The answer is capitalism, I know.
But it wasn’t always like this. Why the hell are they allowed to absolutely monopolize all shows and venues? How are there not laws on this?
Is stopping going to any shows the only way to fix this? If so, that wont happen. People are gonna go see their favorite bands (and ticketmonster knows it)
I wish this one was as easy as getting rid of all my streaming services - but they really fucked us over for live shows.
There are currently lawsuits against them, but it takes time. This is from NC Attorney General Jeff Jackson’s newsletter earlier this year:
"The People vs. Ticketmaster/Live Nation
I’m forcing myself to only pick one case to go into detail about - but it’s a great one.
Let’s say you want to make a bunch of money by supplying live entertainment, primarily the music industry.
Well, the three big pieces in that business are:
The venue
The right to promote the event
The right to sell the tickets
Now imagine you control each of those. You own venues, and you promote the events, and you sell the tickets.
Congratulations - you’re a monopoly.
You’ve achieved vertical integration within your business, which means the sum of those parts has unlocked the ability to gouge customers with the confidence that they won’t be able to find a competitor to offer them a better deal. And using your monopoly to further entrench your power to charge customers higher prices is against the law.
This is exactly what I, along with a bipartisan group of AGs, allege that Ticketmaster/Live Nation has done.
They’ve turned concert ticket fees into something fans call the “Ticketmaster Tax.” These are the “convenience fees,” “processing fees,” and “handling fees” that add up quickly, inflating ticket prices by huge margins.
Why can they get away with it? Because they’ve locked venues into exclusive contracts, squeezing out any chance of competition.
But it gets worse. If venues try to resist and explore other options, Live Nation retaliates by threatening to strip venues of popular acts. The internal emails from Live Nation executives detailed in our lawsuit are explicit and awful.
Which means, if you’re an independent venue that doesn’t use Ticketmaster, good luck booking artists. Ticketmaster controls ticket sales and Live Nation controls promotion, so artists who are promoted by Live Nation typically won’t be allowed to perform at venues that refuse to use Ticketmaster for ticketing.
This is textbook unlawful monopoly behavior. Consumers are paying higher prices and artists and venues are suffering from reduced competition and income.
The good news is that Live Nation just tried - but failed - to get our lawsuit dismissed. That’s a big step toward accountability, including our ultimate request that Live Nation be required to divest Ticketmaster, which it acquired in 2011 and which became the linchpin for much of their monopolistic behavior."
And congratulations, the current US administration now considers you a terrorist. Complaining about being abused and exploited is anti-capitalist.
Something happened in the last 20 years where billionaires were able to buy the government and monopolies are now no longer illegal or controlled.
I have a rare one, i’ve NEVER purchased a ticket through ticketmaster, so i’m glad they never got my money. Too much free/cheap live music local to me anyway.
I’m pretty sure Reagan’s administration decided to just stop enforcing anti monopoly stuff
Citizens United
Here’s why you’re getting enshittified: we deliberately decided to stop enforcing competition laws. As a result, companies formed monopolies and cartels. This means that they don’t have to worry about losing your business or labor to a competitor, because they don’t compete. It also means that they can handily capture their regulators, because they can easily agree on a set of policy priorities and use the billions they’ve amassed by not competing to capture their regulators. They can hold a whip hand over their formerly powerful tech workers, mass-firing them and terrorizing them out of any Tron-inspired conceits about “fighting for the user.” Finally, they can use IP law to shut down anyone who makes technology that disenshittifies their offerings.
You can take care to avoid enshittification, you can even make a fetish out of it, but without addressing these systemic failings, your individual actions will only get you so far. Sure, use privacy-enhancing tools like Signal to communicate with other people, but if the only way to get your kid to their little league game is to join the carpool group on Facebook, you’re going to hemorrhage data about everything you do to Meta.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems
Got to smaller shows at local clubs
This is the way. I’ve seen so many great bands at clubs before they blew up. Why spend hundreds of dollars to see a show produced for mass consumption at a stadium when you can drop $20 and see a hungry up-and-comer pour out their heart and soul to a hundred people. It’s a way better experience.
Also bands that aren’t so famous any more are great to catch at smaller venues.
You must live in very artistically rich city ! Im glad for you. Sadly around here its washed up metal (with lots of fake backing tracks) and rapping to a backing track, mixed in with bad country covers.
Oh i do. But the music around here mostly sucks, and the sound guys are lazy and terrible. Im one of the best sound guys here that actually tries, and I hardly ever do it as a side gig (way too many projects). I actually just studied sound (and the blade) and know how it works, unlike many (small time) sound guys today. And before you ask, I dont do it for a job because I already have a very good job. I have thought about offering classes on the subject locally.
People want to see pro bands with an actual good audio setup and talent. Sadly, youre not getting that at a local level unless you live in a metropolis or somewhere where the local water creates amazing talent from nothing.
I’m also pissed at the venues and artists deciding to use Ticketmaster.
Capita… gosh darn it
If Pearl Jam couldn’t fix it in the 90s and Taylor swift couldn’t fix it in the 2020s that tells you just how much money is behind them.
And the grateful dead, selling tickets via mail order from their own office to the end.
Jerry said he hated that income decided who could or couldn’t come hear music.
Can’t have a freak show without the freaks.
It’s not something a single artist can fix. You’d need some kind of mass movement of artists organizing and auctioning their labor as a collective unit, rather than a bunch of freelancers and independent labels competing with one another for space in an increasingly monpolized marketplace.
Big artists are contractually getting a cut of those crazy high resell prices and fees.
Every big artist could do verified fan presales like the second round of Eras tour shows, but the reality is that popular artists would be leaving money on the table.
To be fair, only the richest artists can self produce a US nation wide tour. It’s often not up to the artists themselves.
To be fair, only the richest artists can self produce a US nation wide tour. It’s often not up to the artists themselves.
And even then, they’d be super limited on where they can play. Any major venues that uses ticketmaster also signs an exclusivity agreement to do so (I guess maybe that might possibly go away depending on how a trial goes in March, but don’t hold your breath), so good luck holding a big show when no arena is going to risk their contract for a single show.
Big artists are contractually getting a cut of those crazy high resell prices and fees.
Unless their managers are exceptionally savvy, they’re not. They get a base rate on ticket sold. Then the broker can operate as seller and re-seller of the allotment of tickets. So Ticketmaster sells tickets to Ticketmaster, guaranteeing Beyonce a sold-out performance. And then Ticketmaster resells the tickets at auction rates to the general public.
Every big artist could do verified fan presales like the second round of Eras tour shows
Swift had the leverage to cut exceptional deals by promising to expand the size and scope of her performances in exchange for a better rate of return. That’s because her audience is large enough and the venues are small enough that there’s functionally no upper limit on ticket sales beyond her ability to do sequential performances.
For very obvious reasons, most artists don’t get this kind of treatment.
To be fair, only the richest artists can self produce a US nation wide tour.
It isn’t a matter of artist wealth so much as the point of market saturation. If you roll into a town with 50,000 fans and the biggest venue only seats 500 people, you can keep throwing sold-out shows, week after week. This is effectively how successful baseball (up to 162 games/year) and basketball (82 games/year) franchises operate.
But if you can’t guarantee a sold-out crowd, you’re effectively paying the venue for the privilege of performing. As more small venues shut down and bigger venues consolidate, artists find fewer places to profitably perform their craft. Its been a rule in the industry for a while that you make money on tour by selling merch (t-shirts, albums, signed drum sticks, whatever) rather than tickets. Ticketmaster complicates this math by effectively promising to buy out the venue (by selling tickets to itself) at a markdown, then auctioning off the tickets at a markup. That shrinks the audience, which shrinks the pool of people buying the merch.
Its a vicious cycle that’s been collapsing the live music industry for over a decade.
T Swizzle is, funny enough, a big chunk of why things have escalated so much. Like her or hate her, she puts on a motha fugging SHOW with incredibly high production values and comparatively limited dates. That drastically increases the baseline price and makes the scalping market start selling their coke filled labubus to get even more seats.
Which, in turn, makes her contemporaries feel the need to put on a comparable show even though they are nowhere near talented or popular enough to make it work. Otherwise you start having very real discussions about why Famous Astronaut Katie Perry is nowhere near as expensive as the Swizzle Stick.
And ticketmaster mostly is just there to help facilitate that scalping and to add obnoxious (and expensive) infrastructure to prevent every single ticket from being sold to the scalpers who stand in line when the booth opens (80s and 90s kids will remember that).
You can very much see this in the pro wrestling space. In a venue that (company full of racist sex traffickers) WWE is a regular at? Basically everyone but AEW is priced out of even having a show and AEW suffers from needing to not be a laughing stock next to WWE on the ticket prices which results in overpriced tickets and blacked out sections of the arena during panning shots. A venue that WWE doesn’t go to very often? You have a lot more genuine indie shows and you can get ringside tickets to an AEW event for under 200 bucks.
And ticketmaster fucking sucks but mostly they are just there to be vultures on whatever demand is already there. They can’t really do much if you have regularly priced tickets going to “actual fans”.
For the same reason as every other service…
MONEY
because people are happy to pay them money
I’m never happy to pay those fucks, they’re just a legal Mafia who controls all the major venues that the bands I want to see play at.
I got to local shows every so often, but I don’t really have a local scene like I did before I moved, so I just don’t go to concerts much anymore.
That’s the answer.
People keep paying so they keep charging. It’s shitty how they operate - they’re playing consumers like a fiddle.
I’ve gone to plenty of local events where ticketing is handled (gasp!) by the venue itself using their own systems! Crazy, right? (I’m sure the ticketing system is leased by them, but it’s still not Ticket Master).
I refuse to go to any even where ticket master is involved. Oh well, guess I’m gonna miss that.
We were warned in the 90’s.
Ticket Ghost of Ticket Future: “Don’t buy from Ticketmaster”
Me, in the Present: “Okay, but I still want to go to the concert”
Ticket Ghost: “You’re going to feel weird in ten years, when you find out what Kanye gets up to. But you do meet someone at the event to hook up with, have an on-again off-again relationship for three years, the sex is amazing but you’re on totally different career tracks. You end up seeing other people, and now you live in the same neighborhood and your kids are friends. Which is nice but also a bit weird at parties.”
Me: “Wow. That’s… a lot to take in.”
Ticket Ghost: “Sorry, bro. I tried to warn you two weeks ago not to take those edibles because they’d give you psychic premonitions, but you hadn’t taken the edibles yet so you couldn’t listen…”
Me: vomiting sounds as I clutch the toilet
Vedder said do better.
Why? As with most awful things in America, the answer is Ronald Reagan.
The same problem exists world wide.
I simply won’t go. I won’t stream their live shows either, because charging for that is also very lame.
There is still plenty of live music to be had, by decent performers at a local scale. Although even then, lots of small venues use AXS to sell tickets which is the second largest global ticket company so it is not much better.
It is harder and harder to find $10 at the door in cash, but they are out there.
- A competent government would see Ticketmaster and LiveNation as the effective trust/monopoly that they are, and break them up into multiple smaller, competing companies.
- To his credit, Biden passed executive action to ban bullshit “junk fees” that get tacked on to ticket prices (among other things). I’m honestly not sure what became of that rule once Trump got into power, but it is absolutely a rule that we need.
- We need like 50x more scrutiny on corporate mergers and collusion of corporate entities to jack up prices.
I guess a better question is why do people keep giving them money so they can keep being this way?
Exactly.
Suckers keep giving them money.
