Frustration with concert ticketing has been building for decades. Brook Silva-Braga spent the last year examining how ticketing got this way, speaking to the artists, scalpers and ticket executives who control ticketing. #concert #music #tickets #ticketmaster #stubhub #concert #concerttickets #news

On a Friday night in L.A., the emo rock band Something Corporate is playing a reunion show at the Hollywood Palladium. Hi, how are you? Fans have been paying about $70 for tickets to the tour. When I woke up in New York City from my sleep behind the wheel But where exactly do those $70 go? Something Corporate frontman Andrew McMahon agreed to share those usually secret details for a show. Here's an example of a deal memo. His team just blacked out exactly which show it was. What do we have here? To start, the band set a ticket price of $56. There's a gross potential of a couple hundred thousand dollars being made. But out of that $200,000 in ticket sales, half is deducted for venue-related show costs. $37,000 in stage hands. Leaving the band with a $100,000 payday. But most of that goes to the band's own expenses. Commissions and fees and payroll. Their management takes a quarter. Travel and crew costs take another quarter. Meanwhile, that $56 ticket has had fees added, though artists don't get that money. So once you take away the venue show costs and the band's touring expenses, Something Corporate's actual profit from that $70 ticket is about $10. And then we split that five ways. Yeah. McMahon isn't complaining. That's still seven grand each for a night's work. We love you, Los Angeles. Thank you for a beautiful night. But the point here is each dollar fans pay To enjoy the show. Is fought over by artists, venues, ticket companies and scalpers. And time and again, the industry's solution to these fights has been to just charge fans a bit more. Tickets go for so high now. Consider the history of the infamous ticket fee. In the 80s, as artists demanded a bigger cut of the box office, venues scrambled for new revenue. Ticket fees, which cut out the artist, were the answer, says New York Times music writer Ben Cesario. There was a guy named Fred Rosen who became the CEO of Ticketmaster. And he's the person who really created the modern ticketing business as we know it. You know, it was field of dreams. If you build it, they will come. And they did. What Rosen built was a network of ticket outlets and phone centers that made it easy for fans to buy. That was new. Fees 18 to 20. But for that convenience, There is a convenience charge of 120. They were charged higher and higher fees. Handling charge. I mean, just to touch it, they charge you $3. Fans complained, but venues signed on because, and this was the key part, Ticketmaster let those venues keep most of the fee. Yeah, Ticketmaster is kind of a fall guy in this. It's set up for that purpose. Fred Rosen, he used to say that his client is not the consumer. It's the venue. He's there to take the heat for that venue. In exchange for taking that heat, Ticketmaster won control, the exclusive right to sell all the tickets. In the 90s, Pearl Jam tried to escape this system, even taking their case to Congress. The issue at hand here is whether Ticketmaster is a monopoly. But that failed and venues and other artists stuck with Ticketmaster. In the UK and in Europe, they have a different ticketing system and it's usually not these exclusive contracts. The cost of a ticket and the cost of a fee overseas tends to be a lot lower than in the U.S. But artists like touring in the U.S. because they make more money here. Today, the concert scene is shaped by the combined power of Ticketmaster and Live Nation, the event company. They merged in 2010 and now some venues say Ticketmaster isn't helping them out, but specifically supporting Live Nation, which owns their own venues and promotes their own artists. We can't compete. Stephen Parker, executive director of the National Independent Venue Association, says Live Nation uses its power across the industry to strangle competition. Basically making it so that artists have to play every single date at Live Nation venues or Live Nation operated venues or Live Nation partner venues. Last May, the Department of Justice made a similar claim. It is time to break it up. Saying Live Nation and Ticketmaster illegally use their power to push down competition and push up ticket prices. Is Ticketmaster a monopoly? Well, obviously, there's a claim that we are. Dan Wall is the antitrust lawyer who helped get the Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger approved in the first place. He calls the DOJ's case a performative lawsuit that would have no impact on ticket prices. The Justice Department is trying to break you up. You have senators on both sides of the aisle saying you're a monopoly. There was a poll that said 60% of Americans think the two companies should be broken up. Why are they all wrong about this? We are obviously the leading company in this industry. There's no doubt about that. And I think that creates a certain amount of jealousy. I think it creates a certain amount of rivalry, a certain amount of fear. But we stand by what we do. It is the one ticketing company in this country that is 100% on the side of the artist and the fan. Not run for the benefit of ticket brokers and ticket scalpers and and big resale prices and big resale fees. Anyone have a good cue? The real problem with ticketing, Wall says. We can get those Sundays. Hold off on Saturday. Still low, OK? Is caused by scalpers. I mean, I do know there's probably stuff out there that a retail fan has no shot at getting.