Ticketmaster Goes Gordon Gekko With Drake, 21 Savage 'It's A Blur Tour' Ticket Prices

This week, Drake announced he'd be going on an American tour with 21 Savage. With presale tickets being deceptively advertised for $67 and bots snapping up seats in the blink of an eye, the 'It's A Blur Tour' is yet another saga in the ongoing Ticketmaster fiasco. Along with the uproar over the ridiculously pricey tickets came heated debates over Ticketmaster and Live Nation Entertainment's impact on the live entertainment industry.

I mean this shit was just NUTS. First I had to deal with Cash App's Cash Card not working, which resulted in me doing my dips on the phone with customer service. Then I nearly pulled a hammy running to my friend Areen's place since customer service had the IQ of a rock. We were number 548 in the Boston queue and number 2000 in the Miami queue by the time I got there. When it was finally our turn to cop Boston tickets, there was a two minute window where seats surrounding GA (sections 3, 5, 11) cost $280 all in and GA tickets cost around $350. We saw this opportunity and hammered that checkout button only to be told seconds later that someone else had beat us to it. Thirty seconds later EVERY seat went grey and remained that way for two minutes before simultaneuously, every seat became available again. There was only one change. Not a single ticket was listed for less than $500 and the cheapest available seats in Miami skyrocketed to $850 at the mezzanine level. Fuck. Off.

To fully understand the situation and what has caused such widespread animosity towards the concert titan, we have to go back to 2010 when Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged to create Live Nation Entertainment. Prior to the merger, the two companies were rivals. Ticketmaster was the primo booking and ticketing platform and Live Nation operated and promoted venues. After nearly a decade and half of competition, the Department of Justice (DOJ) allowed them to merge under provisions designed to curtail their monopolistic power — an antitrust consent decree required the ticketing platform to be licensed and prohibited retaliation against venues that do not use their ticketing platform.

Unfortunately for fans, Live Nation (LN) never planned on following the rules. Owning and operating over 300 venues across the globe, they control over 70% of the market for ticketing and live events. In order to maintain such a level of dominance, LN bullies its competition, forcing artists into exclusive contracts, threatening to withold tours from venues that don't sign deals with Ticketmaster, and buying control over music festivals and other large venues. Jack Groetzinger, the CEO of SeatGeek, testified in court on the adverse impact Ticketmaster's actions have had on his company's ability to find new business. "Venues fear losing Live Nation concerts if they don’t exclusively use Ticketmaster," he said, before declaring that the only way to restore competition is to dissolve the merger.

In addition to the primary market, Live Nation also owns multiple secondary market platforms, effetively controlling both the sale and resale of tickets, as well as the venues hosting the events. These platforms often deny entry to fans that purchased tickets from non LN secondary markets, in blatant attempts to collect twice the fees at inflated prices.

This is the thing that sets me off. The kinda thing that makes my dome piece feel like a goddam nuclear missle about to explode. You know what I'm talking about but I'll give a visual anyways.

THIS IS LITERALLY HOW MONOPOLIES WORK. Market power in one market is leverged to get market power in another. Live Nation is doing it with multiple markets, forcing everybody in the resale market to go through them. And why?? Simply because it can. The company brought in $16.7 billion in revenue in 2022. The $1 million fine LN is forced to pay each time the DOJ finds evidence that the decree was broken is chump change. They don't give two shits because the penalty for breaking/skirting the law with their anticompetitive business practices is a fraction of a fraction of the profits they reap from it. What I don't understand is why artists are allowing this to happen.

The answer to that question may be dynamic ticket pricing — a strategy in which prices are adjusted based on consumer demand. In 2011, Ticketmaster announced it would begin pricing tickets this way, arguing it would keep tickets from being siphoned off onto secondary market platforms, providing more revenue for the artists and (how noble of them). What an absolute crock of shit.

In theory, the dynamic pricing of primary tickets could help the market run more fairly and efficiently, reducing the amount of shady practices on secondary markets and preventing bots from taking over primary ticket sales events. This only happens though if the artist agrees to price out segments of the market, which we all know nobody wants to do. Instead, artists like Drake, Taylor Swift, Ye, and Harry Styles, among many, embrace a broken system. Artists are the ones that tell Ticketmaster the prices they want to set and the strategy they wish to implement, not the other way around. But what about the artsits that don't take advantage of their fans through dynamic pricing? Well, Ticketmaster screws them.

On Wednesday, when the Cash App presale was going on for Drake, tickets for The Cure's U.S. tour opened to the general public. The English rock band purposefully priced their tickets at $20 to make the tour accessible to fans of all income levels. If you think $20 tickets to see The Cure sounds too good to be true, that's because it was. While the band had novel intentions, Ticketmaster took the opportunity to jack up the cost of unnecessary, bullshit fees, subjecting each sale to an $11.65 service fee, a $10 facility charge, and a $5.50 order processing fee.

That's fucking bananas considering how little of the profit artists receive. During Live Nation's hearing before Congress, Clyde Lawrence — guitarist for a small New York band called Lawrence — broke down exactly where the money generated from tickets and fees is allocated. For a typical show, his tickets had a face value is $30 and included $12 in fees. However, of that $42 paid by fans, $30 was gobbled up by the venue, Live Nation and Ticketmaster, and another $6 went to the band’s touring expenses.

6 dollars (pretax) profit per ticket split between an eight-member band is honestly nothing. The hallmark of a monopoly is unbridled price increases. With the average Ticketmaster service fee costing between 27 and 31% of the ticket value (and sometimes up to 75%), it couldn't be more evident that Live Nation Entertainment is monopolistic. Artists and legislators alike must do something to put a stop to this madness. Artists could make the tickets to their events nontransferable, eliminating the secondary market, or band together to push back against some of the worst practices from LN. Legislators must step in to ensure the primary and secondary markets operate freely. The Sherman Antitrust and Robinson-Pattman acts provide a general framework—but they need to be updated with modern e-commerce in mind. There is no logical reason why primary and secondary ticket sellers should be combined. It gives WAY too much control over live events. Live Nation is single handedly ruining the live entertainment industry.