fake websites and spoofs on legitimate sights like StubHub and Ticketmaster popping up hoping to profit off the frenzy around the Eras tour.
Fans who have fallen victim to Taylor Swift ticket fraud often say they are lured into the scam through a post on Facebook, listed on regional group pages from seemingly legitimate accounts offering to sell tickets for an upcoming Swift show below the current asking price on secondary ticket markets.
“When you have people who are desperate [to buy tickets] and vulnerable to fraud, they tend to suspend their common sense and make decisions they wouldn’t normally make,” says Murray, adding that this type of fraud is perpetrated by both “people living in their mom’s basement” and sophisticated criminal groups operating in an organized manner.
What victims do not realize is that instead of talking to person living in their city, they are often talking to a hacker who has recently taken over someone’s Facebook account to appear like a real person with ties in the community. After some back and forth, the scammer convinces the victim to send them money though a cash app like Venmo or Zelle in exchange for tickets that either never arrive or are obvious fakes.
This increase in fraud is happening against a backdrop of transformative technology at Ticketmaster, deployed at a large scale for the Eras tour with the potential to drastically reduce and even eliminate most instances of ticket fraud. Whereas it used to be fraudsters could buy a print-at-home ticket and then sell multiple copies of that, Ticketmaster is now employing its Safetix technology for Swift’s tour and others to issue digital tickets that live exclusively within the Ticketmaster app and are impossible to duplicate in this way. Safetix creates an entire digital ecosystem around the life of the ticket, from its original purchase, through resale and up until the ticket is redeemed on the night of the show. The scam Swift fans describe operates completely outside of that ecosystem, without any protections for consumers.
For scammers, demanding payment upfront is a low-tech way to defeat an otherwise sophisticated security system. The only way to curb this type of fraud, Murray says, is to educate fans on how digital tickets work. Much of Ticketmaster’s consumer education efforts have focused on Swift fans who successfully bought tickets and need to know how to load tickets into their accounts, transfer them to friends and redeem the tickets on show night. While this effort to educate fans is important, it does little to inform fans who were unable to buy during the public sale so that they are better equipped to avoid being sold fake tickets when they attempt to buy secondary tickets
Murray recommends only purchasing resale tickets from official sellers with a clearly visible fan guarantee listed on their site, to only use credit cards (not debit cards) and to match up the seats being sold with a seat map of the venue to verify the seats and rows actually exist.
“Often times the con artists don’t bother to check if the seating section, row and seat numbers they claim to hold tickets for actually exist on a seat map,” Murray says. “A little research on your own might help you determine if the tickets being offered actually exist.”
The Cure‘s Robert Smith is not done fighting the good fight on behalf of his band’s fans. The British goth rock legend who is about the launch his Shows of a Lost World North American tour in New Orleans on Wednesday (May 10) posted a series of tweets on Monday (May 8) in which he lashed out at a bill under consideration by the Louisiana legislature (HB 341) that would restrict the resale of tickets between fans.
“THE LOUISIANA LEGISLATURE (HB #341) IS CONSIDERING A RESELLERS-BACKED BILL TO BAN FAN-TO-FAN EXCHANGES (LIKE THE ONE WE ARE USING ON OUR 2023 NORTH AMERICAN TOUR TO TRY AND LIMIT/STOP SCALPING AND BOTS),” Smith said of the bill sponsored by Republican Paula P. Davis that has already passed the GOP-dominated State House which would allow tickets to concerts and sporting events to be legally resold at a profit under specified conditions.
Smith noted that the bill is now headed to the State Senate — which also features a GOP majority — with a hearing scheduled for Wednesday morning. “LOUISIANA LAWMAKERS! PLEASE DON’T PASS THIS BILL! EMPOWER THE ARTISTS, NOT THE SCALPERS AND THE BOTS!,” the singer wrote. “COMMERCIAL LOBBYING CORRUPTS DEMOCRACY X.”
Am abstract of the bill reads: “Proposed law provides for certain definitions with respect to event ticketing. Additionally, proposed law defines ‘nontransferable ticketing’ as prohibiting the resell or exchange of a ticket or limiting the ticket holder to exchange the ticket exclusively through means provided by the ticket issuer. Proposed law provides that a ticket issuer may use a nontransferable ticketing system only if the ticket holder is offered to purchase the same ticket in a transferable form at the initial time of sale.”
Smith’s issues with the proposed bill make sense given his recent broadsides against what he called Ticketmaster’s exorbitant extra fees on tickets for the band’s tour. Earlier this year the bandleader said he’d hoped to keep seat-buying fair and simple for fans by opting out of TM’s dynamic pricing model while shielding them against scalpers with non-transferable tickets. But when the sale opened mid-March, disappointed customers found that TM had added sky-high fees to tickets that sometimes totaled more than the face-value price of the original tickets.
In a series of follow-up tweets, Smith revealed that approximately 7,000 tickets across more than 2,000 orders had been canceled in early April, with the bandleader claiming those tickets were acquired with fake accounts and/or listed on secondary resale sites.
See Smith’s tweets below.
THE LOUISIANA LEGISLATURE (HB #341) IS CONSIDERING A RESELLERS-BACKED BILL TO BAN FAN-TO-FAN EXCHANGES (LIKE THE ONE WE ARE USING ON OUR 2023 NORTH AMERICAN TOUR TO TRY AND LIMIT/STOP SCALPING AND BOTS). THE BILL HAS ALREADY PASSED THE HOUSE…— ROBERT SMITH (@RobertSmith) May 9, 2023
…AND IS UP FOR CONSIDERATION IN THE STATE SENATE. THERE IS A HEARING THIS WEDNESDAY MORNING… LOUISIANA LAWMAKERS! PLEASE DON’T PASS THIS BILL! EMPOWER THE ARTISTS, NOT THE SCALPERS AND THE BOTS! #ShowsOfALostWorld2023— ROBERT SMITH (@RobertSmith) May 9, 2023
COMMERCIAL LOBBYING CORRUPTS DEMOCRACY X— ROBERT SMITH (@RobertSmith) May 9, 2023
Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Richard Blumenthal’s new legislation aims to take on Ticketmaster by clamping down on the use of long-term contracts to lock up the exclusive ticketing rights of U.S. venues and festivals. But it could backfire in a way that would negatively affect venues and fans.
Titled the Unlocking Ticketing Markets Act, the legislation — introduced on the same day as a second bill from Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) that would ban hidden ticket fees — is a clear attempt to break Ticketmaster’s grip on the ticketing industry, although it never actually mentions the Live Nation-owned company by name. (A press release announcing the Unlocking Ticket Markets Act says today’s concert marketplace is dominated “by one company” with a “70-80 percent market share” thanks in part to the long-term contracts its clients sign for its services.) But while Klobuchar and Blumental believe shortening ticketing contracts will promote competition, the proposal doesn’t seem to consider the benefits these contracts offer the venue clients.
Ever since Ticketmaster dethroned Ticketron as the top ticket seller in the 1980s, the company has built its dominance by offering large upfront cash payments in exchange for exclusive deals. This practice has become commonplace from ticketing companies in live entertainment, and venues and sports teams have come to rely on these advances — which can equal hundreds of thousands of dollars for smaller venues and millions of dollars for arenas and stadiums, increasing in value based on the length of the term — that are paid off over the term of the deal through fees added to the face value of each ticket.
This is a bargaining tool the ticketing companies use to acquire more venue customers, but within that, it’s at the venues’ discretion what kind of deal to take, passing the cost of that loan onto their customers as ticketing fees. If venues haven’t repaid the advance at the end of the contract term, they typically have two options: cut a check to the ticketing company to cover the difference or re-up their deal and borrow more money.
Klobuchar and Blumenthal’s bill would essentially shorten the length of the exclusive ticketing contracts by ordering the Federal Trade Commission to “prevent the use of excessively long multi-year exclusive contracts,” according to a press release announcing the proposed legislation. (The text of the Unlocking Ticketing Markets Act is not public, so it’s not clear how “excessively long” is defined, though average ticketing contracts are about five to six years.) If the FTC opted to limit ticketing to half of the average terms, Ticketmaster’s competitors would have twice as many opportunities to bid for those contracts the company holds.
Shorter contracts would either mean less money for venues, or greater risk that they would fail to repay the advances — in which case venues would either need to repay the remaining balance or negotiate that debt into a contract renewal. For example, a temporary four-month downturn in business is going to have a greater impact on a two-year, $2 million loan than it would on a four-year, $4 million loan. To protect themselves, ticketing companies would likely increase the fees added to tickets to recoup faster, thereby reducing the heightened risk of default — likely meaning higher costs to consumers.
A bill focused on contract length also fails to address long-standing complaints that venues often work with Ticketmaster because of a perception that it means parent company Live Nation will bring more events to their building. This sort of business practice is prohibited under the consent decree that has governed Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s operations since merging in 2010, but that hasn’t stopped accusations of anticompetitive behavior. While Live Nation has long denied this charge, during a January Senate Judiciary hearing probing Ticketmaster’s botched sale for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, Sens. Klobuchar and Blumenthal indicated they believed that Ticketmaster’s relationship with Live Nation was the main reason Ticketmaster held a such a large market share of the ticketing business. Term lengths of the company’s contracts, however, were rarely mentioned.
In response to the introduction of the Unlocking Ticketing Markets Act, a Ticketmaster spokesperson told Billboard, “The ticketing industry is more competitive than ever. Ticketmaster wins business because it offers the best product available for venues, and the length of contracts is generally decided by venues and the guaranteed payments they want to help support their expenses. We do not expect any of the proposed changes to have a material impact on our business as we historically add clients in competitive marketplaces.”
Changing the terms of those loans, as Klobuchar and Blumenthal seek to do by limiting exclusive ticketing deals, could either cause venues to earn less money on the ticketing deals or increase the fees they charge consumers to repay those loans — making ticket prices even more expensive in a climate where most Americans already feel they’re paying too much.
Two new bills introduced to the Senate Wednesday aim to clean up the ticketing industry and address long-standing criticisms about Ticketmaster’s dominance over the primary ticketing market.
The TICKET ACT, introduced by Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) — chair and ranking member of Chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, respectively — would ban hidden ticket fees, requiring vendors to display the total price of a ticket up front. These fees can sometimes increase the purchase price by as much as 60% or higher. For example, some tickets in the upper seating section for Luke Combs‘ current stadium tour being sold by Ticketmaster are marked up more than 100% when fees and taxes are added to the face value.
The bill would also attempt to reign in speculative ticket sales, a heavily criticized sales technique used by ticket scalpers to maximize profits. Speculative ticket selling is the practice of selling a ticket one does not own, often at the height of the market, and then waiting until the price drops to procure and deliver the ticket to the consumer. The TICKET ACT would require scalpers to display in a “clear and conspicuous manner” that the ticket seller does not actually possess the ticket at the time the ticket is listed for sale.
Recent ticketing legislation proposals by both Live Nation and the National Independent Talent Organization have called for a ban of speculative ticketing – with several prominent music industry executives comparing the practice to fraud.
The other bill, the Unlocking Ticketing Markets Act, was presented by longtime Ticketmaster critics Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), seeking to limit the use and scope of exclusive multi-year ticketing contracts in live entertainment. The legislation is aimed at Ticketmaster, which “by some estimates has locked up 70 to 80 percent market share and has used its dominance to pressure venues to agree to ticketing contracts that last up to ten years, insulating it from competition,” explains a press release from Klobuchar’s office announcing the legislation.
It follows a January Senate Judiciary Committee hearing probing the cause of the Ticketmaster Taylor Swift crash. During the hearing, Ticketmaster was regular criticized by the committee for the company’s dominate market share of the U.S. ticketing industry, with several senators accusing the company of acting like a monopoly.
The Unlocking Ticketing Markets Act would empower “the Federal Trade Commission to prevent the use of excessively long multi-year exclusive contracts that lock out competitors, decrease incentives to innovate new services, and increase costs for fans.”
The text of the Unlocking Ticketing Markets Acts has not yet been released to the public and it’s unclear how the bill would define excessively long contracts. In a press release announcing the legislation, Klobuchar’s office noted that some exclusive ticketing contracts last as long as ten years, but the average contract term in sports and live entertainment is typically five to seven years, according to multiple sources, including the often-cited Ticketmaster vs. Tickets.com lawsuit from 2003.
The return of two highly popular dance artists has created new headaches for promoters dealing with increased public outcry over ticket scalping. Skrillex’s first show in nine years at the iconic Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado, and Pretty Lights’ comeback tour after a five-year absence have created supply and demand issues not often seen in the amphitheater and club space. That’s meant new challenges with how to deal with resellers buying tickets en masse and posting them online for profit.
Earlier this week, AEG Presents announced plans to reclaim tickets purchased by scalpers for a sold-out April 29 show by Skrillex at Red Rocks and resell them to fans through the Fair AXS ticketing platform, AEG’s own fan verification. Fair AXS requires fans to register in advance for high demand tickets, and like Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan platform, is designed to weed out scalpers.
The company is now weighing whether a similar plan to claw back tickets for the upcoming, sold-out Pretty Lights tour that kicks off Aug. 6 at the Mission Ballroom in Denver and sell those to fans through Fair AXS.
With the Skrillex concert, says AEG Presents co-president and senior talent buyer Don Strausberg, when the company scraped the sales data, it found instances of buyers who bought multiple tickets, exceeding the four-ticket limit on purchases and violated the terms of service for AEG-owned ticketing system AXS tickets. Those ticket purchases were then canceled, refunded to the originally buyer and put back on sale through the Fair AXS platform, a registration-based identity-verification system that helps concert promoters determine the likelihood that a ticket purchaser is a legitimate fan and not a ticket broker. (This verification system was recently utilized by Zach Bryan for his 2023 tour and requires fans to register in advance and provide their credit card information.) Strausberg says AEG is now considering whether to do the same for the Peaking Lights tour.
Strausberg didn’t identify how many Skrillex tickets were pulled back and sold through Fair AXS, but noted that demand for the April 29 show far exceeded supply at the world-famous 9,545-capacity venue.
“It’s time consuming,” to comb through all of the sales, and requires additional steps by both AEG and fans to register in advance for Fair AXS and to verify the accounts, Strausberg says, “but lately more people are asking for this.” Trying to identify individuals who violated AXS’s terms or service is “something we do without fail on nearly every large concert” says Strausberg, although the scale of unauthorized activity happening with the Skrillex show was larger than normal.
Scalping exists at every level of the concert business, but it’s much rarer to see high volume ticket scalping at smaller capacity venues like those on the Pretty Lights tour, where the artist is playing 3,500-size rooms. AXS ticketed 18 of the 24 shows on the Pretty Lights tour, totaling about 60,000 tickets total.
Lately, ticketing companies like Ticketmaster and AXS have become more effective at reducing the number of tickets that end up on the secondary market. That’s pushed some brokers into smaller capacity events, says a secondary market analyst who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “There’s much less opportunity at the club and theater level,” they add, where the majority of shows don’t sell completely sell out.
The Cure‘s Robert Smith continues to fight back against high concert ticket prices. After weeks of battling to knock out or knock down what he called Ticketmaster’s exorbitant extra fees for the band’s upcoming North American tour, Smith was at it again over the weekend.
Smith revealed that “approx. 7K tickets across approx 2200 orders have been cancelled.” The singer claimed those tickets were acquired with fake accounts and/or listed on secondary resale sites. “TM have identified specific locations from secondary postings,” he said. He then asked fans who think their tickets may have been wrongly cancelled to reach out to TM fan support (@TMFanSupport).
The Cure leader also had another notion about the ongoing imbroglio over ticket fees and the secondary market, writing, “A WEEKEND THOUGHT… THIS ONGOING TM ‘CONVERSATION’ IS NOT TAKING PLACE IN A VACUUM… THE SYSTEM THAT VALUES PROFIT OVER PEOPLE IS REALLY WHAT NEEDS TO BE CHANGED…”
To date, spokespeople for Ticketmaster have not returned Billboard‘s request for comment on Smith’s ongoing battle against fees and the secondary market.
In the lead-up to the veteran group’s upcoming The Lost World North American tour, The Cure had hoped to keep seat-buying fair and simple for their fans by opting out of dynamic pricing and shielding against scalpers with non-transferable tickets. But when the sale opened mid-March, customers were disappointed to find that the Ticketmaster had tacked on sky-high fees to tickets that totaled more than the price of the actual tickets themselves.
At the time, Smith went on a similarly all-caps Twitter rant, writing that he was “AS SICKENED AS YOU ALL ARE BY TODAY’S TICKETMASTER ‘FEES’ DEBACLE” before promising to investigate what went wrong. Soon after, he took to social media again to announce that Ticketmaster would be offering refunds and lower fees.
Last week Smith warned fans of a scam in which scalpers offered to sell account login details to get around TM transfer limitations. ANY/ALL TICKETS OBTAINED IN THIS WAY WILL BE CANCELED, AND ORIGINAL FEES PAID ON THOSE TICKETS WILL NOT BE REFUNDED,” he wrote, adding that the fees from those tickets will be donated to human rights organization Amnesty International.
The Lost World tour is slated to kick off on May 10 at New Orleans’ Smoothie King Center and run through a July 1 gig at Miami’s Miami-Dade Arena.
See Smith’s latest tweets below.
‘IHBT’ #? “Approx 7k tickets across approx 2200 orders have been cancelled. These are tickets acquired with fake accounts / listed on secondary resale sites. TM have identified specific locations from secondary postings” #ShowsOfALostWorld2023— ROBERT SMITH (@RobertSmith) March 31, 2023
A WEEKEND THOUGHT… THIS ONGOING TM ‘CONVERSATION’ IS NOT TAKING PLACE IN A VACUUM… THE SYSTEM THAT VALUES PROFIT OVER PEOPLE IS REALLY WHAT NEEDS TO BE CHANGED… X— ROBERT SMITH (@RobertSmith) March 31, 2023
Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) responded to President Joe Biden’s calls for fairness and transparency in ticketing fees by introducing the Junk Fee Prevention Act on Wednesday (March 22). While the proposed legislation goes beyond live music, it would transform how concert tickets are sold and attempts to reduce fees that inflate tickets’ face values.
“Concealed surprise fees — nickel and diming Americans to distraction — must be stopped,” Blumenthal said in a statement.
“Consumers are charged hidden fees when purchasing everything from flights to concert tickets,” added Whitehouse. “Our Junk Fee Prevention Act would provide consumers with the transparency they deserve when making a purchase.”
Biden urged Congress to pass legislation addressing “junk fees” during his Feb. 7 State of the Union address, pledging to cap fees on concert tickets and make companies disclose all-in prices upfront. “Americans are tired of being played for suckers,” he said. “Pass the Junk Fee Prevention Act so companies stop ripping us off.”
Blumenthal and Whitehouse’s proposed legislation would at least improve transparency. Ticketing companies would be required to “clearly and conspicuously” display the total price of a ticket with all fees included “in each advertisement and when a price is first shown to a consumer.”
While the legislation targets concert ticket fees and some re-sale tactics, it’s more than a reaction to Taylor Swift’s botched Eras Tour presale that prompted a Senate hearing on Ticketmaster’s business practices. The Junk Fee Prevention Act seeks to prevent companies from applying or advertising “any mandatory fees that are excessive or deceptive” for any good or service. It also targets fees for airline tickets and short-term housing such as hotels and vacation rentals, and would require airlines to seat parents next to their young children.
Transparency is a key theme of the Junk Fee Prevention Act. It includes a requirement to disclose the total number of tickets being offered for a concert, theater event, sporting event or other events “at a place of public amusement of any kind.” Both lawmakers and consumers have long complained that many concert tickets are held back for fan clubs, commercial partners like credit card companies and VIP packages.
Many of the changes sought in the Junk Fee Prevention Act are also found in the FAIR Ticketing Reforms, a set of “common sense” measures introduced on March 8 by a group of leading music companies including Live Nation, Universal Music Group and Red Light Management. FAIR Ticketing Reforms also calls for an end to speculative selling on secondary markets and mandatory all-in pricing. Unlike the Junk Fee Prevention Act, FAIR Ticketing Reforms also calls for stricter measures against automated bots and policing and fining resale sites that serve as a safe haven for scalpers.
Any person who violates the Junk Fee Prevention Act would be subject to the penalties of the Federal Trade Commission Act. A state attorney general can also bring a civil action if a violation affects residents of that state. In determining whether a fee is excessive, the bill asks the Federal Trade Commission or court to consider whether the fee is “reasonable and proportional” to the cost of a ticket and the reason for the fee. The FTC or court can also consider “any other factors determined appropriate.”
A mandatory fee is defined as any fee required to purchase a ticket, is not “reasonably avoidable,” is not expected to be included by a “reasonable consumer” or “any other fee or surcharge determined appropriate” by the FTC. Within 180 days of the bill’s enactment, the FTC would commence a rule making proceeding to consider whether and how the Federal Communications Commission should require disclosure of mandatory fees or prohibit companies from charging mandatory fees.
The country’s two leading concert companies, Live Nation and AEG, are at odds over how Congress should address the future of ticketing after a disagreement over Taylor Swift’s record-breaking The Eras Tour.
Long before the pop star’s Nov. 15 sale dominated the news cycle, where hundreds of thousands of Swift fans experienced service disruptions that kept them from buying the tickets they wanted, the two companies had signed an agreement that many thought might take AEG out of the ticketing business entirely. In 2021, when AEG announced that its facility management division ASM had struck a deal to make Ticketmaster its preferred ticketing partner, many assumed that meant the company was on the way to shutting down its own ticking platform, AXS Tickets.
Instead, ASM’s contract with the Live Nation-owned Ticketmaster would pave the way for an expansion of AEG’s AXS, thanks to a provision in Ticketmaster’s exclusive agreement that granted AEG the right to use AXS to sell tickets to AEG-promoted shows at ASM venues, sources tell Billboard. AEG tours like Kane Brown, Elton John and Luke Combs could opt out of using Ticketmaster when playing ASM-client venues such as Soldier Field in Chicago, U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis and Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Ariz., and use AXS instead. This marked the largest carve-out in Ticketmaster’s exclusivity contract to date, potentially allowing hundreds of arenas, stadiums and performing arts centers to use AXS for the first time, like the new Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas — the highest grossing stadium on Billboard’s 2022 year-end Boxscore chart.
The provision was a sort of double victory for AEG, Live Nation’s leading competitor: The company was able to leverage its control over 350 ASM venues to get those clients large payouts for re-signing with Ticketmaster without forsaking its own ticketing service. AEG officials had also hoped this might mark the beginning of a more open ticketing ecosystem away from the sorts of exclusive deals that have helped Ticketmaster gain such dominance in the space. But less than two years later, AEG and Live Nation find themselves at odds, divided over the handling of Swift’s The Eras Tour.
AEG is now refusing to join a coalition of music companies supporting Live Nation’s Fair Ticketing campaign, a piece of proposed anti-scalper legislation born out of the bot attack on Ticketmaster’s Nov. 15 presale for Swift’s tour. While Universal Music Group, Red Light Management, Irving and Jeffrey Azoff, and all four major talent agencies are backing the FAIR Ticketing reforms to ban scalping practices like “speculative” ticket selling and mandating all-in pricing across all ticketing marketplaces nationally, AEG has been taking a different approach to what they see as some of ticketing’s biggest problems. Sources tell Billboard that AEG executives have been quietly lobbying the Department of Justice to investigate Ticketmaster’s use of exclusive ticketing contracts to lock up the ticket market as a possible violation of its consent decree governing its merger with Live Nation in 2010. AEG leadership is also lobbying politicians to include restrictions on such exclusive ticketing practices in new legislation that could be introduced as soon as this week.
Sources say Live Nation executives have been careful not to engage with AEG publicly about its exclusivity agreements. Privately, they have accused AEG of trying to have it both ways, accepting the money that comes with exclusive ticketing contracts, while trying to expand AXS ticketing beyond the ASM deal into all NFL stadiums ticketed by Ticketmaster.
“This is a bad look for them,” one source at Ticketmaster tells Billboard.
Since Live Nation merged with Ticketmaster in 2010 and AEG launched its own ticketing platform in 2012, both companies have found they can earn more from the concerts they promote if they also control the ticketing, collecting more fees for themselves, while keeping data generated by the concert in house. The additional revenue for a promoter like AEG could be substantial, especially for an artist like Swift, who sold a total of 2.4 million tickets for The Eras Tour.
With Swift’s tour, sources say AXS was expecting to handle some of the ticketing under the ASM-Ticketmaster provision, since AEG was a co-promoter with partner Messina Touring Group. ASM managed five stadiums, representing 12 shows on the 52-date trek, and sources say AXS officials were hoping its ties to the tour could lead to it getting some, if not all of the tour. Except that Ticketmaster executives said their exclusive contracts with more than a dozen NFL teams (and the venues they own) superseded AXS’ claim. Under that reading of the deal, two of the 12 ASM dates — a pair of concerts at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz. — would be ticketed by SeatGeek under its exclusive deal with the Arizona Cardinals. Making matters worse, two of ASM’s management clients decided to partner with Ticketmaster for the sale.
Down to just five shows at two stadiums, AEG dropped the matter. According to a source, AEG executives have since spoken with the Department of Justice, encouraging them to look at Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s use of exclusive contracts as anti-competitive.
Relations only worsened in the days following The Eras Tour presale. After the fiasco, Live Nation chairman Greg Maffei appeared on CNBC to defend Ticketmaster and cited the company’s arrangement with AEG in response to claims of monopolistic behavior. “AEG, who is the promoter for Taylor Swift, chose to use us because, in reality, we are the largest and most effective ticket seller in the world,” he said. “Even our competitors want to come on our platform.” AEG leadership was quick to respond with a statement, saying the promoter had no choice but to use Ticketmaster. “Ticketmaster’s exclusive deals with the vast majority of venues on The Eras Tour required us to ticket through their system,” an AEG spokesperson said. “We didn’t have a choice.”
AEG hopes its private lobbying of politicians and anti-trust officials will lead to regulatory change that could include abolishing exclusive ticketing contracts in the United States and ultimately move toward an industry more similar to Europe, where promoters generally don’t sign exclusive ticketing deals and work with multiple partners to sell tickets.
Despite the disagreement, the ASM-Ticketmaster deal remains in place, and AEG officials have had success convincing buildings like the Greek Theater in Los Angeles and the Quicken Home Arena in Cleveland to avoid exclusive ticketing agreements and remain open to multiple systems.
Live Nation and AEG declined to comment for this story.
After warning fans in a tweet spree earlier this week that Ticketmaster’s “Verified Fan” system was “far from perfect,” The Cure singer Robert Smith continued his Twitter rant on Thursday after his band’s 30-date Shows of a Lost World North American tour went on sale.
“I AM AS SICKENED AS YOU ALL ARE BY TODAY’S TICKETMASTER ‘FEES’ DEBACLE,” Smith raged in his latest all-caps broadside against Ticketmaster. “TO BE VERY CLEAR: THE ARTIST HAS NO WAY TO LIMIT THEM. I HAVE BEEN ASKING HOW THEY ARE JUSTIFIED. IF I GET ANYTHING COHERENT BY WAY OF AN ANSWER I WILL LET YOU ALL KNOW.”
Smith’s tweet came as fans complained that despite the band offering reasonably priced tickets for the outing and making sure the tickets will be non-transferable to minimize resale and keep prices at face value, in some cases the added-on service fees, facility charges and order processing fees added up to more than the cost of entry.
By making the tickets non-transferable, scalpers will be unable to purchase tickets and then resell them for a profit since the original owner will have to be present to enter the venue. For fans who purchase tickets but can’t make it to the event, they will be able to resell the ticket on a face-value ticket exchange.
Before the VF onsale, Smith assured fans that he was doing everything he could to alleviate ticketing pain points, including avoiding platinum packages and dynamic pricing, referring to those practices as “a bit of a scam.” But when he saw the complaints about the service charges during Thursday’s onsale, the singer could not hold back; at press time a spokesperson for Ticketmaster had not returned Billboard‘s request for comment.
Following up on his “scam” tweet, on Wednesday (March 15), Smith explained, “I HAD A SEPARATE CONVERSATION ABOUT ‘PLATINUM’, TO SEE IF I HAD MISUNDERSTOOD SOMETHING… BUT I HADN’T! IT IS A GREEDY SCAM – AND ALL ARTISTS HAVE THE CHOICE NOT TO PARTICIPATE… IF NO ARTISTS PARTICIPATED, IT WOULD CEASE TO EXIST.”
If nothing else, Smith implored his fans to avoid buying tickets secondhand from scalpers, writing, “I HAVE BEEN TOLD: StubHub has pulled listings in all markets except NY, Chicago, Denver (IE. CITIES IN STATES THAT HAVE LAWS PROTECTING SCALPERS). PLEASE DON’T BUY FROM THE SCALPERS – THERE ARE STILL TICKETS AVAILABLE – IT IS JUST A VERY SLOW PROCESS… I WILL BE BACK IF I GET ANYTHING SERIOUS ON THE TM FEES… IN THE MEANTIME, I AM COMPELLED TO NOTE DOWN MY OBVIOUS RECURRING ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM THOUGHT… THAT IF NO-ONE BOUGHT FROM SCALPERS… THEN.”
The Cure’s efforts to combat resale ticketing comes after a season of in-demand tours facing astronomical price increases due to dynamic ticketing and scalpers. Ticketmaster is currently facing government inquiries into its handling of the disastrous Taylor Swift Eras Tour presale, which left many fans outraged when service delays and website crashes (caused in part by bots) prevented many of them from securing tickets.
See Smith’s tweets below.
I AM AS SICKENED AS YOU ALL ARE BY TODAY’S TICKETMASTER ‘FEES’ DEBACLE. TO BE VERY CLEAR: THE ARTIST HAS NO WAY TO LIMIT THEM. I HAVE BEEN ASKING HOW THEY ARE JUSTIFIED. IF I GET ANYTHING COHERENT BY WAY OF AN ANSWER I WILL LET YOU ALL KNOW. X— ROBERT SMITH (@RobertSmith) March 16, 2023
WHAT I MEANT BY THIS BIT WAS… I HAD A SEPARATE CONVERSATION ABOUT ‘PLATINUM’, TO SEE IF I HAD MISUNDERSTOOD SOMETHING… BUT I HADN’T! IT IS A GREEDY SCAM – AND ALL ARTISTS HAVE THE CHOICE NOT TO PARTICIPATE… IF NO ARTISTS PARTICIPATED, IT WOULD CEASE TO EXIST X https://t.co/Kj7hjkRGn1— ROBERT SMITH (@RobertSmith) March 15, 2023
I HAVE BEEN TOLD: StubHub has pulled listings in all markets except NY, Chicago, Denver (IE. CITIES IN STATES THAT HAVE LAWS PROTECTING SCALPERS). PLEASE DON’T BUY FROM THE SCALPERS – THERE ARE STILL TICKETS AVAILABLE – IT IS JUST A VERY SLOW PROCESS… X— ROBERT SMITH (@RobertSmith) March 16, 2023
Robert Smith is explaining the serious measures The Cure is taking to avoid outrageous ticket prices for their upcoming North American tour. In a shot across the bow at re-sellers, when the tickets for the 30-date run of Shows of a Lost World Tour went on sale Wednesday morning (March 15) to those who pre-registered using Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan system, will be non-transferrable in order to minimize resale and keep prices at face value.
The singer went on a tweet spree on Tuesday (March 14) in which he explicitly described how and why the veteran goth rockers decided to go their own way on this outing. “TM HAVE JUST TOLD ME ‘ALL tickets for The Cure Shows Of A Lost World Tour will be made available during tomorrow’s Verified Fan Sale,’” Smith tweeted, adding, “SEEMS THE RESPONSE TO REGISTRATION HAS BEEN PRETTY OVERWHELMING – THANKS! HOWEVER, I REALISE THERE ARE PROBLEMS, SOME MORE REAL THAN OTHERS…”
He then noted that the group had “final say” in all the ticket pricing for the tour, with Smith determined that those prices would not be “INSTANTLY AND HORRIBLY DISTORTED BY RESALE.” Smith referred to touts as being part of a “sophisticated business” expert at acquiring tickets and reselling them on marketplaces such as Vivid, Stubhub and Seatgeek.
Smith also revealed that the Cure were told that TM’s Verified Fan platform “has been used more than 400 times to qualify buyers and reduced the % of tickets on the secondary market” and that using VF has regularly reduced scalping by 80%, with less than 5% of tickets typically ending up on the secondary market.
By making the tickets non-transferable, scalpers will be unable to purchase tickets and then resell them for a profit since the original owner will have to be present to enter the venue. For fans who purchase tickets but can’t make it to the event, they will be able to resell the ticket on a face-value ticket exchange.
“WE WERE CONVINCED THAT TICKETMASTER’S ‘Verified Fan Page’ AND ‘Face Value Ticket Exchange’ IDEAS COULD HELP US FIGHT THE SCALPERS,” Smith wrote. “(WE DIDN’T AGREE TO THE ‘DYNAMIC PRICING’ / ‘PRICE SURGING’ / ‘PLATINUM TICKET’ THING… BECAUSE IT IS ITSELF A BIT OF A SCAM? A SEPARATE CONVERSATION!).”
When the band announced the world tour earlier this week, they established that “there will be no ‘Platinum’ or ‘Dynamically Priced’ tickets on this tour,” which includes stops at Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, Moody Center in Austin, Madison Square Garden in New York and State Farm Arena in Atlanta.
The singer also tweeted that though TM’s Verified Fan is a “far from perfect system,” the reality is that if there aren’t enough tickets on sale, some fans will miss out no matter what system the Cure use. “At least this one tries to get tickets into the hands of fans at a fair price,” he said. In the final comment in the Twitter run, Smith noted he’d been told that TM will continued to sell tickets to Verified users “until there are no more tickets to sell.”
The Cure’s efforts to combat resale ticketing comes after a season of in-demand tours facing astronomical price increases due to dynamic ticketing and scalpers. Ticketmaster is currently facing government inquiries into its handling of the disastrous Taylor Swift Eras Tour presale, which left many fans outraged when service delays and website crashes (caused in part by bots) prevented many of them from securing tickets.
See Smith’s tweets below.
TM HAVE JUST TOLD ME “ALL tickets for The Cure Shows Of A Lost World Tour will be made available during tomorrow’s Verified Fan Sale” SEEMS THE RESPONSE TO REGISTRATION HAS BEEN PRETTY OVERWHELMING – THANKS! HOWEVER, I REALISE THERE ARE PROBLEMS, SOME MORE REAL THAN OTHERS…— ROBERT SMITH (@RobertSmith) March 15, 2023
WE HAD FINAL SAY IN ALL OUR TICKET PRICING FOR THIS UPCOMING TOUR, AND DIDN’T WANT THOSE PRICES INSTANTLY AND HORRIBLY DISTORTED BY RESALE – WE WERE TOLD “In North America the resale business is a multi-billion $ industry.— ROBERT SMITH (@RobertSmith) March 15, 2023
The touts are sophisticated businesses that are expert at acquiring tickets, and the major marketplaces like Vivid, Stubhub and Seatgeek spend tens of millions of dollars on marketing. The touts get an unfair share of tickets and resell them on these marketplaces.”— ROBERT SMITH (@RobertSmith) March 15, 2023
WE WERE TOLD “Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan platform has been used more than 400 times to qualify buyers and reduce the % of tickets on the secondary market.— ROBERT SMITH (@RobertSmith) March 15, 2023
Using Verified Fan scalping is regularly reduced by 80%, with typically fewer than 5% of tickets on the secondary market after a Verified Fan campaign. Listed below are a few of the artists who have effectively used VF to limit resale.”— ROBERT SMITH (@RobertSmith) March 15, 2023
WE WERE CONVINCED THAT TICKETMASTER’S “Verified Fan Page” AND “Face Value Ticket Exchange” IDEAS COULD HELP US FIGHT THE SCALPERS— ROBERT SMITH (@RobertSmith) March 15, 2023
(WE DIDN’T AGREE TO THE ‘DYNAMIC PRICING’ / ‘PRICE SURGING’ / ‘PLATINUM TICKET’ THING… BECAUSE IT IS ITSELF A BIT OF A SCAM? A SEPARATE CONVERSATION!)— ROBERT SMITH (@RobertSmith) March 15, 2023
WE KNOW IT IS A FAR FROM PERFECT SYSTEM – BUT THE REALITY IS THAT IF THERE AREN’T ENOUGH TICKETS ONSALE, A NUMBER OF FANS ARE GOING TO MISS OUT WHATEVER SYSTEM WE USE; AT LEAST THIS ONE TRIES TO GET TICKETS INTO THE HANDS OF FANS AT A FAIR PRICE…— ROBERT SMITH (@RobertSmith) March 15, 2023