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A controversial California Assembly bill that would have forced Ticketmaster to share its ticketing inventory with resale sites StubHub and SeatGeek has been amended with anti-resale provisions that would allow promoters like Live Nation to ban Stubhub and SeatGeek from selling its concert tickets in California.
The whiplash legislative maneuvering is the result of the music industry’s successful effort to thwart Oakland lawmaker Buffy Wicks’ attempt to address long-standing consumer complaints against Ticketmaster, forcing her to significantly water down the legislation.
The original version of the bill was introduced on April 8, when Wicks held a press conference with the California Consumer Federation and members of several state Chamber of Commerce groups and unveiled a plan, endorsed by StubHub and SeatGeek, to “make the ticket market more competitive.” To accomplish this, the bill proposed to outlaw Live Nation’s use of exclusive venue contracts, which Wicks said gave the company an unhealthy 80% share of the concert market and had led to a steep price increase for tickets since the company’s merger with Ticketmaster in 2009.
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Wicks’ bill also included a clause — shocking to many in the live entertainment space — that would have required Ticketmaster to develop software integrations allowing rival ticketing companies and ticket resale sites to pull ticketing inventory from the Ticketmaster site and sell it on their own sites. Wicks said she wanted to create a Kayak.com-style marketplace for tickets, where sites like StubHub and SeatGeek, along with smaller primary ticketing companies like Dice and Tixr, sold the same concert tickets Ticketmaster was selling.
The proposal was immediately opposed by professional sports teams including the Golden State Warriors and the San Francisco 49ers, along with concert promoters, venue operators, arts groups and a number of live music industry organizations including the National Independent Venues Association, the Recording Academy and the Music Artist Coalition. Critics said the bill stripped California venues of their rights to monetize their ticketing contracts and transferred the power to control how tickets were sold from artists and venues to third-party technology companies without any safeguards.
Wicks explained that the bill would help consumers by making ticketing companies compete to sell tickets, but opponents said sellers would still be incentivized to raise ticket prices for major concerts when demand significantly outpaced supply. Others argued that giving resale sites direct access to primary tickets would push more tickets into the hands of scalpers and cause prices to skyrocket.
Booking agent Sam Hunt with Wasserman Music described the bill as problematic during an April 16 subcommittee hearing, warning that it “punished artists” and “established a dangerous system for fans.”
“Artists agree that the ticketing process is deeply flawed,” said Hunt, before adding that the blame lies with “unregulated ticket brokers” and “the secondary platforms that allow them to exist and flourish.”
Facing universal opposition from the live music industry and several members of the committee, Wicks vowed to make changes to the legislation.
On Tuesday (April 24), during a hearing of the Assembly’s Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee, Wicks introduced a new, partially completed bill that exempted professional and collegiate sports teams from the new rules. More notably, it included a clause stating that it would be an artist’s decision “to determine the terms and conditions related to the sale, pricing, distribution and transfer of tickets to their events.”
That new language, which mirrors that of legislation in other states as well as proposed federal legislation, was interpreted to mean that artists would be given the right to block resale sites from selling their tickets, potentially ending the resale of concert tickets in California — a sharp contrast with the original bill.
Wicks said the amendment resulted from a compromise with other legislators and was still being revised and amended. Lobbyists for secondary sites like StubHub and SeatGeek testified that they would pull their support for the bill if the new language remained.
Wicks isn’t the only politician tackling ticketing initiatives. Since the high-profile crash of the Taylor Swift Eras Tour ticket sale in November 2022, Ticketmaster has come under fire from members of both parties in Congress and is reportedly the subject of a DOJ investigation on antitrust charges. State lawmakers across the country have largely tried and failed to pass legislation curbing Ticketmaster’s power, but few have swung and missed quite like Wicks, who initially chose to align her efforts with the secondary ticketing market.
Today’s modern live music industry is a diverse cross-section of competing multinational corporations and independent businesses made up of venue operators, talent agencies, concert promoters, artists and their managers, and primary ticketing companies. The broad group of competing interests doesn’t agree on much, except for their universal opposition to the ticket resale business, which many believe caused the Swift ticket sale crash. The bot attack that preceded the temporary disruption of the sale had all the hallmarks of similar attacks utilized by ticket scalping groups.
In its defense, reps for the secondary ticketing business argue that sites like StubHub and SeatGeek provide a safe marketplace to buy and sell tickets that has been embraced by consumers and duplicated by Ticketmaster, which operates its own resale business.
The friction between the music industry and the secondary market involves access to high-demand concerts by artists like Swift and Olivia Rodrigo. Lobbyists for resale sites say Ticketmaster unfairly blocks ticket resellers from accessing high-demand tickets. Ticketmaster officials argue their artist clients want their tickets to be sold directly to fans and not marked up on resale sites.
Following the introduction of Wicks’ revamped bill in California, a new round of debate ensued. During the committee discussion of the legislation, Assemblymember Isaac Bryan said that Wicks’ logic that a Kayak.com site would push ticket prices down was flawed, noting that with hotels, “There’s no secondary market to sell a room for two, three or four” times what was originally paid to book the room.
Assemblymember Lori Wilson added that Wicks should focus her efforts on determining whether Ticketmaster held a competitive or unfair advantage. Committee chair Rebecca Bauer-Kahan said legislators needed to focus on putting consumers first, adding, “We as a committee don’t necessarily think the largest problem is the monopoly at the front end but the brokers in the middle who are buying up the tickets and leading to a lot of the problems” in the marketplace.
Despite these reservations, the new, radically different legislation will move forward. After a brief vote, the rewritten bill passed in the Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee and now heads to the Appropriations Committee, where Wicks serves as chair.
A U.S. District Court judge is allowing a shareholder lawsuit against Live Nation to move forward, denying the concert promotion giant’s motion to dismiss it in a decision handed down Friday (Feb. 27).
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The case involves how much the company should have to disclose about ongoing public pressure from federal authorities and how much of its financial success it should attribute to its dominant market share in the concert industry — as opposed to demand for concert tickets or the strength of its business.
Shareholders Brian Donley and Gene Gress are suing Live Nation over drops in its share price from February 2022 to November 2023 that they say were brought on by the company’s “false and misleading statements and omissions” within its annual earnings reports — specifically regarding the company’s alleged “anticompetitive behavior and cooperation with regulators.”
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The lawsuit did not reveal any new antitrust allegations against Live Nation, nor did it detail any new antitrust investigations into the company by regulators. Attorneys for the shareholders instead focused on boilerplate language within the company’s shareholder report and argued that it should have spent more time talking about the threat a federal antitrust investigation posed.
In siding with the shareholders, Judge Kenly Kiya Kato took issue with how the company described its success, noting in a 13-page ruling that she believed that Live Nation’s “failure to include specific facts and details about their presence and control of the live entertainment industry” in its annual report didn’t paint the full picture. Kato wrote in her ruling that the company’s claim that 2022 revenue growth “was a reflection of the quality of the Ticketmaster platform and its continued popularity with clients across the globe” was “misleading” because it failed to mention that “Ticketmaster controls ticket distribution for over 70% of major concert venues,” and “77% of the top 100 amphitheaters worldwide.”
Kato also wrote that Ticketmaster’s claims that its success was based on the superiority of its ticketing systems was in part a false claim because it omitted criticism from competitors who testified against the company in front of the U.S. Senate in early 2023.
Since it merged with Ticketmaster in 2010, Live Nation has faced antitrust complaints over the company’s size and market share from competitors, politicians including Senators Amy Klobuchar and Richard Blumenthal, and consumer advocates. Scrutiny of the company increased in 2019 when officials with the Department of Justice opted to extend a decade-old consent decree against it, and then ramped up again following the high-profile 2022 crash of Taylor Swift’s Ticketmaster sale for her Eras Tour.
Since 2022, Live Nation has not been notified that it’s the subject of any legal action by the Department of Justice and has written in its annual disclosures that it cooperates with all federal and state authorities, operates in a highly competitive marketplace and attributes its revenue growth at the end of 2021 to an increase “in events and higher ticket sales.”
Attorney Laurence M. Rosen, representing several shareholders in the class action lawsuit, said Live Nation’s answers contradict June 2023 reports from Politico and CNBC that the company was “allegedly stonewalling” a Senate subcommittee led by Senator Blumenthal that was seeking documents from the company about how it operated its concerts division.
Live Nation countered that Blumenthal was misrepresenting the dispute, that it had already handed over thousands of documents and was contesting demands for confidential information that included private details about how much artists earned from touring. In its response to the Senate committee, the company argued it would only hand over the documents if confidentiality protections were put in place. While Live Nation’s attorneys viewed the disagreement as insignificant, Rosen argued that the objection meant the company was “not cooperating fully with the ongoing DOJ and Senate Subcommittee investigations,” an attorney for the shareholders wrote.
Live Nation declined to comment for this story.
The concert business has had a record year in 2023 — tours by Taylor Swift and Beyoncé were pop culture moments, festivals roared back to life and consumers’ splurging on tickets seemed to defy gravity. There’s likely more good news on the horizon, too. By all forecasts, next year is shaping up for continued success, even as consumers still feel pinched by inflation.
Among the big names to announce stadium tours next year are The Rolling Stones, Foo Fighters, Green Day and a pairing of Journey and Def Leppard. Chris Stapleton, Zach Bryan and Luke Combs will hit both stadiums and arenas. Drake, Bad Bunny, Thirty Seconds to Mars, Hootie & the Blowfish, New Kids on the Block, Alanis Morissette and The Trilogy Tour featuring Enrique Iglesias, Ricky Martin and Pitbull will play arenas and amphitheaters. Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour continues in 2024, too, with 85 shows announced for Asia, Australia and North America.
Advanced ticket sales suggest consumers remain eager to see their favorite artists perform live. Through mid-October, Live Nation’s event-related deferred revenue — from ticket sales to events that had not yet occurred — was up 39% year over year, according to the company’s third-quarter earnings release.
AEG Presents, the second-largest promoter, is “feeling really positive” about 2024 tours across all venue sizes and genres, says Rich Schaefer, president of global touring. “I think people are discovering new artists and want to see big shows — and they’re willing to pay for it.” They’re buying well in advance, too: AEG put tickets on sale for 76 Zach Bryan shows in 2024 — some won’t happen until December — and has “largely sold everything out,” says Schaeffer. “That artist especially has a crazy connection with his fans. They’ve seen videos of what his shows are like, and I think everybody wants to experience it.”
Those big tours — and thousands of others — are counting on consumers to continue to open their wallets despite continued high prices for staples and living expenses, rising debt delinquencies and Americans’ credit card debt reaching a record level in the third quarter. The holidays are presenting mixed signals: Black Friday spending was up 2.5% compared to 2022, but numerous surveys have found consumers plan to spend less on gifts this year.
Consumers may feel beleaguered, but they continue to spend to see their favorite artists perform live. “I have weekly booking calls with the over 40 presidents around the world and we talk booking clubs up to stadiums and festivals, and we have not seen anything taper off in any sense,” said Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino during the company’s Nov. 2 earnings call. The company is “not seeing any pullback in any way” in consumer demand regardless of the region or venue size, he added.
A big question, though, is whether consumers will be in a spending mood throughout 2024. A new Goldman Sachs economic outlook report says the U.S. economy today is better than was expected a year ago, inflation will continue to subside and the likelihood of a recession in 2024 is “limited.” The latest data from the University of Michigan is encouraging: U.S. consumer sentiment soared in December and people’s expectations for year-ahead inflation dropped to 3.1% from 4.5% last month.
Whatever uncertainties exist — including falling savings rates and weakening credit conditions — have not materialized in ticket sales thus far. “We certainly see the headlines [about macroeconomic conditions], but it’s not flowing through to numbers that we can see,” Lawrence Fey, CFO of secondary ticket marketplace Vivid Seats, said during a Nov. 7 earnings call.
One could simply look at who’s touring in 2024 to get a sense of where ticket buyers are thinking. “You got The Stones going on the road in parts in North America,” says Doug Arthur of Huber Research Partners. “They’re always a pretty big draw. The Stones are pretty savvy historically about touring when they think the economics support it.”
Consumers’ willingness to spend increasing amounts on live music isn’t a new trend — although some of 2023’s record-setting box office numbers appear to be the result of music fans may be clamoring for live events in after suffering through pandemic-era restrictions. The concert industry has benefited from a lasting shift among consumers from goods to experiences over the last 10 to 15 years, says Brandon Ross, an analyst with LightShed Partners.
This year’s boffo box office numbers weren’t outliers, and Ross expects to see “outsized performance on a global basis” in 2024. “There has been a year-and-a-half long concern for a broader pullback in consumer spending,” says Ross. “I don’t think will not impact growth, but I think there’s substantial tailwind supporting this industry.”
Those tailwinds probably won’t be strong enough for next year’s touring business to duplicate 2023’s stellar growth rate — but no one seems to be expecting that. “I don’t think you’re talking about another up 30% type of year, and I don’t think [Live Nation is] talking about that either,” says Arthur. “But can the concert revenues be up high single digits between volume, fans per show, price per ticket and spending per fan? Yeah, I think that’s not unreasonable at all.”
Artists and promoters will continue to encounter high costs in 2024 — labor, catering, buses and staging are stretched thin with a high number of big tours on the road. That’ll continue to push ticket prices up. Even so, AEG hasn’t seen resistance to higher prices, says Schaefer. “There’s very few instances where we think that pricing is responsible for tickets not selling.”
A Taylor Swift fan who filed a class action against Ticketmaster parent Live Nation in the wake of last year’s disastrous presale of tickets to the Eras Tour has agreed to drop her case against the concert giant, months after attorneys on the case said they were engaged in settlement talks.
Swift fan Michelle Sterioff filed her case in December 2022 just weeks after the botched Eras rollout, which saw widespread service delays and website crashes as millions of fans tried – and many failed – to buy tickets. At the time, her lawyers blasted Live Nation as a “monopoly” that had “knowingly misled millions of fans.”
But a year later, Sterioff voluntarily asked a federal judge on Tuesday to dismiss her case. It’s unclear if a settlement was reached, but the two sides reported in August that they were engaged in “ongoing settlement discussions.” Neither side immediately returned requests for comment.
Sterioff’s proposed class action was just one piece of the legal fallout for Live Nation following the error-plagued pre-sale for Eras, which went on the earn hundreds of millions of dollars and dominate headlines as 2023’s biggest concert tour.
After the Nov. 22, 2022 incident, Live Nation quickly apologized to fans and pinned the blame on a “staggering number of bot attacks” and “unprecedented traffic.” But lawmakers in Washington and state attorneys general around the country quickly called for investigations. That included Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), the chair of the Senate subcommittee for antitrust issues, who suggest that regulators consider “breaking up the company” – a reference to Live Nation’s 2010 merger with Ticketmaster.
Days after the incident, the New York Times reported that DOJ had already been investigating Live Nation for months over potential antitrust violations, reaching out to venues across the country to ask about the company’s conduct. Last month, Reuters reported that the probe was ongoing, with federal investigators focusing on whether Live Nation imposed anticompetitive agreements on venues. A Senate subcommittee investigation is also underway, sending out subpoenas last month demanding info about the company’s “failure to combat artificially inflated demand fueled by bots in multiple, high-profile incidents.”
Taylor Swift performs onstage for night three of Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour at Nissan Stadium on May 07, 2023 in Nashville.
John Shearer/TAS23/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management
Sterioff’s case was one of two major class actions filed against Live Nation over the Eras ticket rollout. In her complaint, she accused the company of violating consumer protection and antitrust laws, calling Ticketmaster a “monopoly that is only interested in taking every dollar it can from a captive public.”
“Because Ticketmaster has exclusive agreements with virtually all venues capable of accommodating large concerts, Taylor Swift and other popular musicians have no choice but to sell their tickets through Ticketmaster, and their fans have no choice but to purchase tickets through Ticketmaster’s primary ticketing platform,” her lawyers wrote.
Sterioff’s lawsuit claimed that Live Nation has exploited that dominance to charge “ever more supracompetitive ticketing fees for both primary and secondary ticketing services,” including for “virtually all venues hosting ‘The Eras’ Tour.”
But the lawsuit has largely been paused for months. In August, both sides agreed that it would be better to wait to litigate the case after a federal appeals court rules on a separate antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation, which will decide whether the company can force ticketbuyers to resolve such legal claims in private arbitration rather than open court.
The other class action over the Eras debacle, filed by an outspoken fan named Julie Barfuss and more than two dozen other spurned Swifities, remains pending in California federal court. In her complaint, Barfuss went even further than Sterioff, claiming Live Nation had tacitly allowed the kind of mass-scalping that caused so many problems during the pre-sale.
“Ticketmaster has stated that it has taken steps to address this issue, but in reality, has taken steps to make additional profit from the scalped tickets,” Barfuss’ lawyer wrote. “Instead of competition, Ticketmaster has conspired with stadiums to force fans to buy more expensive tickets that Ticketmaster gets additional fees from every time the tickets are resold.”
TikTok announced that it will bring its in-app ticketing feature, a collaboration with Ticketmaster, to an additional 20 countries on Monday (Dec. 4).
The feature allows artists to put Ticketmaster event links in the clips they post on TikTok, making it easy for their followers to click and buy tickets in the app. TikTok started testing the feature in the U.S. in August 2022.
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The two companies didn’t share any information about the results of the test, though they said Niall Horan, The Kooks, Burna Boy, and Shania Twain have all tried it out. TikTok opened access to the feature this week to certified artists in the U.K., Ireland, Australia, Germany, France, Canada, Mexico, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Switzerland, Spain and Sweden.
In a statement, Michael Chua, Ticketmaster’s vp global business development and strategic partnerships, said the partnership will allow artists to “easily connect their content to event discovery and ticket purchase in-app making it easier than ever for fans around the world to experience their favorite artists live.”
“By enabling fans to buy tickets directly through TikTok, we’re giving artists the opportunity to reach ticket buyers in a whole new way,” added Michael Kümmerle, TikTok’s global music partnership development lead. “We hope to deliver further value to all artists throughout all stages of their careers and provide more opportunities for a growing fanbase.”
TikTok has been busy rolling out features lately. Last week, the platform added official artist labels (available once a user has released four songs) and a “new” tag that can be used to highlight an act’s latest release (14 days before the song comes out and for another 30 days after it drops). “These features can deepen engagement whilst creating unique opportunities for fans to connect with their favorite artists in meaningful ways, driving music discovery on the platform,” said Paul Hourican, TikTok’s global head of music partnerships and programming, in a statement.
A third-party software provider is to blame for a major disruption to a ticket sale for six Taylor Swift shows in France, according to a statement issued by Ticketmaster France. “This morning’s sale was disrupted by an issue with a third-party vendor who is working to resolve the issue as soon as possible,” the company […]
Sacré bleu! Ticketmaster France pressed pause on the presales for four Paris dates and both shows in Lyon for Taylor Swift‘s 2024 European Eras Tour.
“Some of you may be having issues with the site this morning,” the company tweeted on Tuesday morning. “We are working on it and will let you know.”
The four Paris dates at La Défense Arena on May 9, 10, 11 and 12, 2024 were set to go on sale today in two stages, with one sale for May 9 and 10 opening at 9 a.m. local time and another, for May 11 and May 12, due to start at 11 a.m. Sales for the two dates at Lyon’s Groupama Stadium, set for June 2 and 3, were due to begin at 1 p.m.
“We will keep you informed of the new on-sale time as soon as possible,” the company said. “All codes will remain valid.”
As in past presales, fans had to sign up in order to be put into a lottery for code to redeem for a shot at tickets. But shortly after the Paris sale had begun, “winning” fans began having problems and Ticketmaster suspended the presale, citing issues with the site.
Leading up to the sale, the company gave fans an idea of what to expect:
Tickets will be available for purchase via the website for access code holders on July 11, 2023. Tickets will be sold on a first come, first served basis while currently available inventory lasts. It’s a simple, standard purchase process and the steps below will help you navigate your search and purchase.
If you are selected to receive an access code, you will receive an email and two SMS messages the afternoon before ticket sales begins on July 11 2023
The messages will include timing details and a link to where the on-sale will occur, and your unique access code.
Prepare for the sale by creating your customer account in advance if you don’t already have one. Sign-in to your Ticketmaster Account in advance. Know your Ticketmaster password, or reset your password in advance. For a faster checkout, make sure you have a valid credit card with updating billing information in your account.
The company did not respond to a request for details on the nature of the site outage.
Though “July 11” won’t carry the same stain as “Nov. 15” — the date Ticketmaster’s site buckled under the weight of millions of Swift fans trying to purchase initial U.S. Eras Tour dates — it remains another botched sale for a Swift sale for the ticketing giant.
Last week, Swift announced an additional 14 dates for her European trip next year, with Paramore opening all dates. Swift’s Eras Tour launched in Glendale, Arizona on March 17. She plays two nights at Denver’s Empower Field this weekend before heading to Seattle and the San Jose area later in July.
Ticketmaster owner Live Nation’s push for legislative ticketing reform earlier this year has actually slowed down progress on those issues, sources tell Billboard, stalling a long-in-the-works bill that addresses nearly identical concerns about the ticketing business.
Last year, even before Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour presale fiasco inspired a flurry of ticketing reform bills, the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) had been working on a wide-reaching piece of legislation in cooperation with Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) to “combat predatory and deceptive ticketing practices,” according to sources close to the issue. The bill included bans on deceptive practices and speculative listings, enforcement of existing anti-bot laws and new tools for countering ticketing fraud. Its most substantive change took aim at the secondary ticketing industry, granting artists and tour promoters sweeping power to reduce ticket scalping by allowing artists to set legally binding rules on how and where their tickets are resold, according to a November 2022 memo reviewed by Billboard. Besides NIVA, Universal Music Group, Wasserman Music, Dice and See Tickets were all among the broad coalition of music companies supporting the effort under the coalition name Fix the Tix.
But, for months, the bill has languished — even as attention around ticketing has grown considerably following a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in January on competition within the ticketing industry. That’s because of increased lobbying by pro-scalper groups and a decision in February, by Ticketmaster owner Live Nation, to unveil the FAIR Ticketing Act, a five-point proposal with a list of legislative fixes — and the recommendations were very similar to the fixes NIVA had been quietly lobbying for.
With NIVA representing thousands of independent venues and Live Nation representing its huge corporate portfolio, the two entities often have opposing agendas, and some NIVA members theorized that Live Nation was attempting to sabotage their bill. Worried that supporting a similar proposal would look like politicians were rewarding Ticketmaster at a time when outrage at the company was growing, momentum around the NIVA bill waned. Klobuchar’s office, which had planned to announce a bi-partisan bill with Cornyn in the spring, delayed its announcement amid new concerns that the bill might strengthen Ticketmaster, sources close to both Live Nation and NIVA tell Billboard. They add that the FAIR Ticketing Act was neither a clone of the proposed NIVA bill nor a poison pill.
“Live Nation and Ticketmaster have been the target of the Senate since the two companies merged in 2010,” says one NIVA member speaking on the condition of anonymity. “There’s an appetite in D.C. to punish Ticketmaster, but the reality is that there’s no way to pass a law that would both punish Ticketmaster and bring about the types of reforms needed to clean up the ticketing business.”
Case in point: On April 28, Klobuchar’s office introduced legislation with Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) that would have banned ticketing companies like Ticketmaster from signing venue clients to long-term exclusive contracts. The proposal has faced opposition from some members of NIVA, who argued it would hurt small venues that relied on the payments from those contracts, and that fans would likely have to make up for the loss through higher ticket prices. A representative for Live Nation previously told Billboard the proposal wouldn’t “have a material impact on our business as we historically add clients in competitive marketplaces.”
As for similarities between the NIVA-backed bill and Live Nation’s proposal, “It’s not surprising that the two groups that spent the last six months thinking about legislative fixes [to] the same issue came up with similar solutions,” said one source close to Live Nation, noting that much of the friction between NIVA and Ticketmaster has subsided.
Ticketmaster officials appear to have gotten the message and have toned down the rhetoric around their political efforts. Many of the campaign efforts have been picked up by NIVA, which successfully lobbied for $15 billion in federal aid for venues negatively impacted by the coronavirus pandemic in 2021. Now, sources say, the Fix the Tix bill is expected to be proposed in the next couple of weeks.
Leading the charge at NIVA is the organization’s executive director, Stephen Parker. A longtime D.C. insider who worked with Sen. Tim Kaine when he was the governor of Virginia, Parker spent a decade at the bipartisan National Governors Association and has served on the board of the Country Music Association.
Parker confirmed to Billboard that neither Live Nation nor Ticketmaster has signed on as official supporters of the Fix the Tix coalition, while he and others are being extra cautious not to make their legislative package a referendum on Ticketmaster. Still, the Live Nation-owned company will play an outsized role in the Fix the Tix plan, as opponents are getting ready to paint the proposal as a major power shift to Ticketmaster and away from scalpers.
The Fix the Tix proposal would “make it illegal for resellers, professional ticket brokers, and ticket platforms to violate the artists’ and venues’ ticket terms and conditions, including restrictions that prohibit price gouging of fans through the resale of tickets above face value,” according to an early draft obtained by Billboard. That means artists, venues, or promoters could place ceilings on how much tickets are allowed to be marked up or restrict ticket resale until after all primary tickets have been sold. Since Ticketmaster and AEG are the only two companies on the market with technology that can track tickets after they’re sold to see if they are being resold and for how much, however, critics say this sort of law would create an even greater dependence on their services.
That’s far more power than Ticketmaster should have, says John Breyault, vp of public policy at the National Consumers League and a founding board member of the Fan Freedom Project, an advocacy group fighting restrictions on resale that receives funding from StubHub and Vivid Seats. “Ticketmaster does not want to eliminate resale; they want to control resale,” Breyault says. The current proposals by Ticketmaster and NIVA could bankrupt major secondary resale sites, especially if most tours decided to make their tickets non-transferable. Once Live Nation “got rid of its competitors,” Breyault says the company could convince the artist it works with to lighten up on ticket transferability and effectively “own the resale market.”
To a degree, Fix the Tix is a response to the dozens of pieces of pro-scalping legislation and lobbying that have been proposed at the state and federal levels over the past six months. This Fix the Tix bill would seek to overrule any state-level legislation that exists; there are currently over a dozen states with laws that outlaw restrictions on ticket transferability, meaning anyone can resell tickets at any price they want.Others, like Rep. Bill Pascrell’s (D-NJ) BOSS and SWIFT Act — which Breyault supports and the Fix the Tix coalition opposes — would permanently legalize scalping by making it illegal for ticketing companies to restrict ticket transferability.
Last year, the American Economic Liberties Project, which is funded by Pierre Omidyar — former chairman of eBay and owner of Ticketmaster rival StubHub — announced the “Break Up Ticketmaster,” campaign, aimed at pressuring the DOJ “to investigate and unwind the 2010 Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger,” according to the group’s website.
Opponents of scalping say the BOSS Act would make it impossible for artists to keep their tickets off secondary sites and would allow all scalping sites to sell any tickets they wanted without restriction. Proponents, however, believe that outcome is better for fans than allowing Live Nation and the artists it works with to make these decisions.
While the scalpers and the concert promoters are far apart on most issues, the rival bills do share consensus on a number of practices in ticketing that have long drawn the ire of fans. Those include speculative ticket listing, drip pricing and misleading marketing campaigns — all of which would be banned by both NIVA’s proposal and the BOSS and Swift Act.
Editor’s note: Billboard has updated this story to more accurately describe the work performed by the American Economic Liberties Project.
In a rare investor reproach for Live Nation, at the company’s annual meeting held earlier in June, a majority of its shareholders voted against ratifying chief executive Michael Rapino‘s $139-million pay package for 2022.
In an advisory say-on-pay referendum on June 9, more than 53% of votes cast rejected the 2022 compensation packages for promoter Live Nation’s named executives — Rapino, president and CFO Joe Berchtold, chief accounting officer Brian Capo, executive vp John Hopmans and general counsel Michael Rowles, according to a filing released on June 15. In contrast, 94% of the votes cast at its 2020 shareholder meeting were in favor of the say-on-pay proposal, according to Live Nation.
As the shareholder vote was advisory and non-binding, Live Nation’s board will have the ultimate say on any future actions around executive compensation.
Shareholder rebukes like this are rare, and it comes as the Ticketmaster owner is already under fire from fans and regulators over its role in the Taylor Swift Eras Tour ticket debacle. As of May 31, only 1.5% of companies in the Russell 3000 index have failed Say on Pay votes so far this year, according to a report by Harvard Law School’s Forum on Corporate Governance.
In Live Nation’s proxy statement, the company said it believes its “compensation program is reasonable, competitive and strongly focused on pay for performance principles.” A company spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
“We believe that the fiscal year 2022 compensation paid to our named executive officers was appropriate and aligned with Live Nation’s fiscal year 2022 results,” the company stated in its proxy, citing the company’s 44% growth in revenue to $16.7 billion in 2022.
Influential shareholder advisory groups Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis recommended shareholders vote against Live Nation’s executive officers’ compensation, citing a “misalignment” between pay and performance in the structure of certain stock equity grants.
ISS actually estimates Rapino’s 2022 compensation higher than what Live Nation published in its proxy — at $156 million for the year. The group raised specific concerns over a “mega grant” Rapino received in July 2022 that it said was worth $120.5 million and a similar award CFO Berchtold received worth $52.6 million. ISS contends the grants were not adequately linked to achieving sustained higher stock prices. Total Live Nation shareholder returns were negative over a one-year period and underperformed the S&P 500 Index, ISS says.
“The current structure could reward these executives for short-term or merely temporary increases in stock price,” ISS researchers wrote, adding that the large one-time equity grants paid were “multiple times larger than the total CEO pay for the company’s peer group…lack clear disclosure regarding the rationale for the size of the awards and other details necessary to assess them.”
Glass Lewis also raised concerns over cash signing bonuses of about $6 million received by Rapino and Berchtold.
“The (bonuses) are not subject to any performance or recoupment provisions,” Glass Lewis researchers wrote. “Such pay levels on a one-time basis outpace total compensation levels afforded executives at some of the largest companies in the U.S. despite being subject to considerably weaker vesting and performance conditions.”
Additional reporting by Glenn Peoples.
Beyoncé’s career is filled with chart-topping albums, momentous concerts and her marriage to another musical trailblazer, Jay-Z. But recently, the “Cuff It” singer’s most unusual contribution to society might be her impact on Sweden’s stubbornly high inflation rate.
When Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour launched with two dates at Stockholm’s 46,000-capacity Friend Arena in May, it contributed about 0.2 percentage points to Sweden’s inflation rate for the month. “It’s quite astonishing for a single event,” Michael Grahn, chief economist for Sweden with Danske Bank, told the Financial Times. Termed the “Beyoncé blip” by Grahn, the small impact to Sweden’s overall appreciation in prices was caused by the singer’s fans’ buying up hotel rooms and spending money in restaurants.
The combination of relatively cheap tickets and a strong U.S. dollar — 9.3% more valuable to the Swedish kroner compared to the prior-year period — made Sweden an attractive alternative for Beyoncé fans priced out of concerts closer to home. That helped cause Sweden’s inflation rate — a staggering 9.7% compared to just 4.0% in the U.S. — to land half of a percentage point higher than expectations.
An influx of Americans is hardly the sole reason prices were stubbornly high in Sweden last month. As Forbes pointed out, Sweden’s inflation rate was plenty high before Beyoncé’s Stockholm concert, and one musician could only have a small impact relative to other factors such as food and non-alcoholic beverages (+14.8%) and furnishings and household goods (+10.4%).
Still, it says a lot about ticket prices — and U.S. consumers’ stomach for them — that Stockholm was a viable alternative for some Americans. The Beyoncé blip isn’t the first we’ve heard about her fans’ reaction to high prices for in-demand tickets. Buzzfeed wrote an article back in February about some sticker-shocked fans’ decision to travel great distances to save money. One Las Vegas-based Beyoncé fan told the outlet she couldn’t get into a Ticketmaster presale and ended up spending $300 on a Stockholm show instead. Another American fan said she purchased a floor seat in Stockholm for just $95.
Post-pandemic, artists are less shy about charging their fans higher prices for primary tickets. Beyoncé, Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift are among the superstar artists who have elevated tickets’ face value, rather than let ticket scalpers capture the premium on the secondary market. Although Springsteen had kept prices relatively low throughout his career, tickets for the best seats on his 2023 tour, which went on sale last summer, cost upwards of $5,000. Tickets for U.S. dates for Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour typically cost $350 for decent seats, Billboard reported in May. There’s a large variation by city, too. Currently, the cheapest tickets available on SeatGeek for her tour range from $57 in Louisville, Ky., to $90 in Minneapolis, to $145 in Pittsburgh. Larger markets are far more expensive: Ticket prices start at $270 in East Rutherford, N.J., outside of New York City; and $282 in Philadelphia.
Every consumer has a breaking point, however, and people will take more affordable options when given the chance. Ticket buyers facing sky-high prices need only a passport and time off work to see a superstar at — compared to the United States — bargain prices. A person with frequent flier miles and hotel points to burn can easily get a vacation and a concert in a historic European city cheaper than a concert alone at home.
This presents an opportunity. Why not music tourism when medical tourism is a long-standing tradition?
Health care might be the only aspect of the U.S. economy with a lower public sentiment than concert tickets. Medical tourism is an established industry because healthcare costs are notoriously steep in this country. For patients who don’t mind travel and trust the level of care provided in other countries, elective surgeries can be obtained far more affordably outside the United States, in countries such as Mexico, Costa Rica and Thailand. South African companies sell package vacations that include plastic surgery and a safari. As long as you need the procedure, you might as well enjoy yourself!
Live music companies are already looking to capture a share of music fans’ travel budgets. As my colleague Dave Brooks reported this week, the concert business has put a renewed focus on destination events. Not content with capturing fans’ spending for tickets and concessions, promoters are increasingly interested in grabbing a share of the hotel and hospitality spending when fans travel for concerts and festivals. To that point, in April Live Nation announced a new travel and hospitality firm, Vibee, which offers “curated music experiences in the most sought-after destinations in the world,” according to its website.
Increasingly, going to concerts is more like taking a vacation. A Live Nation study found that fans attending Lollapalooza in Chicago last year spent about $49 million on hotels and over $80 million on food and beverages. Indeed, multi-day festivals, with their VIP packages and high-priced perks, have more in common with an overseas trip than a weeknight concert at a nearby amphitheater. Over time, if enterprising companies can create the right products and services, music tourism could be more than a financial blip, and — as these companies see it — Beyoncé fans might wind up paying you twice.
