State Champ Radio ticketmaster
Page: 5
The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on Jan. 24 at 10 a.m. EST examining the ticketing industry and Ticketmaster’s handling of the Taylor Swift ticket sale, Senator Amy Klobuchar‘s (D-MN) office announced.
Titled “That’s The Ticket: Promoting Competition and Protecting Consumers in Live Entertainment,” the hearing will look at accusations of anti-competitive behavior in the ticketing space and examine the history of the 2010 Department of Justice consent decree governing the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster.
The merger has long been criticized by members of both parties with Klobuchar recently identifying the Swift crash as an example of how “Ticketmaster’s power in the primary ticket market insulates it from the competitive pressures that typically push companies to innovate and improve their services.”
The Nov. 15 sale crash, which affected both Ticketmaster and its competitor SeakGeek, was the result of massive demand from Taylor Swift fans and an illegal bot attack, Ticketmaster wrote in a Nov. 15 blog post.
Klobuchar, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, will be joined at the hearing by ranking member Mike Lee (R-UT) for the hearing before the full Senate Judiciary Committee with Chair Dick Durbin (D-IL) and incoming ranking member Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
“The issues within America’s ticketing industry were made painfully obvious when Ticketmaster’s website failed hundreds of thousands of fans hoping to purchase tickets for Taylor Swift’s new tour, but these problems are not new. For too long, consumers have faced high fees, long waits, and website failures, and Ticketmaster’s dominant market position means the company faces inadequate pressure to innovate and improve,” Klobuchar said in a statement. “At next week’s hearing, we will examine how consolidation in the live entertainment and ticketing industries harms customers and artists alike. Without competition to incentivize better services and fair prices, we all suffer the consequences.”
“American consumers deserve the benefit of competition in every market, from grocery chains to concert venues,” Lee added. “I look forward to exercising our subcommittee’s oversight authority to ensure that anticompetitive mergers and exclusionary conduct are not crippling an entertainment industry already struggling to recover from pandemic lockdowns.”
“It’s been more than a decade since Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation, and competition in the ticketing and live entertainment industries has only gotten worse. Too often, consumers are the ones who pay the price for this market failure,” said Durbin. “I look forward to this hearing to explore what led to this environment, as well as steps we can take to bring competition back to these industries in a way that puts fans and artists first.”
“I’m glad to see the committee will look into the Ticketmaster debacle,” said Graham. “I look forward to hearing more about how we got here, and identifying solutions.”
A witness list has not been released for the Jan. 24 hearing. A spokesperson for Ticketmaster did not comment when asked about the upcoming hearing.
Zach Bryan is making a statement. On Christmas, the singer-songwriter announced on social media that he had released a new live album titled All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster (Live From Red Rocks). He also told fans that he is taking a stand against high ticket prices, though he did not specifically call out Ticketmaster in his post, save for in the album title.
“Seems there is a massive issue with fair ticket prices to live shows lately. I have met kids at my shows who have paid upwards of four-hundred bucks to be there and I’m done with it,” the country star began his message. “I’ve decided to play a limited number of headline shows next year to which I’ve done all I can to make prices as cheap as possible and to prove to people tickets don’t have to cost $450 to see a good and honest show.” He added that he’ll also be playing “a few festivals which I have no control over.”
“I believe working class people should still be able to afford tickets to shows,” the “Something in the Orange” singer continued. He also encouraged fans to sign up for a new messaging service that will inform them about tour dates and concert tickets, as well as through which he’ll send merch drops and unreleased music.
“I am so tired of people saying things can’t be done about this massive issue,” he went on. “Also, to any songwriter trying to make ‘relatable music for the working class man or woman’ should pride themself on fighting for the people who listen to the words they’re singing.”
Bryan closed with some good news for fans eager to see him live in concert. “A tour announcement is coming soon and I’m sorry it has taken so long,” he shared. “Just did everything I possibly could to make tickets more affordable.”
Billboard has reached out to Ticketmaster for comment.
This isn’t the first time that the country singer has shared his thoughts about the company. In recent weeks, he has tweeted about Ticketmaster, often with the hashtag #allmyhomieshateticketmaster.
All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster — recorded at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheater on Nov. 3 — is on streaming services now, and is Bryan’s third release of the year. He dropped studio album American Heartbreak in May, and the Summertime Blues EP in July. In addition to wrapping 2022 with a surprise live album release, the singer-songwriter came in at No. 1 on Billboard‘s Top New Country Artists and Top New Rock & Alternative Artists charts, and No. 2 on the all-genre Year-End Top New Artists tally.
Stream All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster (Live From Red Rocks) below:
Less than three weeks after two dozen Taylor Swift fans sued Live Nation over Ticketmaster’s disastrous presale of tickets to her Eras Tour in November, another similar lawsuit has been filed against the concert giant in California federal court.
Filed Tuesday (Dec. 20), the class-action lawsuit, brought by Swift fan Michelle Sterioff, accuses Live Nation and subsidiary Ticketmaster of violating federal antitrust and unfair competition laws and “intentionally and purposefully” misleading “millions of fans into believing” Ticketmaster would prevent bots and scalpers from participating in presales for the tour.
Similar to the lawsuit filed earlier this month, Tuesday’s lawsuit alleges that Live Nation and Ticketmaster, which merged in 2010, represent a monopoly in both the primary and secondary ticketing markets and have used that alleged monopoly power “in a predatory, exclusionary, and anticompetitive manner.” According to the complaint, this monopoly is used to charge “supracompetitive” ticketing fees that can increase the price of tickets “by 20-80%” over their face value.
“Ticketmaster…has violated the policy, spirit, and letter of [antitrust] laws by imposing agreements and policies at the retail and wholesale level that have prevented effective price competition across a wide swath of online ticket sales,” the complaint reads, adding that the company “is only interested in taking every dollar it can from a captive public.”
Sterioff claims that she registered for the Eras Tour presale on Nov. 1, 2022, and “relied” on Ticketmaster’s claim that its Verified Fan program “would ‘level the playing field’” so that more tickets would go to real fans over bots. However, she claims she was unable to secure a ticket during the presale on Nov. 15 or Nov. 16, forcing her to purchase tickets “through an alternate secondary ticketing service provider” after Ticketmaster canceled the general public sale, citing widespread service delays and website crashes as millions of fans tried -– and many failed –- to buy tickets.
Additionally, Sterioff says the amount she paid for her ticket on the secondary market was subject to Ticketmaster’s “monopolistic prices” due to the company’s dominance in the secondary ticketing market as well. She cites a Ticketmaster technology that limits ticket purchasers from transferring tickets unless they’re resold through the company’s secondary ticketing platform — essentially making it all but impossible to purchase a Swift ticket outside the Ticketmaster ecosystem. That allows the company “to charge monopolistic ticketing fees every time a single ticket is resold,” the complaint adds.
There are a total of eight counts listed in Sterioff’s complaint, including violation of California’s Consumers Legal Remedies Act; intentional misrepresentation; common law fraud; fraudulent inducement; antitrust violations; violation of California’s Unfair Competition Law; violation of California’s False Advertising Law, and quasi-contract/restitution/unjust enrichment.
Sterioff is asking the court for injunctive relief, statutory damages, punitive or exemplary damages, costs of bringing the lawsuit and more.
Reps for Live Nation and Ticketmaster did not immediately return a request for comment.
In the wake of the Swift ticketing controversy, Ticketmaster apologized to fans and pinned the blame on a “staggering number of bot attacks” and “unprecedented traffic.” But that explanation has seemingly not been enough for many of the company’s critics, who have resurfaced longstanding complaints about the outsized power Ticketmaster and Live Nation have wielded in the market for live music since they merged.
In November, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and her counterpart on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), jointly announced they would be holding a hearing to examine the effects of consolidation on the ticketing industry. Live Nation and Ticketmaster are also reportedly under investigation by the Justice Department over whether the companies represent an illegal monopoly, though that probe is said to have predated the Swift incident.
When Taylor Swift sells the remaining 170,000 tickets for her 52-date Eras tour later this month, the U.S. trek will have generated $591 million in sales, Billboard estimates. The average ticket price is $215, according to concert business sources.
This total will make Swift the highest-grossing female touring artist of all time, according to the Billboard Boxscore chart, topping current title holder Madonna whose Sticky & Sweet Tour (of 2008 and 2009) currently holds the No. 1 slot with a gross of $407 million. Swift’s U.S. tour will also put her in fourth place on the all-time Top Tours chart, which is currently led by Ed Sheeran, whose 2017-2019 Divide shows grossed a total of $776.2 million.
Normally with a tour of this scale, artists share some revenue with a promoter and an agent. In this case, Swift will presumably keep a higher share of revenue, because she’s not represented by one of the major booking agencies and because independent promoter Louis Messina is booking the entire tour and providing some of the services an agency normally would.
Other companies involved in the tour won’t do as well as they normally do, either. Ticketmaster and SeatGeek, which handled sales for the tour, normally allow ticket buyers to sell tickets on their secondary markets and take a percentage of that revenue. (Ticketmaster handled sales for 47 shows, while SeatGeek sold seats for the remaining five.) But Swift would not allow the companies who handled primary ticket sales to also sell secondary market tickets. As well, Swift asked Ticketmaster to help make sure tickets went to fans, rather than scalpers, and the company says it used its Verified Fan technology to reduce the number of tickets on resale sites by 75%.
That’s an expensive decision. Ticketmaster makes a much higher margin on resale tickets than primary tickets, since it keeps all of the fees it charges — typically 10% of the sale price for the seller and another 20% for the buyer. The company still charges a 25% service fee for all primary ticket sales. However, it only keeps a small percentage of that money, $3.50 to $5 per ticket, which for this tour will come out to about $7.6 million to $10.8 million. The rest of the fees normally go to venues and promoters. (Ticketmaster, like most ticketing companies, also charges 2.75% for credit card processing, of which it keeps about 10% and pays the rest to credit card companies. The Eras tour generated approximately $13.8 million in these fees, Billboard estimates.) All told, by the time Ticketmaster sells the remaining 170,000 tickets, the company’s total revenue will add up to between $9 million and $12.9 million.
Ticketmaster’s efforts to fight scalpers means that relatively few tickets wound up on the secondary market – but the ones that did are expensive. A month after the presale, on Dec. 14, the average resale ticket price was $1,425, according to TiqIQ, which tracks secondary ticket sales across multiple marketplaces.
TiqIQ estimates that about 1,100 resale tickets are available per show, out of an average of about 50,000. At an average price of $1,425, that would work out to about $1.6 million worth of tickets per show on the secondary market. Assuming that Ticketmaster would have captured about 15%–20% of those purchases, based on 2018 estimates by the United States Government Accountability Office, that means that the company could have brought in an additional $12.5 million to $16.4 million in revenue, of which Ticketmaster would have kept $3.8 million to $5 million in fees, if Swift had allowed the company to sell tickets on its own secondary market.
SeatGeek, which has a 12% share of the secondary market according to its April earnings report, agreed to turn off resale for the five shows it ticketed on the tour, but not the 47 shows sold by Ticketmaster. (Ticketmaster blocked secondary sales for the SeatGeek shows.) That means SeatGeek could make about $9 million from the Ticketmaster shows it lists on its secondary market, although it missed out on about $960,000 in revenue for not allowing secondary sales on the five shows for which it initially sold tickets.
Working with Swift has benefits beyond the financial, of course. In addition to the prestige of working with an artist of that stature — and enduring the embarrassment of the flubs around the Nov. 15 presale — Ticketmaster will presumably see an increase in app downloads and usage of its digital ticket platform, which has been a priority for the company.
After massive technical problems marred the Nov 15. pre-sale for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, forcing some fans to queue for several hours to buy tickets or fail to buy them entirely, Ticketmaster is changing tactics to sell the remaining 170,000 seats for the artist’s 52 shows. The company, hoping to avoid long fan wait times and site crushing web traffic from bots and Swifties, is going back to an older technology: The 20-year-old Ticketstoday platform, modeled after The Grateful Dead’s own fan club system and still used by jam bands like Phish and Ween. The system has been updated in recent years and even deployed for artists like Ed Sheeran and Madonna, although it’s never handled 170,000 tickets for a single sale.
The move, coupled with Ticketmaster’s agreement to not participate in secondary ticket sales for the Eras tour, shows how eager ticketing companies are to work with a mega earner like Swift while avoiding the crush of traffic that disastrously caused widespread disruptions to her Nov. 15 presale. The record-breaking sale is now the subject of multiple congressional inquires around the Live Nation-owned company. These include a request from Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) to Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate the crash and a call from her counterpart on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), to hold a hearing on the “lack of competition in ticketing markets.”
The decision to use Ticketstoday — originally built for Dave Mathews Band’s fanclub platform MusicToday by manager and Red Light Management founder Coran Capshaw in the early 2000s and sold to Live Nation in 2008 — would significantly reduce fan wait times and the potential for another site crash by gating off the most vulnerable parts of the ticketing platform to uninvited fans and bot attacks thought to be responsible for the disruption issues. Instead of making fans queue up again to order their tickets, this will essentially assign tickets to them based on their preferences.
Despite receiving an unprecedented level of negative publicity, Billboard estimates Swift’s Nov. 15 presale generated approximately $554 million in sales for Ticketmaster (which ticketed 47 dates on the Eras tour) and Seat Geek (which ticketed five dates as the primary ticketing company for the Arizona Cardinals and Dallas Cowboys).
The 170,000 remaining tickets not sold during the presale have a cumulative face value worth $37 million, Billboard estimates. Once Swift completes the sale of her remaining tickets for the Eras Tour, Billboard estimates that she will have generated $591 million in the U.S. alone. Based on projection, Taylor would easily capture the title of Billboard Boxscore’s highest-grossing female touring artist of all time, topping the current title holder Madonna who’s Sticky & Sweet Tour (2008-09) currently holds the No. 1 slot grossing $407 million, and the number four slot on the all-times tour chart, currently topped by Ed Sheeran, whose Divide tour from 2017-2019 grossed $776.2 million.
Typically, Ticketstoday helps artists sell a small portion of their available tickets – usually about 8% per show — directly to their most loyal fans, much like a lottery system. Fans receive an email about a limited number of VIP or high demand tickets available for sale for an upcoming show, and then those who want to buy the tickets select a pricing option and provide their credit card information in advance. If there are more fans wanting tickets than tickets available, a digital lottery is held and the fans selected have their credit cards automatically charged.
While Ticketmaster stayed online during the attack and sold a record 2.2 million tickets in 12 hours, the site could barely handle the traffic created by 14 million fans and billions of bots the company claimed hit the site. This system using Ticketstoday will pace out the sales, and they will be processed away from the public, avoiding any similar potential issues. To determine which fans would get to participate in the upcoming sale, Ticketmaster used its Verified Fan platform . Fans who bought tickets to the 2020 Lover Festival, canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, have been prioritized, as well as those who bought select Taylor Swift merchandise, like a “F— the Patriachy” keychain that went on sale in August. Participating fans will be sent an email requesting their credit card number and choice of tour seating options representing various price ranges and seat locations. Ticketmaster will then work to match fans with their purchase request and charge their card on file. The entire process will take about four weeks and is expected to be completed by Dec. 23.
As 2022 comes to a close, the music business can look back on another hectic year: turnover at the top levels of several big companies; record-breaking successes in several sectors of the industry; and some major headlines coming from sometimes unexpected places, all of which captured the attention of the music business over the past nearly 12 months. Here are 10 big stories and trends that helped define the year in the industry.
The Executive Turntable
The end of the year is always time for turnover, and the final stretch of 2022 has seen more of that than usual. The biggest story of all, however, is a change atop the Warner Music Group, with Stephen Cooper exiting after a successful 11-year run that saw the major double its revenue and boost its market share while taking the company public once again. He’ll be replaced by YouTube’s Robert Kyncl in February, in a move that has been widely seen as a nod toward the tech-based present and future of the music biz, particularly at WMG. Though changes atop the major groups are relatively rare, that was far from the only transition this year: Def Jam, Island and Capitol all welcomed new chairmen/CEOs, with Tunji Balogun, the duo of Justin Eshak and Imran Majid and Michelle Jubelirer taking over the trio of UMG companies, respectively. John Esposito also is transitioning into a new chairman emeritus role at Warner Music Nashville, handing the day-to-day reins to his longtime heirs apparent Ben Kline and Cris Lacy, who will take over in January. Warner also integrated 300 Entertainment into the 300 Elektra Entertainment Group, with Kevin Liles in charge, then placed it under the umbrella of the newly-formed Atlantic Music Group, with Julie Greenwald at the helm. And just recently, Motown chairman/CEO Ethiopia Habtemariam surprised many in the industry by announcing her intention to step down, at a time when the label is in its best shape in years, with a successor yet to be named. The C-Suites have been spinning much more than usual this year.
The Ticketmaster-Taylor Swift Meltdown
Cross Taylor Swift, and her fans, at your peril. The biggest artist in the world, whose latest album Midnights easily cleared the biggest streaming week globally of 2022, had set a presale for her first tour in five years, with tickets slated to become available on Nov. 15 through Ticketmaster. But the company badly, and somewhat inexplicably, misjudged the level of demand that existed for Swift’s tour. Long wait times, astronomical prices and service outages tanked the pre-sale, with billions of bots, according to the company, flooding the site and resulting in 3.5 billion requests to access it — four times the previous high water mark. That resulted in millions of frustrated, ticket-less fans. Which would have been bad enough, if it didn’t spark a firestorm that has yet to abate and is showing no signs of doing so. (As Billboard’s Glenn Peoples wrote, “Ticketmaster is one of the few non-partisan issues in America in 2022.”) There is now a Justice Department investigation into whether Live Nation has abused its market share in the live business (which was said to pre-date the Taylor tour, though it came to light in the wake of the problem) and a Senate antitrust panel hearing on the docket, as well as several state-level probes, and a lawsuit from more than two dozen fans accusing the company of fraud and “anticompetitive conduct.” It’s unclear if changes are on the horizon, but it has proven a headache of massive proportions.
Top-Level Touring Success
The headlines have never been rosier: Live Nation and Ticketmaster reported record-breaking quarters. Bad Bunny’s World’s Hottest Tour became the first ever to average a $10 million gross per show. Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour closed in on the record for highest-grossing tour of all time. In short, it was a great year to be in the live music business — if you’re one of the biggest artists or promoters in the world. For a lot of others, the outlook was much less rosy: a “nightmare” of supply chain issues, COVID-related cancellations and postponements, rising costs and routing difficulties all combined to make it much more difficult for a lot of artists to get back out on the road this year. It is, and will continue to be, a process to get back to normal.
Synchs On Fire
A well-placed synch has always been a big revenue driver, particularly for legacy acts, but this past year the combination of prestige television and the TikTok algorithm combined to super-charge some of the biggest synchs to not just big bucks, but new chart highs, too. This past year, the biggest story on this front was Kate Bush’s 1985 track “Running Up That Hill,” which received a high-profile synch in Stranger Things and simply took off, surging into the top five of the Hot 100, becoming the oldest song to reach No. 1 on the Streaming Songs chart and returning to the top 10 of the Alternative Airplay chart after a record 28-year absence, while doubling its label revenue in the first two weeks after the series aired. And that wasn’t even the only Stranger Things-related synch to blow up: Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” ballooned 400% in streams in the days after its synch in the season finale. Songs featured in Euphoria, The Batman and Thor exploded in value, while the RIAA’s midyear report saw synch revenue growing faster than ever. Most recently, The Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck,” with a placement in Netflix’s Wednesday, saw its revenue grow more than 8,000% in a single week.
Ebbs and Flows of Catalog Market
The red-hot catalog market has been the talk of the business for almost half a decade at this point, but over the past year things started to change in some unexpected ways due to rising interest rates, the dwindling number of truly elite catalogs available and the faltering of some of the sector’s most prominent players. And still there were big wins, including Sting’s deal with UMPG that Billboard estimated could be worth well north of $300 million, Stephen Stills’ sale of a controlling interest in over 1,000 songs to Irving Azoff’s Iconic Artists Group and UMG’s purchase of Frank Zappa’s catalog in the region of $30 million. Meanwhile, Brookfield dropped $2 billion into Primary Wave, which promptly acquired the catalogs of Joey Ramone ($10 million) and Huey Lewis & the News ($20 million). Concord swung a package deal for the Genesis catalog as well as those of its individual members for somewhere around $350 million, and new players like Litmus Music came into the market with $500 million to spread around (some of which just went towards Keith Urban’s master recordings). So despite a “challenging environment” and an end to the catalog “feeding frenzy,” there’s still a lot of juice left in those old songs (and a big Pink Floyd-sized catalog potentially in the offing).
The Rush Toward Services
While one sector of the business is running with arms wide open toward catalog ownership, another sector is running just as firmly in the opposite direction: toward services, or partnering with artists and labels to provide a backbone of support to help them achieve their goals without giving up ownership through distribution, marketing, publicity, promotions, royalty claiming and other services. The independent distribution space has generally been a viable business model for decades, but the rush into services ramped up in the past year. Companies like SoundCloud, TikTok, Tencent and Downtown embraced the shift with realigned business models, joining relatively new entrants to the space like UnitedMasters, Stem and Utopia. Many of the major labels (Interscope, Republic, 300) also launched their own distro subsidiaries in an attempt to grow their market share in an increasingly indie world. For some, however, the shift was less of a slam dunk than they may have envisioned, with a tough business model that relies on scale colliding with the increasingly-murky corners of the digital music industry –resulting in fraud, financial challenges and lukewarm responses from the market.
The Onset of Crypto Winter
Early in the year, Web3 projects exploded in what seemed like every sector of the music business, including all three major labels along with companies like Spotify, Coachella, Ticketmaster, Gibson, the Grammys and Death Row Records — not to mention artists like Snoop Dogg, Steve Aoki, Pharrell and Keith Richards. Universal launched an NFT band, Warner partnered with a slew of web3 companies, Snoop promised to buy Death Row and make it into an NFT record label; the possibilities seemed endless. But the seas proved to be much choppier than many had expected, and a series of selloffs and financial failures (as well as recession and inflation fears) brought in what many called the Crypto Winter, with sales and enthusiasm beginning to ebb as the year went on. By the time the second-biggest crypto exchange, FTX, spectacularly failed in November, there had been a 70%-80% cool-off in the market, to the point where the once-ubiquitous format seemed ready for another hibernation while the industry tries to figure out how best to take advantage of the new-ish technology. Expect the ebbs and flows to continue until we’re all in an acronym haze.
BTS Break Rattles Biz — And HYBE Stock
By just about any metric, BTS has been one of the biggest and most formidable acts of any genre in the past several years, racking up No. 1 hits, big-name collaborations, massive box office grosses and accounting for nearly one-third of the entire K-pop market in the U.S. since 2021, according to Luminate. So the group’s decision to take some time off for solo projects was a blow to the group’s management company, label and agency HYBE, which saw its stock, already down 45% for the year at that point, sink 27% in the week after the announcement. (Shares recovered a bit after closing at 145,000 won following the announcement, hitting a low of 107,000 on Oct. 13 and rebounding to 157,000 as of Dec. 12.) With the group members facing the prospect of mandatory service in the South Korean military, HYBE is facing an uncertain outlook for 2023, despite third-quarter growth and the possibility of positive returns from BTS members’ solo projects. For K-pop fans, however, there is room for other companies to step in: JYP Entertainment has had chart success with TWICE and Stray Kids multiple times this year, SM Entertainment’s BLACKPINK scored a No. 1 album in October and Big Hit Entertainment has generated success with Tomorrow X Together. While there’s plenty of opportunity in the K-pop market, the road ahead is uncertain for HYBE, a company that not too long again was a slam dunk.
Despite Complications, the Business is Thriving
It’s been a complicated year for the business overall, as the return from COVID has been trickier than expected, breaking new artists has become harder than ever and overarching financial issues like inflation and the possibility of a recession have cooled what had been a white-hot market. But despite those challenges, the music business has been growing on almost all fronts for another year. The touring business has already been covered here, but the U.S. recorded music business also saw on-demand audio streams surpass 1 trillion for the first time ever — representing a 611% increase from 2015, according to Luminate. Despite supply chain issues that continue to bedevil labels and manufacturers, vinyl sales passed $1 billion in revenue for the first time since the mid-1980s. At the midyear mark, they were up more than 22% — well before Taylor Swift’s Midnights set the record for largest vinyl sales week since Luminate began tracking data in 1991. Overall consumption is up another 9.2% year over year so far in 2022, with no signs of slowing down and with record companies increasing their guidance for investors in 2023. Amid cutbacks and hiring freezes in tech and media, the music business stil appears to be on strong footing.
It’s Still a TikTok World
Love it, hate it, rue its influence or spend hours scrolling it, the industry was as obsessed with TikTok in 2022 as it’s ever been, and the ByteDance-owned social streaming behemoth has leaned further than ever into its connections to the music biz — for better or worse, depending on whom you ask. The service has been behind the massive success of hits both old (Kate Bush’s “Running Up that Hill,” Frank Ocean’s “Lost”) and new (Lizzo’s “About Damn Time,” Bebe Rexha and David Guetta’s “I’m Good”) while helping break new artists like Em Beihold and Cafuné. But the labels’ love affair with TikTok has, over the past year, cooled down, as breaking a hit has become more complicated and the marketing pluses that it offered have fizzled. A distribution play from the platform called SoundOn was met with a lukewarm response, while a ByteDance streaming service, Resso, has rolled out in select markets, with rumors that it could come to the U.S. soon — if TikTok can ease the concerns of U.S. officials. And that comes as the frustration over low payouts and song leaks have some executives warning of a repeat of the early days of MTV and YouTube, when music content was regularly used to promote a fledgling service without commensurate compensation. Still, the biggest song on the platform in 2022 — a nine-year-old track from Swedish sad boy Yung Lean — grew its stream count by over 1,000%, and TikTok is still the single biggest proving ground for singles in the current digital climate. What to make of TikTok in 2022? How about…everything?
Replying to mounting criticism from the public and Mexican officials, Ticketmaster Mexico issued a formal statement on Monday (Dec. 12) following a ticketing fiasco that led to hundreds being denied access to Bad Bunny’s Mexico City shows Dec. 9 and 10.
“As has been reported, on Friday an unprecedented number of fake tickets were presented at the entrance of [Estadio Azteca], purchased outside our official channels,” wrote Ticketmaster in its release, posted on Twitter late Monday. “In addition to causing confusion among entrance officials, this situation generated a malfunction in our system, which for moments at a time, couldn’t properly identify legitimate tickets. It’s important to underscore that there was no oversale of tickets. Ticketmaster took the technological and logistical measures needed to ensure what happened on Friday would not happen on Saturday.”
Mexico’s Federal Attorney’s Office for Consumers (PROFECO), reported that more than 1,600 people were denied entry to Bad Bunny’s Friday show, leading to crowds of angry ticket-holders clamoring outside the gates of Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca. At the time, Ticketmaster attributed the issue to fake tickets that caused their system to malfunction. On Saturday, just 110 were denied entry.
PROFECO, however, said the ticketing problem for the Puerto Rican superstar’s shows was triggered by an “oversale” of tickets and that Ticketmaster would be fined as a result. “The difference between those defrauded in the first and second concert is proof of it. 1,600 tickets in the first concert… and 110 in the second”, PROFECO head Ricardo Sheffield explained on TV program Aguila o sol.
The fine for Ticketmaster México could amount to up to 10% of that company’s total sales in 2021, Sheffield said.
“Ticketmaster claimed they were counterfeit, but they were all issued by them,” Sheffield said in an interview on Saturday with Radio Fórmula.
PROFECO’s investigation determined that many tickets claimed as false were indeed legitimate and had been purchased through legitimate channels, according to Sheffield.
In its new missive, Ticketmaster says the Bad Bunny shows were the most in-demand ever in the country’s history, with 4.5 million people attempting to purchase just 120,000 available seats for both Azteca dates. The company said it’s collaborating “openly and widely” with the investigation and will refund ticket buyers in addition to paying them the 20% indemnization mandated by law.
Read full statement in Spanish below:
Ticketmaster has technology that can prevent the type of fraud that allegedly impacted entry to the show, but so far it has only been deployed in the United States. The technology, known as SafeTix, digitizes tickets and eliminates easy to duplicate barcodes that can be resold to multiple people. It’s unclear when the technology will be available in countries outside of the U.S.
Ticketmaster Mexico had been owned and operated by OCESA-CIE since the 1980s but last year Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation finalized its acquisition of Ticketmaster Mexico, transitioning the company from a license holder to a Ticketmaster subsidiary. Ticketmaster Mexico is forecast to sell 20 million tickets this year.
Massive overselling of tickets for the last two concerts of Bad Bunny’s World’s Hottest Tour in Mexico City this weekend led to hundred of people being denied entry to the superstar’s shows and will have million-dollar consequences for Ticketmaster Mexico, according to Mexican authorities.
The head of Mexico’s Federal Attorney’s Office for Consumers (PROFECO), Ricardo Sheffield, told the Televisa network on Sunday that those affected must receive a 100% refund plus a 20% compensation, and that the company will also be fined.
In a statement, Ticketmaster México acknowledged on Saturday that “the access problems were the result of the presentation of an unprecedented number of counterfeit tickets, which caused an unusual crowd of people and an intermittent operation of our system” which “generated confusion and made entrance to the stadium complicated, with the unfortunate consequence that some legitimate tickets were denied entry.”
Sheffield confirmed the ticketing problem for the Puerto Rican super star’s shows was triggered by an “oversale” of tickets. A total of 1,600 faulty tickets were reported for the first concert Dec. 9, and 110 for the second on Dec. 10. Both shows were at Estadio Azteca. Organizers said some 80,000 people attended each night.
“The difference between those defrauded in the first and second concert is proof of it. 1,600 tickets in the first concert… and 110 in the second”, Sheffield explained on TV program Aguila o sol.
The fine for Ticketmaster México could amount to up to 10% of that company’s total sales in 2021, the official said.
“Ticketmaster claimed they were counterfeit, but they were all issued by them,” Sheffield said in an interview on Saturday with Radio Fórmula.
According to the Mexican official, in its investigation, PROFECO determined that many tickets claimed as false were indeed legitimate and had been purchased through legitimate channels.
Those affected are also preparing a class action suit against the company. PROFECO opened an investigation and invited those who had irregularities with their tickets for Bad Bunny and other major events to file a complaint.
“As we are a fiscal authority, if they don’t want to pay of their own will, we will seize their accounts then, and they will pay because they have to,” said Sheffield.
The ticket issue delayed Bad Bunny’s show on Friday for almost an hour, while a crowd of hundreds outside Estadio Azteca demanded an explanation. Some people climbed through the main gate of the compound in an attempt to gain entry but were stopped by law enforcement. On Saturday, PROFECO announced plans to assist those affected.
Billboard Español reached out to both Ocesa and Ticketmaster Mexico for comment on Friday and Monday, but had not received a reply by press time. On Saturday, Ocesa sent Billboard the press release issued from Ticketmaster Mexico about what had happened at Estadio Atzeca the night before. Last year, Live Nation acquired 51% of the operations of the Mexican company Ocesa and Ticketmaster México.
Cancellations or duplications of tickets for concerts operated by Ticketmaster México and concert promoter Ocesa have increased in recent months for massive concerts, including those of Daddy Yankee, Harry Styles and Dua Lipa, according to complaints from users of the popular ticket sales platform.
The situation in Mexico comes after fans of pop star Taylor Swift collectively sued Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation in the United States for the chaotic ticket sales of her The Eras Tour. Thousands of the singer’s followers were unable to get tickets for her concerts.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) is following up last week’s open letter to Live Nation over “dramatic service failures” during the Taylor Swift presale with a hearing on competition across the ticketing industry. The senator and her across-the-aisle counterpart on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), jointly announced the hearing, with a date and witness list forthcoming.
“Last week, the competition problem in ticketing markets was made painfully obvious when Ticketmaster’s website failed hundreds of thousands of fans hoping to purchase concert tickets,” said Klobuchar, without mentioning Swift. “The high fees, site disruptions and cancellations that customers experienced shows how Ticketmaster’s dominant market position means the company does not face any pressure to continually innovate and improve.”
Klobuchar said the hearing will examine the effects of consolidation across ticketing — namely that a lack of competition suppresses the need to improve services and maintain fair pricing.
Lee added that consumers “deserve the benefit of competition in every market, from grocery chains to concert venues. I look forward to exercising our Subcommittee’s oversight authority to ensure that anticompetitive mergers and exclusionary conduct are not crippling an entertainment industry already struggling to recover from pandemic lockdowns.”
Aside from a possible grilling by U.S. senators, Live Nation and Ticketmaster are said to be under investigation by the Justice Department as to whether the company maintains an illegal monopoly over the live event ticketing ecosystem. The probe, according to The New York Times, predates this current debacle involving Swift’s tour presale.
Ticketmaster has apologized for the debacle, which started Nov. 15 when millions of Swift fans overwhelmed a presale for her Eras Tour — causing site crashes and hours-long waits, with many fans left empty-handed and — possibly newly engaged in politics. Ticketmaster went on to cancel the general sale as well.
“I apologize to all our fans. We are working hard on this,” Liberty Media CEO and Live Nation chairman Greg Maffei said in an appearance on CNBC last Thursday. “Building capacity for peak demand is something we attempt to do, but this exceeded every expectation.”
Swift’s tour is actually being promoted by Live Nation competitor AEG, which has told Billboard it “didn’t have a choice” in terms of ticketing sales and distribution because of Ticketmaster’s “exclusive deals with the vast majority of venues on the Eras tour.”
Ticketmaster and Live Nation have long been dogged by accusations that they exert an unfair dominance over the market for live concerts, particularly since they merged in 2010 to create their current structure. The combined entity has operated for its entire existence under a so-called consent decree imposed by the DOJ when it approved the merger. Under the decree, Live Nation is prohibited from retaliating against venues that refuse to use Ticketmaster. Those restrictions were set to expire in 2020 but were extended by five years in 2019 after the DOJ accused Live Nation of repeatedly violating the decree.
This is The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings, and all the fun stuff in between. This week: Live Nation faces potential legal fallout from Ticketmaster’s Taylor Swift fiasco, Journey bandmates sue each other over an American Express account, Mariah Carey loses a bid for ‘Queen of Christmas’ trademarks, and much more.
THE BIG STORY: Taylor Swift … Trust Buster?
A week removed from Ticketmaster’s disastrous presale for Taylor Swift’s upcoming Eras Tour, criticism of parent company Live Nation isn’t getting any quieter – and the threat of legal repercussions is growing.Live Nation has apologized to fans and pinned the blame on a “staggering number of bot attacks” and “unprecedented traffic.” And whether or not the star really was forced to use Ticketmaster is a complicated question, as Billboard’s Dave Brooks writes.But the debacle, which saw widespread service delays and website crashes as millions of fans tried (and many failed) to buy tickets for Swift’s 2023 Eras Tour, has nonetheless resurfaced some uncomfortable legal questions for the all-powerful concert giant.Since they merged in 2010, Ticketmaster and Live Nation have been dogged by accusations that they form a near-monopoly in the market for live concerts, potentially violating federal antitrust laws. Federal regulators at the U.S. Department of Justice approved that deal, but only after Live Nation signed a so-called consent decree that aimed to allay fears that they might abuse their dominant position. Among other things, the agreement prohibits the company from retaliating against venues or acts that refuse to use Ticketmaster. Those rules were set to expire in 2020, but were extended by five years in 2019 after the DOJ accused Live Nation of repeatedly violating the decree.In the wake of the Swift fiasco, those same monopoly questions are back in the spotlight – and some lawmakers want more than just another extension of the consent decree.On Tuesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) blasted Live Nation as a “monopoly” and called for regulators to “break them up.” Two days later, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), the chair of the Senate subcommittee for antitrust issues, warned that the company’s market share “insulates it from the competitive pressures that typically push companies to innovate and improve their services.”Then on Friday, 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. Reacting to that news, Klobuchar and two other Democratic senators on Monday urged the Justice Department to take hard action if they discover more violations, including “unwinding the Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger and breaking up the company.”“This may be the only way to truly protect consumers, artists, and venue operators and to restore competition in the ticketing market,” the senators wrote.Such action might have been unthinkable just a few years ago, amid a decades-long period of relatively lax antitrust enforcement that saw airlines and mobile providers (and yes, music companies) merging into ever-larger conglomerations. But the Biden-era Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission have embarked on an aggressive new effort to crack down on such mega-mergers, including successfully blocking book publisher Penguin Random House from buying up rival Simon & Schuster.Beyond the Justice Department probe, other legal threats also potentially loom for Live Nation. The attorneys general of Tennessee, North Carolina, Nevada and Pennsylvania have all launched investigations into whether state consumer protection and antitrust laws were violated, including a Tennessee state law that aims to fight the use of automated “bots” on ticketing websites.And don’t forget about class actions. Live Nation is already facing an existing case that accuses the company of “blatant, anti-consumer behavior,” and the rest of the plaintiffs bar could be eager to try similar cases in the wake of such a high-profile snafu. At least one group of Swift-loving lawyers is already brainstorming how to bring cases.Faced with all that, can Live Nation shake it off? Stay tuned…
Other top stories this week…
JOURNEY’S CREDIT CARD CLASH – Journey guitarist Neal Schon filed a lawsuit against bandmate Jonathan Cain over allegations that he’s blocking access to “critical” financial records for the band’s American Express account, through which “millions” in Journey money has allegedly flowed: “This action is brought to turn the lights on, so to speak, and obtain critical financial information Schon has been trying to obtain but has been denied.” The case is the third legal battle among Journey members in the past two years, but the first to divide Schon and Cain — the only core members remaining in the band from Journey’s heyday.I FEEL SUED – Primary Wave and the estate of James Brown were hit with a lawsuit claiming their $90 million catalog sale last year violated an agreement that the iconic singer had struck decades earlier with another company. The case was filed by David Pullman’s Pullman Group (best known for creating so-called Bowie Bonds in the 1990s) over allegations that the blockbuster sale breached a contract that Pullman company struck with Brown way back in 1999, which allegedly guaranteed the company the right to broker any such deal in the future.YOUNG THUG GANG TRIAL SET FOR JANUARY – A Georgia judge refused to delay the closely-watched criminal case against Young Thug, Gunna and others accused of participating in an Atlanta gang, meaning their trial is now locked in to start on January 9. Prosecutors wanted to move the trial back by nearly three months because a few defendants had not yet been appointed a lawyer. But with Young Thug, Gunna and many others stuck in jail until trial, defense lawyers strongly opposed the delay: “It is unjust that [Young Thug] rots in the county jail and … is being required to wait on the appointment of counsel for co-indictees.”DUA LIPA RIPS COPYRIGHT SUIT – Attorneys for Dua Lipa asked a federal judge to quickly toss out a lawsuit claiming she stole her smash hit song “Levitating” from a little-known reggae track called “Live Your Life.” Florida band Artikal Sound System sued the star for copyright infringement last year, arguing the songs were so similar it was “highly unlikely that ‘Levitating’ was created independently.” But in their response last week, Lipa’s attorneys said those allegations were full of “vague, boilerplate labels and conclusions” and “devoid of a shred of factual detail.”MARIAH CANT GET ‘CHRISTMAS’ TRADEMARKS – The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected Mariah Carey’s application to register “Queen of Christmas” as a federal trademark, siding instead with Elizabeth Chan, another singer who says she’s used the same name for years. Repped pro bono by BigLaw attorneys, Chan had argued that no single singer or company should be able to lock up the title. “It is wrong for an individual to attempt to own and monopolize a nickname like ‘Queen of Christmas’ for the purposes of abject materialism,” Chan said in a statement after the ruling.R. KELLY MANAGER SENTENCED – Donnell Russell, R. Kelly’s friend and former manager, was sentenced to 20 months in prison after pleading guilty to charges that he stalked one of Kelly’s sexual abuse victims in an effort to keep her silent. Prosecutors said Russell used “reprehensible” tactics against the unnamed victim after she filed a civil lawsuit against the disgraced singer in 2018, including threatening messages to her mother and leaking explicit photos online.SLACKER ON HOOK FOR HUGE ROYALTY JUDGMENT – A federal judge refused to undo his own earlier ruling that Slacker owes nearly $10 million in unpaid music royalties to SoundExchange, despite the steamer’s warnings that the huge judgment could trigger financial ruin for the company. SoundExchange urged the judge to ignore those pleas and last week he obliged – ruling that the seven-figure judgment was simply the result of an agreement that Slacker itself had signed.
