Ticketmaster killed the radio star

“The public brought this all on themselves … I have no sympathy for people who complain about high ticket prices… They have contributed to artists having to make all their money on tour. Artists and the market set prices, and you can’t pay the price of a Motel 6 and stay at the Four Seasons.” —Fred Rosen, former CEO of Ticketmaster

On the first night of her Australian Eras Tour, Taylor Swift performed to a record 96,000 people at the Melbourne Cricket Ground – the biggest concert of her career – breaking her previous record of 74,000. Aside from less sequined jumpsuits and glittery fedoras, MCG looked more or less the same 31 years ago for Madonna — the last artist to headline the venue before Swift — during her 1993 “Girlie Show” tour.

The world knows big concerts – Live Aid, Woodstock, Isle of Wight. If you exclude festivals and open tickets for a fairer comparison, Paul McCartney at Macaranã had 184,000 ticketed visitors in 1990. Bruce Springsteen in Berlin: 160,000. Queen, Sao Paulo: 131,000 heads. Michael Jackson in Warsaw, The Stones in Prague, the list goes on.

Demand hasn’t changed much over the past five decades or so: hundreds of thousands, now armed with iPhone flashlights instead of lighters, still flock to the same venues to watch their favorite artists take the big stage. But while the Deadheads of the world got their tickets from Pomeroy or their best friend’s cousin’s older brother, today’s Swifties get bogged down in 12+ hours of internet traffic.

No matter how hard you try to escape the onslaught, frozen screens and an endless line of more than 2,000 people always win – a hurdle in today’s live music market that didn’t previously plague concertgoers. If we consider the reality of today’s live music market, which in short is a corporate market, victim blaming aside, Rosen had a point.

Ticketmaster is the soul-crushing one-stop live music monopoly of our nightmares. It leads to price increases, to profit increases… it is essential. The world’s biggest names in music need it – because when it comes to revenue streams and industry revenue, it’s live performances that pay off their debts. The majority of leading artists’ revenue comes not from streaming – the emergence of which has led to a massive commercial shift in the music business in place of physical sales and paid downloads – but from revenue from the live music market.

For the superstars, the trade is even tougher; While streaming accounts for 80% of the recording industry’s total revenue, it’s less than six percent of Swift’s total annual income, and the Falcon 900 has to be paid for somehow. In response, the performance industry has grown rapidly not to compensate for consumer demand, as Rosen so heartwarmingly suggested, but to compensate for its new role as the primary source of income for major artists, and this transition has been anything but effortless.

In 2009, Ticketmaster entered into an agreement to merge with the world’s largest event organizer, Live Nation. The following year, Live Nation Entertainment was founded, resulting in the industry’s largest live music conglomerate in memory. According to consumer organizations, this dynamic duo controls over 70% of the primary market for ticket sales and live event venues. The lack of competitive pressure, coupled with inadequate alternative revenue streams, explains the company’s notoriously substandard service and inflated prices.

Everyone gets their tickets from one place and the traffic far exceeds the current bandwidth capacity of the Internet. Despite selling a record-breaking 2,000,000 tickets for the Eras Tour on November 15 alone, Ticketmaster’s website crashed within an hour. Ticketmaster attributed the crash to high traffic on the site, but additional reports of customer service issues and the huge number of tickets purchased by scalpers for sale on resale sites led many fans to brand the conglomerate as fraudulent – a sentiment that has since been echoed by consumer groups and United States Congressmen alike since the merger.

Across the Atlantic, similar events have sparked scrutiny of the conglomerate’s business practices, particularly Oasis’ long-awaited reunion tour, which generated a response comparable to Swift’s. Swap boas for bucket hats, and Ticketmaster had to contend with a similar influx of buyers. Your Answer? Just a tiny violation of consumer protection law. Tickets for the tour were subject to an unclear “in-demand” pricing model, which saw standard tickets more than double their original value at £148. The increase stunned fans and Oasis themselves, who later said even they were unaware of Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing.

This is an interesting phenomenon: fans are dissatisfied, artists feel excluded and there remains a gaping gap between producer and consumer. The backlash is fierce and with much at stake, the performance industry is evolving; This means that the methods of purchasing tickets are also evolving. The challenge is to ensure that live music is not lost to the machinations of corporate interests.

Diversity and competition are paramount to preserving the intimacy of a delicate and ever-growing industry, but Ticketmaster’s near-monopoly on the live music market is an example of antitrust failure. The fallout from the Eras and Oasis reunion tours exposes the merger as a colossal mistake by the Justice Department, which 14 years ago was right to suspect it was a consolidation of power and wrong to allow it to happen anyway.