All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster (Live at Red Rocks): The Swift ticket debacle after the sudden loss of Taylor Swift
The rising country star, named among Barack Obama’s favorite musicians this year, surprise dropped a new album on Saturday, a collection of live tracks titled, All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster (Live at Red Rocks).
Bruce Springsteen fans were upset with the ticket prices for his tour, with some seats increasing to $4000 to 5000 per person.
Bryan added that he believes “working class people should still be able to afford tickets to shows,” continuing to say that he is “so tired of people saying things can’t be done about this massive issue while huge monopoly sit there stealing money.”
The Swift concert drama started even before tickets officially went on sale. The pre-sale tickets for a few dates became very popular when fans tried to purchase them. Demand was so high that Ticketmaster ultimately canceled the public sale of the tickets. Swift was furious, calling the debacle “excruciating for me.”
Fans were eagerly waiting for the tour but many are worried about a disaster following the recent Swift ticket debacle.
“It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse,” wrote Swift, who has been otherwise quiet about the issue (while her fans have been extremely vocal).
World Tour 2020: Beyoncé, Ticketmaster, and the World’s Wrong Kind of Phenomenology
If you went through all this, you kind of know that it was like playing the world’s worst video game. The winning prize was to pay outrageous fees from the ticketing service, which was included in the price. Now, the weird thing is that this is far from the first time Ticketmaster has failed in this way, and it’s certainly not the first time fans of a major artist have been pissed at the company. People really dislike Ticketmaster. They have low expectations, and somehow, the company still blew it.
Good news, there is a tour coming down the pike. The bad news is that fans are going to be difficult to get tickets for, especially in the wake of the Ticketmaster debacle.
The tour was previously rumored but it was announced on Wednesday by BeyHive. In an Instagram post, the superstar posted simply “RENAISSANCEㅤ ㅤWORLD TOUR 2023.” Her website has dates from May to September. Beyoncé will perform in cities around the world, making several stops in the United States.
But just because you’re verified doesn’t mean you’ll get a ticket. A lottery system is used to determine who gets an access code, and who is put on a wait list.
Beyoncés, Live Nation, and the Problem of the Live Nation Ticketing Industry: A Reply to Live Nation’s Anomaly
Live Nation has its own ticketing system, runs most of the large tours and owns many of the venues. This power over the entire live entertainment industry allows Live Nation to maintain its monopolistic influence over the primary ticketing market.
Fans and politicians alike say that the company’s problems run much deeper than its one concern as they accuse it of being a monopoly and call for change in the ticketing industry.
Between May and September, the singer will take her album to cities across Europe and North America, including New Orleans.
The first tickets for Beyoncé’s five United Kingdom dates went on sale Thursday, and the BBC reports that standard prices were roughly the same as the 2018 tour.
The company apologized for Swift presale chaos which it blamed on high demand and bot attacks. Live Nation President and Chief Financial Officer Joe Berchtold spoke to legislators at a recent hearing and said that they need to do better.
Many are unsure whether sales will go smoothly this time around. The BeyHive is worried about another frenzy.
Has Ticketmaster learned who runs the world? Girls. The woman is named beyonce. There was Taylor Swift. Fans. All of us are watching,” tweeted Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a vocal advocate for antitrust reform and critic of the company’s behavior (and no stranger to referencing song lyrics).
The sign-up page for Bey’s mailing list disappeared from the official website after the tour announcement, but that’s likely due to people signing up through her official website.
Ticketmaster’s Clock is Caught: Pre-Sale Tickets for Beyonce’s Renaissance Tour
The Ticketmaster site wasn’t equipped to handle all the demand, and it just kept crashing. People waited all day in the queue before they got kicked out. The people who were lucky to get to the front of the line got kicked out and had to start over again. This happened to me.
“Beyonce fans have reason to be concerned”, says Daniel Avital, chief strategy officer for Cheq, a cybersecurity company.
“If a scalping attack of these proportions occurred once on Ticketmaster, it is likely to occur again,” unless more robust security measures are put in place, he told NPR via email.
If you can’t wait, add your eligible card to your account ahead of time, sign in early or only refresh the page in very limited circumstances, because The Points Guy offers tips for anyone trying to get pre-sale tickets.
There are steps fans can take to increase their odds. Citi cardmembers can access presale tickets by registering with their credit or debit card number, and members of the Verizon Up rewards program can participate through its website.
“Hey, remember when concert tour announcements were exciting news drops instead of harbingers of an impossibly complicated and bewilderingly expensive buying process that ruins the entire experience before it ever kicks off?” he wrote, thanking Ticketmaster sarcastically.
It’s not yet clear how much North American tour tickets will cost, and it’s worth remembering that Ticketmaster’s controversial “dynamic pricing” model adjusts the price of tickets based on consumer demand.
Some of O2’s customers reported problems with its app and website, as the first to get access. People who did buy tickets reported paying between the equivalent of $68 to $245 for standard tickets and up to nearly $2,940 for VIP “on stage” seats.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/02/1153806365/beyonce-ticketmaster-renaissance-tour
The Sensitivity of Live Nation to Music Competition and Competition Laws: Reply to Senator Klobuchar, Kanter, and Lee
The U.S. and Canada are next. Fans are speculating that more may be added, and USA Today reported some tour stops have changed.
A handful of states actually sued over the Ticketmaster-Live Nation deal, as did the Justice Department. The Senator talked about this.
The company was under investigation by the Justice Department prior to the sale. NPR has reached out to Justice Department for comment.
Live Nation acknowledged areas of improvement, especially when it comes to bots, but has denied engaging in behavior that would justify antitrust litigation or changes to its business practices.
On Thursday, the company issued a new statement urging people to “focus on the facts.” In the last few weeks, Live Nation has provided more than 35 pages of information in an effort to give policymakers a sense of the realities of the industry.
The statement says policymakers could benefit from asking more questions about the chaos caused by the resale-first side of the industry.
Even though they had different ideas about how to address it, the lawmakers decided that the company’s dominance is a problem in the industry. After the hearing, the subcommittee leaders sent Live Nation a letter with seven additional questions, requesting a response by Feb. 15.
Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Mike Lee, R-Utah — who lead the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights — sent a letter on Wednesday to the Justice Department presenting evidence from the January hearing and urging it to follow up on unanswered questions.
Writing to Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division, the senators stressed that all of the witnesses except for Live Nation’s president had testified that the company’s practices harm the music industry. They asked a lot of questions at the hearing but Live Nation didn’t answer all of them.
There are two main lists in the senator’s letter, the first one being allegations against Ticketmaster and the second being follow-up questions which they found the company’s response lacking.
The hearing featured testimony from antitrust experts, entertainment company executives and a musician, who collectively painted a picture of an industry that is dominated by one oversized company at the expense of fans, venues and artists.
Live Nation’s pricing model and fees, contracts with competitors and alleged behavior against venues that don’t want to work with it are some of the issues they raised.
“As the hearing demonstrated, there is a strong bipartisan consensus about taking steps to improve the way America’s ticketing industry functions,” they wrote. “We must ensure that we have competition in the market to drive down prices, encourage companies to innovate, and give consumers choice.”
The letter was signed by an executive vice president for corporate and regulatory affairs and called for Congress to take action against bots, ban fraudulent resale practices and mandate the ability for artists and other event providers to set their own resale terms.
They also asked Live Nation if it would commit to having third-party audits to confirm that it isn’t retaliating, in threat or actuality, against venues that pursue other ticketing providers.
Live Nation did not answer questions about the number of arenas it provides ticketing services for, and whether or not it’s entered into agreements with venues that have long-term contracts for ticketing services.
Ticketmaster Eras: A New Era of the Crowd? Taylor Swift’s tribute to Taylor Swift in the Senate Hearing Convention
And since it’s a special episode, we’re trying something new. We made a video for you to watch. Let us know what you think.
A strong capitalist system has to have competition. We know all too well that this country cannot have too much consolidation, it is an homage to Taylor Swift.
If you screw up on the biggest stage you could end up out of a job, and if you’re both terrible at the thing you’re doing and expensive as well, it would have consequences. Artists like Taylor Swift would just pick a different ticketing company next time, and a bunch of those companies would compete to offer the most reliable service with the best user experience for the lowest fees — you know, capitalism.
Ticketmaster was started in 1976, but the modern era of Ticketmaster kicked off in 1982. The Pritzker family acquires a large stake in the company. The company is focused on software for the computerized ticket business and has a new CEO. Rosen also started aggressively courting venues to sign exclusive contracts. His message is: we will make more money.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/23645057/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-eras-tour-beyonce-antitrust-monopoly-reagan-senate-hearing-congress
The Chicago School, The Sherman Antitrust Act, and the Successes of Ronald Reagan: A Contribution to the History of Antitrust Law
Sandeep Vaheesan is the legal director at the Open Markets Institute. It’s important to back up what he means. The Sherman Antitrust Act was passed in 1890 by congress and was used by Theodore Roosevelt to break up monopolies. They called old Teddy the Trust Buster. Congress amended the Sherman Act in 1914 to prohibit anti-competitive mergers. Up until the ‘80s, this was all working. The government was pretty aggressive about breaking up monopolies.
They believed antitrust should be exclusively about consumer welfare, which they described as low prices, high output — so more stuff, the better — and practices that limit the availability of stuff are bad. So they remade the philosophy of antitrust law.
Now, Bork was a professor at Yale Law School when he wrote The Antitrust Paradox, but because he went to undergrad at the University of Chicago, he gets lumped in with a bunch of other law scholars and economists from Chicago with similar ideas. The Chicago School is a collection of these theories. Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. Reagan and his team were big fans of Robert Bork and the Chicago School. Why does that matter?
President Reagan remakes antitrust in some major ways, by doing two things, and he was a key figure in the history of antitrust. He appointed Chicago School lawyers and economists to lead the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, which were the main public enforcers of antitrust law. These officials were different from their predecessors in their view of antitrust.
They said, “Actually, mergers are generally good.” Businesses gain economies of scale, and potentially even lower prices for consumers, through mergers. And so, they greatly scale back merger enforcement and adopted a set of guidelines that were extremely tolerant of mergers and acquisitions.
SV: Presidents Nixon and Ford appointed five justices between them to the Supreme Court, and they effectively remade the Supreme Court in their two-plus terms in the White House. There was a focus on efficiency and the benefits of scale in the Supreme Court decisions of the late 70s, and less on preserving opportunities for small businesses.
The Supreme Court decided in 1979. In that decision, the court officially endorsed Bork’s claim that Congress had actually intended to adopt the consumer welfare standard when it wrote the first antitrust law in the 19th century. Again, the consumer welfare standard is not in these laws. Bork convinced everyone that they could read Teddy Roosevelt’s mind, because he wanted it to be that way. It’s kind of incredible.
A side note: Bork cast such a spell on Reagan that Reagan nominated him to be on the Supreme Court. The press leaked Bork’s video rental history, which led to the federal law making the rental history private. This is true. It’s also where the term “borked” comes from — the ‘80s.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/23645057/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-eras-tour-beyonce-antitrust-monopoly-reagan-senate-hearing-congress
Can Live Nation Stop It? A Reply to Ederer on Ticketmaster’s Disruption of Live Nation at the January Hearing
If something happens, the costs for app development and server will have to be raised and the profits limited, but that won’t happen unless something happens. It is either one option or the other.
There is a man named Florian Ederer. They were competitors. So when Ticketmaster acquired Ticketron, they were direct competitors, they were in the same industry, and hence, that is a form of horizontal integration. Market power can be abused at times when two companies are merging. Does this reduce competition? When there isn’t another competitor around to lower prices or offer better service, that may harm consumers.
As Dean told us, Live Nation’s dominance of ticketing and promotion has allowed it to shut out competitors. Jack Groetzinger talked about this at the January hearing. Live Nation has stopped giving concerts to venues that switch to SeatGeek and another competitor if he is correct.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/23645057/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-eras-tour-beyonce-antitrust-monopoly-reagan-senate-hearing-congress
Ticketmaster, SeatGeek, and DICE: How an Artist Can Get Their Tickets Nontransferrable Without A Single Source?
A vertical integration, or vertical monopolies is when the players in one industry integrate up or down the value chain and that is an intermediate step to this. A vertical monopoly is where there is only a single provider, at all points of the value chain. It would give that player a lot of market power because they are the only sellers and the only buyers in this value chain.
Sen. Durbin: The Justice Department and attorneys general from many states, including Illinois, sued to block the merger. The merger went through despite the fact that the consent decree was put in place to ensure competition.
DB: In 2022, if an artist did want to circumvent Ticketmaster, I think number one, it would be really hard if that artist were playing stadiums. Essentially most, but not all, of the stadiums have relationships with Ticketmaster.
DB: It would’ve been different if they had spread those out over the course of a week, which is often what happens. I think maybe on some level they were trying to push back against scalpers, because otherwise you could have people who want to resell the tickets all focused on a handful of shows. Then if you spread them out, you have those same people who want to get those tickets to those few shows coming in every day over the course of a week. It seemed like a cluster-F to me, in terms of what was going to happen and what demands on the system were going to be.
You’ve already heard from some of the competitors in this episode: SeatGeek is another primary ticketing site that has struggled to compete with Ticketmaster. Ditto for both StubHub and Eventbrite. We talked to Russ Tannen, the president of DICE. DICE is a venture backed startup that’s made its tickets are nontransferrable — a QR code with your ticket appears right before the event to prevent scalping.
No publicly traded company with a responsibility to its shareholders could reasonably make a lot of the decisions Ticketmaster had to make.
Recently, there has been a lot of pushback against the Chicago School and Bork’s ideas in particular. The new chair of the Federal Trade Commission is named Lina Khan, and she’s written at length about the problem with Bork’s approach.
The current framework in antitrust doesn’t capture forms of market power that should be relevant to antitrust and raise concerns.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/23645057/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-eras-tour-beyonce-antitrust-monopoly-reagan-senate-hearing-congress
The Biden Administration: Do We Really Want to Live in the Bork-Reagan World of regulated monopolies or Will We Realize Their Role in Fair Trading?
The person who is running the FTC might be that person. There are some things that can be found under the Biden administration. Sandeep certainly thinks so.
SV: I’m hopeful. President Biden has made antitrust reform a key part of his administrative agenda and has appointed a number of progressives to the DOJ and the FTC, so the appointments have been positive. The progress has been slower than expected but there are some positive signs. I think the Department of Justice has made reining in employer power a key part of its enforcement program. They’ve gone after many managers and firms for engaging in wage fixing, no-hire agreements, no-poach agreements.
But all that’s easier said than done. Under Commissioner Kahn, the FTC has aggressively gone after big tech, but its first attempts at lawsuits have been busts. They are knocking themTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkias are being knockedTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkias are being knockedTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkiaTrademarkias are not agreeing with the new version of antitrust. They’re stuck in the consumer welfare standard.
Sen. Klebuchar: I am aware of what Ms. Bradish said about spinning off companies. We’ve all seen that as a remedy that would most likely be coming from the Justice Department. So all we can do here is put forward the evidence, and these are sworn testimonies back and forth under law, so that the Justice Department can look at this discussion.
We will see if Congress makes any changes to our antitrust laws. Senator Klobuchar has been pushing to do exactly that for a while now. In the meantime, the question we should all be asking ourselves is, do we want to live in the Bork-Reagan world of weird, regulated monopolies, or do we want these companies to actually compete?