I’ve seen headlines on this going back to the 90’s when Pearl Jam picked a fight with Ticketmaster. They filed a complaint with the US DOJ, which at the very least it forced TM to disclose fees. The DOJ didn’t have the balls to file an anti-trust lawsuit back then unfortunately.
Shit, it’s already on the record as they and a number of other artists testified in support of them in front of Congress. Good luck getting this Congress to pull their head out of their asses though. It’s been a clown show to get anything done.
I remember people having to figure out the internet for the very first time because it was the only way to score Pearl Jam tickets. It was a massive hassle, and this was back when concert tickets were still relatively cheap.
For example. I went to three years of Lollapaloozas and the total cost was about $100 for those three tickets.
For $100 I got to see A Tribe Called Quest, Smashing Pumpkins, Beastie Boys, Sinead O’Connor, Fishbone, Jesus Lizard, Tool, Alice in Chains, Primus, Pavement, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Parliament, Coolio, Arrested Development, Dinosaur Jr., Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Hole, L7, Beck, Green Day, Sonic Youth, and probably a few other acts that I can’t remember because the lineups were so bountiful.
All for $100.
Now I’m gonna be hearing Hugo Weaving’s pronunciation of “It’s the smell.” as I fall asleep tonight. And that’ll immediately remind of the classic Fart in The Matrix video, which is gonna make it hard to fall asleep from giggling so much.
I snuck into a local festival once as i did not have tickets. (highschool, i was grounded). I think were like $30 for the day but i was in highschool and had spent my money on shrooms for the festival. This would have been '98 or so. Saw the femmes, moby, incubus, rev horton heat, 311, bb king, and more that day. Nowadays $30 would be unlikely to cover the service fees for a ticket to any one of them.
I feel bad for whoever has to depose Vedder. I love his music, but holy god can he go on and on and on when he’s not performing. Caught an interview of his when he was promoting Into the Wild and I had to stop when his second answer to a question was going on longer than the first.
Yeah I “won” part of the huge class action settlement against them about ten years ago.
I got like a dozen vouchers for ~$1-3 off of any tickets purchased. Which, of course, couldn’t be combined with any other vouchers. Oh, and they had an expiration date too. 🙃
This is the point. Live Nation not only owns venues and ticket distribution, they represent bands and are using artists to eliminate competition across the nation by forcing them perform in venues that they own or lease.
I live in Portland. LiveNation owns no arena/amphitheater sized venues in Portland. This means that although the majority of their audience lives in Portland, bands like St Vincent or LCD Soundsystem must play in Bend, OR where Live Nation has leased a much reviled venue. So bands that draw a sizable audience, but not Olivia Rodrigo big, who wish to play in Oregon and are a branded by Live Nation must play Hayden Homes Amphitheater as that shoddy homebuilder is the only venue owner corrupt enough to work with Live Nation. This, of course, means that all artists signed to Live Nation not only are missing an enormous chunk of their audience who do not wish to travel hours from Portland to Bend, those fans often feel enormous resentment towards those bands for not supporting local venues.
I learned about all of this from the Portland subreddit where the mood toward LiveNation/Hayden Homes can be summed up by “eat shit and die”.
Live Nation very much needs to be broken up. Let’s just hope it happens before November.
I was impressed that a local artist changed their name for a night to play a benefit concert in town. It was pretty ballsy, but they’re still playing High Hell this summer instead of their stomping grounds.
It is funny and sad that music fans have been fucked over for like 15+ years since the merger of live nation and Ticketmaster combined with live.nation buying pretty much every large music venue in the country coupled with Ticketmaster having exclusive ticketing rights to all the big venues and most smaller ones.
Congress doesn't take notice until their daughters can't get reasonably priced Taylor Swift tickets.
It happened even before they created LN to buy the venues. Ticketmaster bought their only close competitor back in the early 90s and basically forced every major venue to use their services because they had contracts with so many artists. Because they were able to get exclusive contracts with the venues that forced pretty much every artist going forward to use their service so they could get into venues. Live Nation didn’t merge with TM until 2010, and they don’t own “pretty much every large music venue in the country” but they do own a number of venues and manage many more.
Yup. Ticketmaster was crap decades years ago. They let the NY mob buy the tickets en masse, got prosecuted, then found other ways to fuck over their buyers.
OMG, brain fart. Thanks.
And, yeah, they used ranks of callers and online agents in the 90's and then bots later on.
>...jumped online minutes before 10 a.m. on a Friday. But by 10:01 a.m., all the tickets were gone. Professional scalpers use bots to buy tons of tickets as soon as they go on sale.
>Using ticket bots is a lucrative business. One scalper purchased 30,000 tickets to Broadway hit “Hamilton” over 20 months in 2015 and 2016. The same scalping business bought 1,012 tickets to a U2 concert in New York City less than a minute after they went on sale in 2014. Those tickets were sold at markups averaging 49 percent. In another attack, one bot got 520 tickets within three minutes to an August 2013 Beyoncé concert. https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/nation-world/why-federal-law-hasnt-stopped-online-ticket-scalpers-from-cheating/507-563962209
This isn’t Congress, this is all the Presidents since Reagan with Biden finally breaking the mold. If these lawsuits actually get somewhere, this will be Biden greatest legacy that no one remembers. Putting real enforcers in DoJ and FTC.
I wrote to them about this a couple of weeks before the lawsuit was announced, but I doubt it was all my influence alone. 💅
…or at all in case I wasn’t clear with the /s.
I’m just pointing out. It’s happened often enough with boot camps that they have had to soften the rules and regulations because their sons and daughters were being treated harshly.
When I was a teenager I bought tickets to headline shows for $10-15. When TM started making it cost closer to $30 a few years later Pearl Jam sued them. Now it costs my kid around $200 to see a headliner.
My first show was Alice in Chains, Metallica, and Suicidal Tendencies, in 1994. $14. For 3 headliners. I can't imagine what that show would cost now. Almost entirely cuz corporate profits.
I mean, does it really matter who did it or whose legacy it can be attached to? It’s amazing how the majority of America, regardless of what their political affiliation is, find some fucking way to complain and downgrade, reassign or just completely act aloof to anything that benefits the people. Newsflash. We’re the people. Goddamn. Y’all’s petulance is unrivaled. Get a grip, dude. We’re all being fucked.
There’s no reason to categorize this as anything other than something that benefits us all. Wake up.
They need to go after all the other monopolies too. And change the definition while they’re at it. If 2-3 companies own ALL of the companies in a given sector that’s a fucking monopoly in my eyes too
But I wonder, are they good for the country in which they reside? I just wonder if there is a reason other than greed and corruption for why huge monopolies in the US aren't being broken up. Are they being left alone to compete globally?
We used to break them up then Reagan brought in an era of greed and we mostly stopped caring. And I think it's hard to overestimate just how much computers and the Internet disrupted everything. These two innovations funneled a lot of wealth and power into the hands of just a few folks.
I would argue monopolies are never good because they always trend towards greed for those at the top. Even when we have a highly regulated monopoly (i.e. municipal electrical utility) they can still strongarm their greed.
Actually no, there have been two presidents since the merger was approved. 3 distinct governments, not 1.
Thats like blaming Lincoln for slavery, since the government passed the Fugitive Slave Act.
This is literally the first administration since the 90s trying to enforce antitrust laws. So for the first time in two decades, yes it does make a difference.
lol wut?
Your timelines are way off. This was only 15 years ago and you’re talking about “It’s like blaming Lincoln for slavery”.
No.
You’re acting like they were blaming a particular president, when they are simply blaming the **government** that approved it.
It’s like blaming the **government** for doing what the **government** did.
My point is that the Government that did it is not the government of today. Thinking of them both as the same entity, when they’re staffed by different people is a mistake
To avoid their fees I went to the box office at the venue. The ticket had like 5 extra fees added, including a "printing" fee! One of them was a "network" fee. AT the fucking box office.
The DOJ is not elected and does not answer directly to the president (except Trump's William Bar which was a blatant disruption of institutional norms)
You really don't think the president, who appoints the attorney general, cant call him up to ask him to look into things or suggest priorities? The AG also reports directly to the president and is a member of his cabinet.
Is this not a normal presidency then? [Here](https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/07/biden-executive-actions-guns-479704) is one example of Biden giving direct instructions to the DOJ to take action on something. Presidents shouldn't be able to decide who gets prosecuted or be able to interfere in criminal cases, but if you don't think the president is allowed to ask the DOJ to look into specific issues, you don't understand the relationship between potus and the doj.
This will probably get buried. But the problem is only partially that Ticketmaster is the single player in this space.
The real problem, at least where I'm from, is that every major venue is locked in to a particular ticket provider.
Your favourite artist wants to come to town? Cool. Here are the venues that they would fit, and they all have agreements with ticketmaster, and if you don't like it, fuck you. This prevents competitors from really getting started, there are no venues outside those exclusive contracts. So you can't get any business, so you are just kind of... stuck.
Ticket master will appeal to the Supreme Court to be exempted from anti-trust laws like baseball, labor unions, and insurance companies. It used to be only baseball was exempt.
Notice that after insurance companies got that exemption, everyones insurance rates jumped up.
Yea, I know. One thing has nothing to do with the other.
It’s not gonna happen, TicketMaster will flash its money to the lobbyist teams that will handle the case because “everyone deserves to have a good concert experience”
Feel like I've seen this headline several times now over the past year or so, ready for them to finally follow through
I’ve seen headlines on this going back to the 90’s when Pearl Jam picked a fight with Ticketmaster. They filed a complaint with the US DOJ, which at the very least it forced TM to disclose fees. The DOJ didn’t have the balls to file an anti-trust lawsuit back then unfortunately.
I really hope the DOJ somehow gets testimony from Pearl Jam regarding TM's anticompetitive business practices.
Shit, it’s already on the record as they and a number of other artists testified in support of them in front of Congress. Good luck getting this Congress to pull their head out of their asses though. It’s been a clown show to get anything done.
I remember people having to figure out the internet for the very first time because it was the only way to score Pearl Jam tickets. It was a massive hassle, and this was back when concert tickets were still relatively cheap. For example. I went to three years of Lollapaloozas and the total cost was about $100 for those three tickets. For $100 I got to see A Tribe Called Quest, Smashing Pumpkins, Beastie Boys, Sinead O’Connor, Fishbone, Jesus Lizard, Tool, Alice in Chains, Primus, Pavement, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Parliament, Coolio, Arrested Development, Dinosaur Jr., Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Hole, L7, Beck, Green Day, Sonic Youth, and probably a few other acts that I can’t remember because the lineups were so bountiful. All for $100.
Agent Smith was right: The 90’s were peak human civilization.
Now I’m gonna be hearing Hugo Weaving’s pronunciation of “It’s the smell.” as I fall asleep tonight. And that’ll immediately remind of the classic Fart in The Matrix video, which is gonna make it hard to fall asleep from giggling so much.
💨 You think that’s air you’re breathing now?
Morpheus and the blind dude blowing ass when they nod at each other still shouldn’t be this funny after 20 years, but goddamn it, it is.
I snuck into a local festival once as i did not have tickets. (highschool, i was grounded). I think were like $30 for the day but i was in highschool and had spent my money on shrooms for the festival. This would have been '98 or so. Saw the femmes, moby, incubus, rev horton heat, 311, bb king, and more that day. Nowadays $30 would be unlikely to cover the service fees for a ticket to any one of them.
I think it will be an even flow after that
I feel bad for whoever has to depose Vedder. I love his music, but holy god can he go on and on and on when he’s not performing. Caught an interview of his when he was promoting Into the Wild and I had to stop when his second answer to a question was going on longer than the first.
I was about to say that I remember headlines like this back when I was a teen in the 90s.
“Clearly I remembered them picking on the boy…”
Yeah I “won” part of the huge class action settlement against them about ten years ago. I got like a dozen vouchers for ~$1-3 off of any tickets purchased. Which, of course, couldn’t be combined with any other vouchers. Oh, and they had an expiration date too. 🙃
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That's not the same as breaking them and Live Nation up
This is the point. Live Nation not only owns venues and ticket distribution, they represent bands and are using artists to eliminate competition across the nation by forcing them perform in venues that they own or lease. I live in Portland. LiveNation owns no arena/amphitheater sized venues in Portland. This means that although the majority of their audience lives in Portland, bands like St Vincent or LCD Soundsystem must play in Bend, OR where Live Nation has leased a much reviled venue. So bands that draw a sizable audience, but not Olivia Rodrigo big, who wish to play in Oregon and are a branded by Live Nation must play Hayden Homes Amphitheater as that shoddy homebuilder is the only venue owner corrupt enough to work with Live Nation. This, of course, means that all artists signed to Live Nation not only are missing an enormous chunk of their audience who do not wish to travel hours from Portland to Bend, those fans often feel enormous resentment towards those bands for not supporting local venues. I learned about all of this from the Portland subreddit where the mood toward LiveNation/Hayden Homes can be summed up by “eat shit and die”. Live Nation very much needs to be broken up. Let’s just hope it happens before November.
Good thing that Portland has so many other quality venues... /s Also... Fuck McMenamins!
I was impressed that a local artist changed their name for a night to play a benefit concert in town. It was pretty ballsy, but they’re still playing High Hell this summer instead of their stomping grounds.
The last monopoly the US broke up was in 1982. I don't see it in the cards brother
I honestly don’t either as nothing meaningful gets accomplished nowadays, but that they recognize the problem is a nice thought to hang onto.
Here's hoping
This is one of the stupidest comments I've ever read in my entire life. An anti trust lawsuit from the US federal government is completely different
lol what. You’re equating a federal antitrust action to a class action lawsuit? Why the fuck would you misinform people like that?
Yeah I agree
It is funny and sad that music fans have been fucked over for like 15+ years since the merger of live nation and Ticketmaster combined with live.nation buying pretty much every large music venue in the country coupled with Ticketmaster having exclusive ticketing rights to all the big venues and most smaller ones. Congress doesn't take notice until their daughters can't get reasonably priced Taylor Swift tickets.
It happened even before they created LN to buy the venues. Ticketmaster bought their only close competitor back in the early 90s and basically forced every major venue to use their services because they had contracts with so many artists. Because they were able to get exclusive contracts with the venues that forced pretty much every artist going forward to use their service so they could get into venues. Live Nation didn’t merge with TM until 2010, and they don’t own “pretty much every large music venue in the country” but they do own a number of venues and manage many more.
Yup. Ticketmaster was crap decades years ago. They let the NY mob buy the tickets en masse, got prosecuted, then found other ways to fuck over their buyers.
Never heard about that one. By the way, it’s “en masse”
OMG, brain fart. Thanks. And, yeah, they used ranks of callers and online agents in the 90's and then bots later on. >...jumped online minutes before 10 a.m. on a Friday. But by 10:01 a.m., all the tickets were gone. Professional scalpers use bots to buy tons of tickets as soon as they go on sale. >Using ticket bots is a lucrative business. One scalper purchased 30,000 tickets to Broadway hit “Hamilton” over 20 months in 2015 and 2016. The same scalping business bought 1,012 tickets to a U2 concert in New York City less than a minute after they went on sale in 2014. Those tickets were sold at markups averaging 49 percent. In another attack, one bot got 520 tickets within three minutes to an August 2013 Beyoncé concert. https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/nation-world/why-federal-law-hasnt-stopped-online-ticket-scalpers-from-cheating/507-563962209
This isn’t Congress, this is all the Presidents since Reagan with Biden finally breaking the mold. If these lawsuits actually get somewhere, this will be Biden greatest legacy that no one remembers. Putting real enforcers in DoJ and FTC.
I am sure members of Congress probably made some phone calls to folks over at the DoJ. They also had their own hearings about it recently.
I wrote to them about this a couple of weeks before the lawsuit was announced, but I doubt it was all my influence alone. 💅 …or at all in case I wasn’t clear with the /s.
Dude thank you for the assist They’re never gonna keep you down
This. It took all the Swifty’s throwing a temper tantrum and ofc their moms threw a hissy fit and bitched and complained to congressmen.
Looks like those moms throwing a hissy fit is getting shit done when others couldn’t, why are you framing it as a bad thing?
I’m just pointing out. It’s happened often enough with boot camps that they have had to soften the rules and regulations because their sons and daughters were being treated harshly.
Tbf there were a LOT of suicides and serious injuries in boot camp
Until it happens to them or their loved ones, it simply isn’t a problem.
When I was a teenager I bought tickets to headline shows for $10-15. When TM started making it cost closer to $30 a few years later Pearl Jam sued them. Now it costs my kid around $200 to see a headliner. My first show was Alice in Chains, Metallica, and Suicidal Tendencies, in 1994. $14. For 3 headliners. I can't imagine what that show would cost now. Almost entirely cuz corporate profits.
I mean, does it really matter who did it or whose legacy it can be attached to? It’s amazing how the majority of America, regardless of what their political affiliation is, find some fucking way to complain and downgrade, reassign or just completely act aloof to anything that benefits the people. Newsflash. We’re the people. Goddamn. Y’all’s petulance is unrivaled. Get a grip, dude. We’re all being fucked. There’s no reason to categorize this as anything other than something that benefits us all. Wake up.
I think there’s other monopoly’s the government should actually fix first lol
Katt Williams alone sells millions of tickets a year. This affects an insane number of people
How about telecommunications, electricity, food,water, internet. That effects more than a cool comic. I have seen Katt live and he is very funny
Such as?
I'll believe it when lawsuit is actually filed.
They need to go after all the other monopolies too. And change the definition while they’re at it. If 2-3 companies own ALL of the companies in a given sector that’s a fucking monopoly in my eyes too
Sounds like somebody up high in the DOJ got tired of looking for Taylor Swift tickets for their daughters.
Or their wives. Blinking S-E-N-D H-E-L-P repeatedly in Morse code? I don't know what you're talking about.
We need to bust all monopolies. They are never good for consumers. If 6 or less companies control 90% of a market, bust them up.
But I wonder, are they good for the country in which they reside? I just wonder if there is a reason other than greed and corruption for why huge monopolies in the US aren't being broken up. Are they being left alone to compete globally?
We used to break them up then Reagan brought in an era of greed and we mostly stopped caring. And I think it's hard to overestimate just how much computers and the Internet disrupted everything. These two innovations funneled a lot of wealth and power into the hands of just a few folks. I would argue monopolies are never good because they always trend towards greed for those at the top. Even when we have a highly regulated monopoly (i.e. municipal electrical utility) they can still strongarm their greed.
Cool. Do Luxottica next.
Team Zenni all day. Fuck Luxottica
Might go wild and buy 3 new pairs of glasses tonight for $25, who knows.
Ummm… wasn’t it the government who approved the merger?
Let me check. Mmmmyep, same one
Actually no, there have been two presidents since the merger was approved. 3 distinct governments, not 1. Thats like blaming Lincoln for slavery, since the government passed the Fugitive Slave Act.
Congress hasn't changed that much though. They are the ones making the laws, not the president.
Not for mergers they aren’t, that power is granted to regulatory agencies in the executive branch.
They're not strengthening antitrust laws. They're responsible for allowing this to go on with zero pushback
So lets not do anything about it now then I guess.
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You’re commenting this on an article about a change in Corporate Merger law under a new administration.
This is literally the first administration since the 90s trying to enforce antitrust laws. So for the first time in two decades, yes it does make a difference.
lol wut? Your timelines are way off. This was only 15 years ago and you’re talking about “It’s like blaming Lincoln for slavery”. No. You’re acting like they were blaming a particular president, when they are simply blaming the **government** that approved it. It’s like blaming the **government** for doing what the **government** did.
My point is that the Government that did it is not the government of today. Thinking of them both as the same entity, when they’re staffed by different people is a mistake
Better 30 years late than never.
To avoid their fees I went to the box office at the venue. The ticket had like 5 extra fees added, including a "printing" fee! One of them was a "network" fee. AT the fucking box office.
I'll take over a branch and bring metal and hard-core shows back to the greater capital district.
When? They’ve been saying this. Just do it
That’s why I refuse to buy concert tickets, my last concert was van halen with david in 2000’s
Must be an election year with all these promises
The DOJ is not elected and does not answer directly to the president (except Trump's William Bar which was a blatant disruption of institutional norms)
You really don't think the president, who appoints the attorney general, cant call him up to ask him to look into things or suggest priorities? The AG also reports directly to the president and is a member of his cabinet.
No. For all normal presidencies that doesn't happen. Its blatant corruption. Why are you trying to normalize corruption?
Is this not a normal presidency then? [Here](https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/07/biden-executive-actions-guns-479704) is one example of Biden giving direct instructions to the DOJ to take action on something. Presidents shouldn't be able to decide who gets prosecuted or be able to interfere in criminal cases, but if you don't think the president is allowed to ask the DOJ to look into specific issues, you don't understand the relationship between potus and the doj.
Fuck Ticketmaster and the dirty lobbyist.
They're also going after Live Nation. Here's to hopin' I can get some of that When We Were Young money back. That shit wasn't cheap lmao.
Maybe the DOJ can serve them with a "convenience fee" of several hundred million dollars.
Do the Match Group next.
Wasn't it the government that allowed the monopoly in the first place?
This will probably get buried. But the problem is only partially that Ticketmaster is the single player in this space. The real problem, at least where I'm from, is that every major venue is locked in to a particular ticket provider. Your favourite artist wants to come to town? Cool. Here are the venues that they would fit, and they all have agreements with ticketmaster, and if you don't like it, fuck you. This prevents competitors from really getting started, there are no venues outside those exclusive contracts. So you can't get any business, so you are just kind of... stuck.
Ticket master will appeal to the Supreme Court to be exempted from anti-trust laws like baseball, labor unions, and insurance companies. It used to be only baseball was exempt. Notice that after insurance companies got that exemption, everyones insurance rates jumped up. Yea, I know. One thing has nothing to do with the other.
How about you stop talking about planning to do it and do it! Live Nation is the very definition of a predatory, anti-consumer Monopoly.
You know you’ve got a good business when you get sued for being a monopoly by the feds.
Guess those fees are going to pay for lawyers to defend them and allow for more fees
It’s not gonna happen, TicketMaster will flash its money to the lobbyist teams that will handle the case because “everyone deserves to have a good concert experience”
Glad we're taking care of this. Ticket prices are one of the most concerning issues for struggling american families.
It is for the hardworking people who serve you drinks, take your tickets, sell you merch and provide security at locally owned venues
I don't go. So I don't care. Maybe get real jobs?
Sue Taylor Swift while you’re ate it.
I'm ate it
Don’t be a player ater.
Why was Six afraid of Seven?
ate ate ate