Personally, I hate it too, scalpers drive me crazy, and really piss on the fans that try to get tickets earlier. The best summary was in one conversation where someone said "We've spent years trying to fight these assholes and now we're getting into bed with them, which pisses off the agents, bands and the fans." It gets even hairier if you consider that LN owns some resellers now (the attitude was, if we can't beat them, might as well buy em out and take back some of the profits) which caused a HUGE internal uproar. Never really worked on that side of the business. Known scalpers are actively banned from the system - I'm not too sure about the prosecuting angle to be honest. If someone has 20 computers in 20 different states with 20 credit card numbers.we can't really do anything if each one is buying 2 tickets. There are definitely measures to keep scalpers out in an automated sense (there are developers who work pretty much just on that) but there's not much we can do when someone's just buying up tickets since there are usually limits on per-account tickets for big shows. There are a lot of ways to get tickets early - fanclubs, presales, bots - and even good seats are available last minute due to production holds or artist holds or things like that that get released. Here's the thing - it's not that there's some big conspiracy about it, the scalpers are just really good at gaming the system. Sorry, that's weird, I checked a few times and didn't see your comment, and there wasn't much interest here so I stopped checking. You can all it greed if you want (and I wouldn't disagree with you), but another side of it is that venues will start shuttering if they can't make up for poor ticket sales. That's a regional manager hitting budget cuts due to show sales declining and figures he has to make up his revenue somewhere. Charging everyone individually for parking when there's one car? That's ridiculous to me. That's how much goes directly into the artist settlement and some production costs, but who pays for the other staff, marketing, overhead, etc?Īnd a final part, I'll agree, is just asinine. As Live Nation buys up venues and now, with Ticketmaster, owns the ticketing, in theory the fees can go down.Īnother part is just the way it's presented. And as venue expenses get higher, those fees go up. For any non-LN owned venue, that means we're paying out to that venue. And if a tour tanks (and many do, 40% of all ticket inventory goes unsold), then Live Nation takes a big loss on the artist fees (since they're guaranteed a certain amount + a split after a certain ticket sales count).Īnother part is that the ticketing agency has to pay kickbacks to the venue to be the exclusive ticketer. So the artist gets the majority of the ticket price. Part of it is that the artist fees have gotten higher as touring expenses (and life in general) has gotten more expensive. Money is made off beer, parking, fees, etc. One fun fact though - Live Nation loses money on ticket sales. We don't (generally) get free tickets internally, and if we try to buy them, we have to pay service fees too. There are a lot of reasons that led to the current climate (which I agree sucks.
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