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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.
President Joe Biden announced a major accomplishment in his battle against ticketing junk fees Thursday (June 15), but the impact is likely to be minimal.
After meeting with executives at Ticketmaster, SeatGeek and Dice, among others, those companies agreed to adopt all-in ticket pricing for their sales. For Ticketmaster, that will specifically impact shows at the more than 250 venues owned by parent company Live Nation in the United States — not all its ticketing clients.
The companies’ commitments to all-in pricing are part of a larger effort under the Biden administration and the Federal Trade Commission to reign in billions of dollars in junk fees charged to consumers by banks, hotel companies and entertainment groups. And while the buy-in from some of the world’s largest ticketing companies is an important milestone, the voluntary change will likely only impact a small percentage of tickets and give ticket sellers who conceal add-on fees to consumers until the end of the checkout process a competitive advantage over firms who display the full price at checkout.
The limited impact of Thursday’s announcement underscores the challenges lawmakers face as they attempt to come up with legislative fixes for the ticketing industry in the wake of disruptions to Taylor Swift’s high profile Eras tour. While politicians like Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) have pointed the finger at Ticketmaster’s dominant market share, a growing coalition of music industry insiders under the #FixTheTix banner have blamed scalpers for the disruptions to the Taylor Swift sale and continued bot attacks on the ticketing industry.
While much of the battle between Ticketmaster and secondary sites like Stubhub and SeatGeek comes down to fundamental disagreements over artists’ rights to control their tickets and consumers’ rights to buy and sell tickets at whatever price the market will bear, the elimination of last minute fees added to tickets at checkout — sometimes as high as 25% to 35% of the face value of the ticket — had support from both primary and secondary ticket sellers.
In order for the all-in pricing to work, however, most experts agree that it must be mandated by law. Otherwise, many ticketing companies, sports teams and venues are unlikely to voluntarily change their pricing policy out of concern it could be a competitive disadvantage for their facility.
Even Thursday’s commitment from Ticketmaster has no impact on the hundreds of sports venues that sell millions of tickets to games and concerts each year. That’s because Ticketmaster cannot force teams within National Hockey League, National Basketball Association and National Football League to adopt all-in pricing at their stadiums and arenas, despite holding the exclusive ticketing rights to approximately 80% of the teams within those three leagues.
The same goes for the hundreds of independently owned venues for which Ticketmaster provides ticketing services.
Looking at the top 40 venues on Billboard‘s midyear Boxscore charts, while most are ticketed by Ticketmaster, none are owned by parent company Live Nation and none of the facilities will initially offer all-in pricing on their websites or ticket sales pages under the new commitment. The same goes for the hundreds of tours Live Nation promotes as well. That’s because standard ticketing contracts allow venues — and not Ticketmaster or other ticketing companies — to decide how tickets are sold, how much money in fees is added to a ticket, and how and when the breakdown between face value and add-ons like facility fees are displayed to consumers.
Studies show that ticketing companies that don’t use all in pricing have a competitive advantage over companies that show the full price of a ticket upfront. A consumer study by Stubhub in the 2010s shown that fans were more likely to purchase a ticket, even if it had a higher checkout price, if the initial price they were shown was lower than comparable tickets on other websites prices
“Live Nation’s promise today to give Americans price transparency at their venues is encouraging, but we need all-in pricing at all venues, for all live events, and on all ticket selling services now,” Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) wrote in an email to Billboard, noting his bill, the BOSS and SWIFT ACT legislation would “mandate in law all-in pricing for true transparency.”
“Not until every seller offers all-in pricing can consumers get the comparison shopping experience for tickets that they deserve,” he wrote.
Critics of the BOSS and SWIFT ACT argue that while the legislation does improve transparency, it includes protections for ticket scalpers that would make it impossible for artists to protect their concert tickets from price gauging.
“Live Nation is proud to provide fans with a better ticketing buying experience,” said Tom See, president of Live Nation’s Venue Nation, in a statement. “We have thousands of crew working behind the scenes every day to help artists share their music live with fans, and we’ll continue advocating for innovations and reforms that protect that amazing connection.”
Stephen Parker, executive director of the National Independent Venue Association, told Billboard in an email, “Up-front pricing should be the start of comprehensive ticketing reform that protects consumers from price gouging and deceptive practices by predatory resellers.”
“We applaud the President for today’s meeting and look forward to working with his Administration and Congress to make comprehensive, bipartisan ticketing reform a reality,” Parker continued.
The National Independent Talent Organization, a group representing independent talent booking agents, applauded the voluntary change at Ticketmaster, but noted the change was “an important first step.”
“Until Congress acts to eliminate excessive fees and secondary ticketing is carefully regulated,” the organization said in a statement, “millions of consumers will still be the victim of predatory ticketing practices.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and many liberal Democrats have two things in common, and perhaps only two: They hate the way concert and sports ticket sales work — specifically the company selling most of them, Ticketmaster — and they love Taylor Swift. Or, at least, they acknowledge that ingratiating themselves to Swift’s fan army as she sells out stadiums in their states is an efficient way to build up constituent support.
Over the past couple of months, Cruz, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Massachusetts Sen. John Velis (D-Hampden and Hampshire) and others have presented a variety of bills intended to reform the ticket-selling business, invoking Swift and fans’ displeasure with Ticketmaster’s Eras Tour on-sale fiasco in November, when more than 100,000 fans were kicked out of the online sale queue. Following a Senate subcommittee hearing focused on Ticketmaster in January, politicians clearly see positioning themselves against the ticketing giant and attaching themselves to Swift’s millions of passionate fans as a winning combination. They’re even naming their bills after her.
“There’s a growing awareness of the problem, and the Taylor Swift concert debacle played a part in focusing a lot of attention on the issue,” Cruz tells Billboard, adding that his 12-year-old daughter recently attended an Eras Tour show.
That debacle, Ticketmaster declared at the time, was due to unprecedented levels of illegal bots attacking the online sale. But that claim did little to satisfy fans and politicians, who during a January Senate hearing instead chose to focus on monopolistic behavior by Ticketmaster and its owner, promoter Live Nation, often referencing Swift lyrics between swipes at the company. Since then, the rhetoric has changed slightly. While politicians continue to scrutinize the concert giant — Klobuchar says the Department of Justice is investigating Live Nation and Ticketmaster for possible violations of their 2010 consent decree — senators and congresspeople at federal and state levels are proposing solutions to potentially more manageable issues.
In Massachusetts, Velis and his co-sponsor, Rep. Dan Carey (D-Easthampton), have introduced what they nicknamed the “Taylor Swift bill,” which aims to abolish hidden ticket fees and require sellers such as Ticketmaster and SeatGeek to disclose service charges and costs upfront. A similar law already exists in New York state, and Live Nation actually supports the issue — including it in the company’s own proposed legislation outline. “Taylor Swift obviously sells out every concert,” Velis says, “but she’s also got this support ecosystem that lends itself to, ‘If you want to do something about this, why not use something that’s absolutely going to get the public’s attention?’”
But at a time when opposing Ticketmaster is good politics, one source in touring suggested politicians do not want to be seen aligning with the corporate giant. That political strategy may even be holding back legislation on other subjects where there’s popular consensus. Other bills, like the one Klobuchar and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) introduced in April, limit exclusive deals with venues and therefore more directly target Ticketmaster.
Velis said he and Carey plan to meet with Ticketmaster executives in the coming weeks to discuss their bill. “The more you can firm up a piece of legislation to get rid of unintended consequences, you’re better off,” Velis says. “That being said, as it relates to just telling a consumer, ‘This is what you’re going to spend if you want to go to this concert’ — I can’t think of anything remotely close to approaching how someone can convince me that’s not a good idea.”
To help wade through the many different pro-Swift, Ticketmaster-targeting bills out there, here’s a rundown of what they each intend to achieve — and what each legislator gets out of sponsoring them:
Unlocking Tickets Markets Act, in the U.S. Senate
Fans buying tickets to upcoming Wu-Tang Clan and De La Soul tours now have easy access to custom messages from the RZA, the GZA and other members of each outfit via a new partnership between Ticketmaster and HiNOTE. The ticketing giant has partnered with the platform, which allows fans to request custom videos from artists […]
Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino’s total compensation package rose to $139 million in 2022, up from $13.8 million the previous year.
Rapino’s compensation included a base salary of $3 million, up from $2.6 million in 2021 (which came as Rapino agreed to take a pay reduction during the pandemic). Live Nation entered into a new employment agreement with Rapino in July 2022, ending Dec. 31, 2027, which meant he also earned a $6 million signing bonus.
The executive also earned a $12 million annual cash performance bonus for 2022 and stock awards of $116 million, some of which vest in early 2024, while others vest in four installments through 2027 if the company reaches certain stock price targets.
CFO Joe Berchtold also saw his overall compensation jump to $52.4 million in 2022, up from $5 million the prior year. His base salary increased slightly to $1.3 million from $1.1 million, and he also earned a signing bonus of $6 million and an annual cash performance bonus of $2.5 million. Berchtold received $42.4 million in stock awards.
These pay bumps come after a rocky year for the company.
The Ticketmaster, which falls under Live Nation Entertainment, has faced backlash since its site experienced errors and site slowdowns during its Taylor Swift presale for verified fans in fall 2022. Since then, the company has faced pushback from lawmakers over its merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation and is said to be undergoing an investigation by the Department of Justice. At the same time, concert attendance has been on the rise, as has the company’s revenue.
This article was originally published by The Hollywood Reporter.
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.
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
Robert Smith continued to blast Ticketmaster on Thursday night (March 30), taking to Twitter to warn fans of a scam in which scalpers offer to sell account login details.
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“BEWARE ANOTHER SCALPER SCAM: OFFERING TO SELL/SEND 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 Cure frontman, however, did not share plans to regulate and spot the scammers.
1 OF 2BEWARE ANOTHER SCALPER SCAM: OFFERING TO SELL/SEND 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… #ShowsOfALostWorld23— ROBERT SMITH (@RobertSmith) March 31, 2023
2 OF 2…ORIGINAL FEES PAID ON THOSE TICKETS WILL BE DONATED TO @amnesty AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL, AND THE TICKETS THEMSELVES WILL BE RESOLD TO FANS #ShowsOfALostWorld23— ROBERT SMITH (@RobertSmith) March 31, 2023
As the band gears up for its first trek in seven years, 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 July, fans fumed over the high cost of Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing — the model that responds in real time to consumer demand and can cause prices to skyrocket, especially at on-sale — for Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band’s 2023 tour.
Then, in November, Ticketmaster’s presale for Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour sold over 90% of the trek’s inventory — breaking the record for the most tickets sold in a single day by a touring artist — but online traffic stranded millions of infuriated fans in digital queues and caused website outages. Ticketmaster canceled the general on-sale for the remaining inventory, and Swift lambasted the company in a statement: “We asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand, and we were assured they could. It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”
Soon, politicians were calling for accountability, and in January, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on competition within the ticketing industry, including whether the 2010 consent decree governing the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster has worked — or if the company has monopolized the sector.
Ticketmaster effectively controls major live-music events in many North American arenas and stadiums: It’s the primary ticketing system for 27 out of 32 NFL stadiums and Live Nation-promoted arena shows across the continent. But since its merger with Live Nation, viable alternatives have emerged.
“With ticketing systems, you may not know who they are, and that’s a good thing. Frankly, when a ticketing system makes the news, usually something went wrong,” says International Ticketing Association president/CEO Maureen Andersen, who adds that millions of tickets for music, sports and other live entertainment are sold every day on various platforms in North America without a hitch.
“There is a lot of ticketing technology available,” says Andersen. “A lot of ticketing companies [are] coming to the U.S. to test the waters and see what kind of market share they can get. That rings to me as healthy competition.”
Artists looking for ticketing alternatives in 2023 will fare better than Pearl Jam did nearly 30 years ago when the band tried — and failed — to route a tour without using Ticketmaster in protest of the company’s service fees. In December, country singer Zach Bryan released his album All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster (Live at Red Rocks) — the Denver-area amphitheater is ticketed by AXS, the Ticketmaster rival owned by the second-biggest North American promoter, AEG Presents — and took to social media: “I am so so tired of people saying things can’t be done about this massive issue while huge monopolies sit there stealing money from working class people.” Within weeks, he announced and sold out a 28-date tour, exclusively ticketed by AXS. “We sold all the tickets in 3 waves to actual fans, we hired teams to limit bots, and we sacrificed a lot of personal things to give real people, real seats,” Bryan posted afterward.
And in March, when fees for some dates on The Cure’s Ticketmaster-ticketed arena tour exceeded face-value prices, frontman Robert Smith called on the company to correct the matter — which it did in short order, issuing $10 credits to many purchasers.
Ticketing platforms in both the primary and secondary markets — which facilitate sales from rights holders and resale from other consumers, respectively — are experimenting with new features and working to keep prices in check. Billboard highlights some of the notable companies increasing competition in the sector.
AXS (primary and secondary markets)
Founded: 2011The Gist: Ticketmaster’s most significant U.S. competitor duplicates many of Ticketmaster’s strengths, including its ability to handle high-volume on-sales and a lottery system called Fair AXS. (AEG previously licensed Ticketmaster technology as a condition set by the U.S. Department of Justice in its approval of the 2010 Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger, but used other software to build AXS.) Following the 2019 merger of AEG Facilities and SMG, AEG now owns, manages or operates more than 350 venues, many of which use AXS for ticketing.
CashorTrade (secondary)
Founded: 2009The Gist: With roots in the jam-band community, CashorTrade eschews a first-come, first-served model, instead allowing buyers to plead their case to sellers, who are required to upload receipts to prove they’re selling at face value. Buyers can’t offer more than face value for tickets but can “creatively barter,” most often by pitching trades of other concert tickets or artist merchandise, in order to be selected. After The Cure’s tour went on sale, the band publicly endorsed CashorTrade and Twickets, a U.K.-based resale platform operating in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States, for resale of its tickets.
DICE (primary)
Founded: 2014The Gist: DICE entered the U.S. market in 2019 with a bold promise: to help eradicate scalping. Digital tickets are locked to a buyer’s smartphone, and back-end technology prevents the resale of tickets above face value. DICE also blocks tickets from the secondary market by allowing fans to return them to sold-out shows, which are then redistributed to customers on waitlists.
Lyte (supplementary)
Founded: 2013The Gist: Lyte works with primary ticketing platforms to eliminate scalping and get in-demand tickets to actual fans. Partners like See Tickets integrate Lyte’s technology to field ticket requests and credit card information prior to on-sales, allowing fans to return tickets that are then offered to preregistered fans at fair market price (which can exceed face value).
SeatGeek (primary, secondary)
Founded: 2009The Gist: SeatGeek established itself as a secondary ticketer similar to resale giant StubHub — and continues to expand its reach in that market, including through new resale deals with MLB and college-athletics ticketing giant Paciolan — but has since become the primary ticketer for a handful of NFL and NBA teams, Broadway theaters and other venues. (Major League Soccer and Brooklyn’s Barclays Center recently ended partnerships with SeatGeek in favor of Ticketmaster.) The ticketer also introduced SeatGeek Swap in 2021, which allows the return of eligible tickets, no questions asked, for credit at 100% of the purchase price.
See Tickets (primary, secondary)
Founded: 1991The Gist: Since opening a Los Angeles office in 2014, the U.K.-based ticketer has steadily grown, including working with boutique North American festivals and independent clubs and theaters. After becoming a National Independent Venue Association sponsor in 2020, See signed deals with 100 new indie venues and promoters in a 12-month period. The platform’s tools include fan-to-fan resale technology.
This story will appear in the April 1, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Robert Smith still hasn’t found a permanent cure for Ticketmaster’s ill-priced fees. After blasting the company earlier this month for applying exceptionally costly service charges to ticket sales for The Cure‘s upcoming tour, the frontman is now calling out the entertainment giant once again.
This time, the issue comes with the discovery of some tickets labeled by Ticketmaster as being “face value” in spite of the fact that they cost a lot more money than a standard ticket normally would, much less one supposedly charging a minimum amount. “I AM ASKING ABOUT THE WEIRD OVER PRICED ‘FACE VALUE’ TICKETS THAT ARE POPPING UP HERE AND THERE… X,” Smith tweeted on Tuesday (March 28).
For reference, one fan commented on the guitarist’s tweet with a screenshot of two “face value” tickets that cost nearly $1,400. “That’s nuts,” someone else replied to the fan. “I gave almost the same seat for Toronto and paid $160. In USD, that’s around $115!!!”
On Ticketmaster’s website, the face value ticket exchange is defined as “an artist-driven marketplace where fans can sell their tickets to other fans at face value.”
As the band gears up for its first trek in seven years, 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.
Afterward, 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.
See Smith’s tweet below.
I AM ASKING ABOUT THE WEIRD OVER PRICED ‘FACE VALUE’ TICKETS THAT ARE POPPING UP HERE AND THERE… X— ROBERT SMITH (@RobertSmith) March 29, 2023
That’s nuts. I gave almost the same seat for Toronto and paid $160. In USD, that’s around $115!!!— mejane🇨🇦🎶📈 (@mejanetoo) March 29, 2023