I didn’t really want to go out. It was cold and snowy, with ten inches of fresh last night. It was too late for first tracks, and I skied a ton of crud the other day. But I view skiing as a job, I go absolutely every day, whether I want to or not, because at some point the switch flips, and I’m having a great time. Meanwhile, if I don’t go out, I’ll end up wasting time. Kind of like last night. I put aside three hours to read my book, I’d been into it before I went to bed the evening before, but as soon as I opened my Kindle my eyes started to droop, I was falling asleep.

So I suited up with my heavy jacket. It’s a Phenix, I bought it at Pepi’s ten years ago, half off, $500 instead of a grand. I’d have never spent a grand, but Fenix is top-notch stuff, and it turned out to be warmer than any other jacket I own.

And I picked up my down mittens. Overkill if they were new, but they’re just about worn-out, so good for weather in the teens.

And I rode up the gondola, then the Wildwood Express to the top of the mountain.

Visibility was close to zero. I couldn’t see Chair 2 in the distance, my destination. Usually when it’s this bad they put up posts with blinking electric lights, but not today. But I’ve been down this route a zillion times and I could do it blindfolded, which was what I essentially was doing.

I believe in a warm-up run. Only weekend warriors go to the difficult slopes first. But having said that, if a black diamond slope is groomed, sometimes you’ve got to hit it right away. Which I did about a week ago, on Ricky’s Tube, in the back. The top is very steep, but only for about fifty feet. But I buckled my boots tight in preparation.

And then my feet were killing me most of the day.

As for those people who buckle their boots in the morning and leave them so, I don’t know. I don’t buckle mine until I’m about to get off the gondola. And I’m forever tightening them throughout the day. Actually, my boots are tight enough that I could ski in them without buckling them at all, but I want that precision.

So today I had my buckles relatively loose, and I rode across the ridge to a green run and…

Man I was going way too fast. This was crud (cut-up/tracked out powder) and it was heavy and my skis were not riding over it and my boots were so loose I was barely in control and…

I realized I had the wrong skis. I needed my 117s. But they’re old, and I need a new pair that wide for conditions just like this. My old Rossi S7s have a turned up tip, they can ride over and through anything. Oh, despite the pictures you see, powder is rarely that soft. It might be in the Cottonwood Canyons in Utah, but in Colorado, snow lighter than air, that you can blow off your car…I haven’t experienced it yet.

But those old S7s were in the condo. There was no way I was going back there to retrieve them.

So I went to my secret stash, a beginner area where…

The beginners don’t ski on the fringes and you can get mini-pow, a few inches, it can be marvelous. But since it was a beginner area it was groomed after the storm and it was a nearly perfect carpet.

And I’m riding up Chair 2, Avanti, and my feet are killing me! I can’t loosen the buckles, because unlike my Nordicas, these Langes leak if I do.

So I get to the top and I go over to Pickeroon, which had been groomed the night before, but had the fresh ten plus inches on it. Normally I scream down Pickeroon, but there was all of this dense crud and even some bumps and although I’d tightened my boots they still weren’t tight enough.

Now I was feeling bad about myself. Am I that much of a wimp, that I need the absolute right skis for the condition or else I want to go in?

So I skied lower Berries. A black. And I was good, but I had to stop a few times, it was so much work.

And my feet were still killing me.

So I went back up and skied Berries from the top and Lodgepole at the bottom and I was skiing better, but to tell you the truth, I wanted to go in, to relieve my feet, if nothing else.

But no, I can’t do that, I won’t let myself. But maybe there’s a time to break the rules.

So I figured I’d go to Game Creek, to ski Dealer’s. A mild blue that had been groomed before the storm.

But that required me to ski down to the Wildwood Express and come back up and…

That’s when I remembered Ouzo had been groomed the night before. The steepest slope in Game Creek…but there was one problem, the visibility. I could see maybe five or seven feet in front of me. My skis were riding over bumps I was unaware of. And when visibility is bad you ski by the trees, then the slope becomes clear, don’t ask me the science, it’s just true. But although there are trees at the top of Ouzo, after that it is wide open.

And I’m skiing alone. And I’m big on good judgment. Was this a good idea?

But when I got to Ouzo… It was nearly flat, i.e. there was no crud. Until I veered to the left side and found myself in deep junk. I think they groomed the slope after the storm so people could get to the Game Creek Club for lunch. Don’t go to the Game Creek Club for dinner, when it’s open to the public, it’s lousy. But if a member takes you during the day…there’s a buffet with iced seafood and everything. But to be a member…let’s just say it doesn’t make financial sense.

And after the club the visibility was bad and I got down to the lift and my spirits were up a bit, but I was still asking myself how long I had to be out there until I could go back in.

So I took the Game Creek Express up to Dealer’s and… Usually the left-hand side of Dealer’s is full of crud after a storm. And it wasn’t.

And then it was.

This was the turning point. I could traverse over to the right, where the slope was packed, or keep skiing the crud. I buckled my boots and did.

And then on the bottom face, I went all the way to the left to ski the steeper crud. And I was going slower and turning on all the bumps and that’s when…

I had a revelation.

That’s right, I have to go slower, I have to have both hands in front of me at all time, I’ve got to turn on every bump…

And then I went up to Riva, Vail’s signature run. From the absolute top of the mountain to the bottom. It had been groomed the day before, so I figured it would be pretty good today.

Wrong. It contained massive bumps and people were littered all over the slope.

That’s when I committed, turn by turn, I was getting in the groove.

And then I dodged the people on Tourist Trap, one of the steepest faces on the mountain, and then zipped down lower Riva and…

Wait a second… Now I was having a good time, my mood had completely changed. It had to do with being out there, fighting the elements and winning. Man, I can do this.

So then I went up to Blue Ox, one of a trio of steep slopes on the left side of the mountain.

And there was no one there. Zippo. To the point that the top of the slope, which is flat, was all mini-pow.

And when I turned the corner to the steep…

That’s when I realized I was truly the only one on the slope. And like Riva, it was a minefield of bumps, and it was blowing and snowing and I kept pushing myself around every bump and…

I was glad I was out there. I was calculating when the lifts would close, I wanted more.

Actually, I got the very last run. Me and a few other people, at 3:31, on Avanti. They always say not to take the last run, but I wanted to go back to that beginner area, to ski the mini-pow, at this point a few inches of fresh had accumulated, I’d just come down it.

And I came down it again and…

I’m skiing to the bottom and thinking about all this. How many people won’t even go out in weather like this. Which is a shame, because then you’re burdened psychologically, you’ve got to go out there and develop the skills.

And many people would just make a few runs and go in.

I never go in. Once I’m out there I ski until the end. Screw the overpriced lunch. This is not relaxation, this is not a vacation, this is a job! And just like a good job, when you know how to do it and keep doing it you get better and feel better about yourself.

But why me? I don’t know a single person who is as into it as I am. I’m sure there are, but I don’t know one. Except for my buddy Andy who passed, the radiation that cured his cancer caused a secondary cancer years later.

Now on some level it’s just a raw inexplicable passion. But still, what was keeping me out there?

And then I realized, it was my mother.

My mother is dead, has been for a little over three years now. And to be honest, it’s freeing. She was judgmental in a unique way. You could tell her you’d been to the moon and she’d say “And what did you do after that?” Whatever you did it was never enough. And she didn’t give kudos either.

But man, put her in a group and she was the life of the party. Not that it was so easy being her kid. If she’d been born fifty years later I don’t think she’d even have had kids, she would have been a career woman, something in the arts, she used to write musicals for the Temple. But that’s what you did back in the forties and fifties, got married out of college and soon had kids.

But my mother would never ever let you quit.

I remember being on the Middlebury ski team… Let me just tell you, when you’re on a squad with Olympic athletes…the training gets intense. There was this exercise where you had to hop up the bleachers on two feet, walk down and do it on your left foot, and then walk down and do it with your right.

This bleacher exercise separated the men from the boys. That’s when I called my mother and told her I was quitting, that I was nowhere near good enough to compete anyway, to ski in the big races for the team.

She bad-vibed me. My mother was a pro at this.

So I went back.

You started off with four sets of bleachers (what the coach, Olympic athlete John Bower referred to them as). The trio above represented one rep. And they added a rep every week. To the point where they eventually got up to sixteen. I did it. I won’t say it was easy, but I did it. And I’d believed four reps was too much.

And we had to run up the Middlebury Snow Bowl before the snow fell. That wasn’t easy, but as the weeks went by not only did we have to run up, we had to run halfway back down and then to the top again.

But I couldn’t quit, I couldn’t make that call to my mother, she’d hold it against me for life. I can see the disappointment in her face.

So that’s why I was out there today. There was no award, no competition, but I did it long enough until it was satisfying, beyond satisfying.

And then I started thinking about other things in my life. That I’ve stuck with longer than seemingly anybody else would. Like this newsletter, which used to be in print, which came out every two weeks, come hell or high water. Man, the nineties were bleak. Try facing the world with less than twenty dollars in your pocket after having written a bad check for the rent.

But then along came the internet and Napster and things turned around.

Now in truth my mother wanted me to give up the newsletter. But I wouldn’t. She would say get a job, any job, literally at McDonald’s. That was her background, her parents were immigrants, her father worked at a tannery.

But I wouldn’t. Because somewhere deep inside… I was not a quitter. I stayed the course if I believed in it and myself. Which didn’t and doesn’t include all verticals, but when I’m passionate, which I am about a few things, man, I’m not giving up, never.

Oh, did I tell you my favorite Muggs story? (A nickname in college, it stuck, no one called her Muriel.) I got an e-mail from Quincy Jones. And I forwarded it to my mother. And she never e-mailed me back, she never mentioned it. So, a few weeks later I brought it up in conversation. “Ma, did you see the e-mail from Quincy Jones?” She said yes. Flatly. Which confounded me. I said “Aren’t you impressed?” No, she wasn’t. Then I had to drill down, make my case. “Mom, you’re not impressed that Quincy Jones e-mailed me?” And then she said…HOW WOULD YOU KNOW QUINCY JONES?

Bada-bing. She literally thought it was some other Quincy Jones.

So, I can never please my mother, so I stay the course, keep at it, trying to. And now she’s gone, but you can’t take the parent out of the child, no way. And as much as I’m screwed up as a result of my mother, I think about all those kids who lack parents, or direction. They’ve got it in them to make it, but no one pushes them, no one holds them to account.

I’ll be back out there tomorrow.

The two biggest stories in America today are AI and the Sphere, and neither were in the public consciousness a year ago.

Oh that’s not right Bob, what about Taylor Swift, and Gaza?

Well, the Israeli/Arab conflict is always simmering, it’s always in the news. As for Taylor Swift…

This is not a new story. Successful musical artist goes on the road to massive sell-out audiences playing their hits. In this case, a retrospective of their entire career.

Don’t get me wrong, Taylor Swift is an original. But her tour looked backward. Yes, the massive outpouring of love from female fans was noticeable, but it was not DISRUPTIVE! The media was just reporting a story it saw, there was no harbinger of where we’re going. Because the media never knows, but Washington, D.C. and most industries are just as bad.

If you’ve been following the news, and maybe you haven’t, in the last twenty four hours the “New York Times” has released polls saying that Biden is losing the popular vote and an incredible number of people believe he’s too old for the job.

It’s not like we didn’t know this a year ago. It was hiding in plain sight. But the usual suspects mired in the past believed it didn’t matter. They had power and they were not going to let it go.

Meanwhile, on the other side they’ve got the disrupter in chief, Donald Trump. The only thing is he disrupted the political landscape back in 2016, there’s been nothing new since, just a doubling-down of insanity.

Not that America doesn’t rally behind the insane. Hell, Kanye just released a chart-topping album.

But in all businesses, in politics, you need to look forward, to the horizon, to the hoi polloi, if for no other reason than everybody has the tools to disrupt you at their fingertips, oftentimes for free, they call it the internet.

Look at TV singing shows… They were a novelty twenty years ago. Kelly Clarkson became a star. But no one since. Because the public has seen the movie. As a matter of fact, the young, who usually start trends, have tuned out of singing competitions completely. It’s the old people who are watching on network TV. Meanwhile, youngsters don’t even own a television set, they’ve got their phone and their laptop, and sure they might have a subscription to a streaming service (oftentimes their parents’), but network, cable, are as foreign to them as Frank Zappa was to our parents back in the sixties. Want an example? Viacom/Paramount+ continued to put their money behind MTV, a youth juggernaut of the last century that is meaningless today. You don’t succeed unless you retool for the future.

So if you’re a young musical artist singing the hits of today on YouTube and TikTok thinking you’re going to make it, you’re plain wrong. Good voices are a dime a dozen. It’s always about the songwriting. Believe me, Bob Dylan never sounded like an opera singer, never mind Roy Orbison, Paul McCartney or even B.J. Thomas. No, Dylan was an outsider, with an outside perspective, he took roots and combined them in a new way that was perfect for the era. Dylan didn’t follow the youthquake, he caused it. And when everybody else caught on, he stopped writing political songs, he’d been there and done that. Furthermore, his 1970 album “New Morning” presaged the back to the land movement of the seventies, and “Blood on the Tracks” was evidence of the personal focus/Me Decade seventies.

So we’ve got major labels tightening the belt, not wanting to risk the new and disruptive. Their idea of disruptive is an act with a thirty second song on TikTok, and we know those acts are almost always fads. Hell, the music business has oftentimes focused on fads, but they’ve never been responsible for great leaps forward financially, never mind artistically, they’re moments in time.

Now the Democratic party knew Joe Biden was perceived as too old years ago. But the brass decided to do nothing. He’s President, on top of the world, he’s got the chair, let someone try to steal it, push him out of it.

Brilliant thinking by those who believe history is all that matters.

Meanwhile, the Republicans lost control of their party to Trump. Who continues to foster losers. Trump’s endorsement… Oftentimes means you’re going to lose. Someone could have stood up to Trump, corporate leaders, elected officials, but the wimps in the party decided to fall in line. And if you didn’t, they turned their backs and made you walk the plank, i.e. Liz Cheney. You stay on the team or you’re excised.

Now if you’ve got a losing sports team, they fire the manager, they get new players. Hell, the Patriots just got rid of Bill Belichick, something had to give. But not in the Republican party, they’ve got a losing hand and they keep on playing it. Sure, Trump could win the presidential election. And that might mean not only the end of Democracy, but the end of the Republican party. But no one is blowing the whistle, no one is complaining.

And on the Democratic side, all we’ve got is people like Lawrence O’Donnell explaining why we can’t have an open convention, with some hooey about the past, about the way the party works. But that would assume that disruption never happens.

Now remember, disruption always starts off to the side, off the map, and is usually pooh-poohed by those in control, if they’re aware of it at all. And at first, the disruptive force is imperfect, disorganized, but then the disruptive force gets it together and dominates.

This is the story of Donald Trump. The Democrats were too stupid to realize Hillary Clinton was a bad candidate, irrelevant of whether she’d make a good president.

And the Republicans have done a phenomenal job of labeling Biden old and senile. And just like Hillary before him, Joe has done a piss-poor job of countering these accusatory claims. Biden could start making public appearances, being available, but his handlers are afraid this will evidence stumbles and gaffes that will prove the point.

Meanwhile, this is all playing out in public.

The Republicans are putting all their faith and support behind a loser and the Democrats are rerunning “Weekend at Bernie’s.” And we can all see it but no one will acknowledge it. Talk about the Emperor’s New Clothes.

I don’t know what will happen. I lived through 1968 when Johnson surprised us by dropping out of the race at the end of March.

I also know that sh*t happens. Both Trump and Biden could have a health event before November. They’re both aged, the odds are not good.

But I do know if you want to play the game and win you always come from the outside, you do what is unexpected.

The reason no candidate could win against Trump in the primaries is because they were all mini-Trumps. There was no real alternative.

Got to give Gavin Newsom credit. He went after DeSantis, he tackled national issues. Does that mean America wants Newsom to be president? I’m unsure about that, because the Republicans have spent years demonizing California.

But back in 2008 the barely known Barack Obama won selling hope.

That’s not what Joe Biden is selling, he’s selling fear, that you’ve got to vote for him because you don’t want the other guy.

As a matter of fact, that’s what the Republicans are selling too, fear of the other party.

But someone going outside the usual lane, with a plan, for progress… They’re not the candidate.

We’re looking for revolutionary music. Something new and different that we not only want to listen to, but we want to tell everybody about.

Now there is a world of different sounds on the road. And their success can be quantified, by the number of tickets acts can sell.

As for recordings, online… Sure, there are statistics, but oftentimes they’re ginned-up, it’s unclear if there truly is a fan base. And there are so many competitors that it’s overwhelming.

Not live.

So if you want to make it…

Stop saying you can sing like Mariah Carey. Music is about conception, always has been. You don’t need to be the greatest singer or songwriter you just have to have a new idea and express it. Sure, it takes longer than ever to make it, but you’ve got to accept that.

America craves the new and different. The past with a twist. Something wholly new.

Which is why “Squid Game” was so popular. Whatever you think of “Tiger King” we’d never seen anything like that before. Or even “Love on the Spectrum”…autistic people as stars?

But in politics and music, it’s the same old same old.

Sure, there’s a music business. But despite those in it talking about fandom, reciting statistics, music doesn’t drive the culture. If you want to know which way the wind blows, you don’t listen to a record.

And that’s easy to change. And it doesn’t even cost much. You’ve just go to think different.

Steve Jobs came back to a company that he got fired from, threw out the old operating system, slimmed the product line, refined others’ products into new hit items, i.e. the iPod, and Apple became the most valuable company in the world.

And it was done in plain sight.

Sleeker packaging. Easier operation. To this day the complaint about the iPhone by the cognoscenti is it’s too easy to use, it can’t be customized enough. But Jobs was smart enough to know that the masses wanted usability first.

And the public does not want Biden or Trump.

And the public is hungering for sounds unlike those in the Spotify Top 50.

But those in control are resting on their laurels, doubling down on the aged past, just waiting to be disrupted.

Tune in Saturday March 2nd to Faction Talk, channel 103, at 4 PM East, 1 PM West.

If you miss the episode, you can hear it on demand on the SiriusXM app. Search: Lefsetz

https://shorturl.at/aG189

This went up yesterday, but I didn’t find out about it until today, from a tweet by analyst Brandon Ross.

No post in “Hits.” No post in “Billboard.” It’s like the announcement was dropped and it didn’t even make a ripple in the water.

I Googled. I couldn’t find one reference to this post, NOT ONE!

Then I went to the Apple News. Ditto.

I’m a pretty good Googler, there’s a chance I missed something, but I don’t think so.

So how is it the biggest name in live entertainment gives a detailed explanation of how ticketing and concert promotion work and no one cares?

All I can say is we live in a post-truth society. You make up your own facts. Ticketmaster is the devil and they’re taking advantage of those damn acts and you. This might feel right, but it’s patently untrue.

You’ve even got Zach Bryan deriding Live Nation with the title of an album!

And you wonder how come truth can’t penetrate politics…

This is great evidence of the fact that you can make it, you can post it, but that does not mean anybody will pay attention.

Live Nation should include this screed with each and every ticket it sells. Not once, but for a year or two or three until the message finally penetrates the public consciousness.

You still may not understand how ticketing and concert promotion work. Hell, the acts don’t want you to know. I’ve delineated it many times, but many readers still don’t want to believe what I say.

So read this Live Nation post. You can click on the link above, or if that’s too much, I’m going to post the entire statement below.

Of course not everything in the concert world is covered. But as far as this post goes, it’s right.

“The Truth About Ticket Prices”

By Dan Wall

In the ongoing antitrust attacks on Live Nation and Ticketmaster, a constant theme is that their alleged “monopolies” are responsible for high ticket prices.  Rhetorically, that’s understandable, because if you want to rile up fans against Live Nation and Ticketmaster, there is no better way than to blame them for something you know fans dislike. But is there really a connection between any of these antitrust arguments and prices for concert tickets?  That’s the subject of today’s post.

The starting point is what Live Nation and Ticketmaster actually do.  What roles do they play in the concert industry and what power does that give them to influence ticket prices?  We’ll start with Ticketmaster, since it tends to get the lion’s share of the blame for high ticket prices even though, as we shall see, it has the least influence over prices.

HOW TICKETING WORKS

Ticketmaster and other “primary ticketing companies” provide the technology and services that venues need to manage and market shows, sell tickets, and validate tickets for entry.  Typically, one primary ticketing company provides these services for all events at a given venue.  The chosen ticketing company then interfaces with consumers on online marketplaces, not to sell inventory of their own, but as agents of the venues selling tickets priced by performers and production entities.  Fans tend not to understand that.  They think of Ticketmaster as an enormous ticket retailer that acquires vast quantities of tickets and puts them up for sale at prices Ticketmaster determines – an assumption that makes it easy to blame Ticketmaster for high ticket prices.  But that’s not true.

Tickets are actually priced by artists and teams.  It’s their show, they get to decide what it costs to get in.  The NFL tickets on Ticketmaster were priced by the home teams, concert tickets were priced by the performer’s business teams, Monster Jam tickets were priced by its producer (Feld Entertainment), and so forth.

THE TRUTH ABOUT FEES

The argument that Ticketmaster is responsible for high prices is really about service charges.  The practice in the U.S. for decades has been to break down the cost of admission into a “face value” sum and one or more fees added to face value.  There is a common perception that service charges are “junk fees” and that Ticketmaster sets the fees and pockets the money.  Again, that’s not true.

Service charges are added to the face value of concert tickets because two important players in the concert ecosystem – venues and primary ticketing companies – get little or nothing out of the revenues derived from the ticket’s face value.  That money goes mostly to the performers, secondarily to cover certain show costs, and if anything is left over to the promoters.  So, the practice developed to add a percentage service charge to a ticket’s face value to pay the venue for hosting the event and the primary ticketing company for servicing venues and distributing tickets.  The add-on nature of the service fee is annoying to many fans and fuels the narrative that these are junk fees.  But they are not junk fees for the simple reason that the venues and ticketing companies have costs associated with the services they provide to help produce the show. They provide value and one way or another will be compensated for it.

Fans are also told that service charges are Ticketmaster’s way of raising ticket prices.  In fact, Ticketmaster does not set service charges, venues do, and most of the money goes to the venues.  Let’s break that down.

Primary ticketing service charges are a product of the hundreds of contracts that exist between venues and their exclusive ticketing providers.  They are not uniform, but a typical contract will provide that in exchange for its services and some guaranteed cash payments to the venue, the ticketing company will get a stated percentage of the service charge the venue intends to impose, a dollar-per-ticket fee, or some combination of the two.  The venue decides on the service fees.  During the ticketing contract bidding process, the venue tells the bidding ticketing companies that it intends to charge certain fees, and the ticketing companies structure their offers accordingly.

However the contract turns out, the venue gets most of the service fee, not Ticketmaster or any other primary ticketing company.  In fact, the venue normally gets around two-thirds of the service charge and in many cases a facility fee as well.  So, if fees add, say, 30% to the face value of a ticket, the primary ticketing company is getting perhaps a quarter of that – something in the range of 5-7%.  And the primary ticketing company is not making 5-7% per ticket as profit because it has costs to cover, not the least of which are the guaranteed payments to the venue it needed to promise to win the contract.  A primary ticketing company’s profit per ticket is closer to 2% of the average ticket price, a figure far too low to be the cause of high ticket prices.

But let’s ignore costs and just ask whether getting a 5-7% commission on the sale of a concert ticket is abnormal or unreasonable.  In today’s economy we have a lot of data points about what digital distribution usually costs.  We can, for example, compare Ticketmaster’s 5-7% commission rate with what other digital distribution platforms charge.  The fact is that the 5-7% fee that primary ticketing companies earn on ticket sales is extremely low by the standards

of digital distribution.  Here’s how it stacks up against a collection of other fees charged by online marketplaces.

If distribution makes up 25%, 37% or 50% of what a consumer pays for something, of course it bears some responsibility for the ultimate price.  But at just 5-7%, there is no rational basis for thinking that primary ticketing companies are the cause of high concert ticket prices.  They charge too little, and even if one were to assume — without any evidence — that there is some amount of unjustified “monopoly profit” in a 5-7% commission, it could not affect ticket prices by more than one or two percent at worst.  So the narrative that Ticketmaster fees are responsible for high ticket prices makes no sense.  There is no way that’s true.

THE ROLE OF THE PROMOTER

Now let’s consider Live Nation in its role as a concert promoter.  The arguments we hear about Live Nation’s role in concert pricing are inconsistent.  Some claim that Live Nation is so powerful in concert promotion that it can dictate what artists charge; others claim that Live Nation can raise its prices to artists, and this gets passed through to fans in higher ticket prices.  Neither argument is plausible.

Concert promoters provide an array of services related to putting on memorable and financially successful concerts.  They help the performers secure the right venues, negotiate deals with venues and others, advise on pricing, market the shows, and manage the countless details involved in hosting a concert.  But promoters don’t get paid for their services directly, the way a lawyer or an accountant might.  Concert promoters invest in the show or tour by guaranteeing the performers a certain amount of money on the hope and expectation that there will be some profit for the promoter after the performers have been paid and all show costs have been covered.  Promoters, in other words, are risk takers: they bankroll the show hoping it turns out to be profitable, but the risks they take make their compensation uncertain.

Promoters do not set ticket prices.  They care deeply about pricing, and are usually quite sophisticated about it, because the offers they make to artists necessarily anticipate and depend on the number of, and prices for, tickets likely to be sold.  Think about a simple guarantee to an artist of $100,000 for one show at a 5,000 seat venue:  there is no way for a responsible promoter to offer that guarantee without at least a general understanding of what those 5,000 tickets will sell for.  This is the same reason why the investors on Shark Tank ask potential partners how much they charge for their products.  If your money is at risk, you pay attention to pricing.

Nevertheless, promoters don’t set prices, artists do.  The artist and her business team listen to the promoter’s input and then decide.  This is the case even with a promoter as large as Live Nation or AEG.  Furthermore, if you want to talk about a promoter’s pricing incentives, the last thing a concert promoter wants to do is charge too much for a show.  That is a surefire way for the promoter to lose money.  The promoter’s incentive is to find the sweet spot that balances ticket revenues and the probability of a sellout.  That’s what gives promoters a reasonable chance of making money on the show.

There is even less merit to the idea that the promoter’s take from a concert pushes up ticket prices.  Concert promotion services are not remotely expensive enough, let alone profitable enough, to have that effect.

A promoter’s compensation is the product of numerous terms in its contract with an artist.  The most important are the guarantee to the artist, the artist percentage of revenues after ticket sales exceed the guarantee, and the terms defining the expenses that the promoter is allowed to recover.  The guarantee is a fixed amount paid by the promoter to the artist regardless of whether the promoter loses money.  For example, a band might be guaranteed $100,000, in which case it will be paid $100,000 irrespective of whether the concert makes money.  The band may even make more if the show is successful, however, because through the artist percentage the band will also be entitled to a substantial part of any net ticket revenues.  Nowadays, it’s common for top artists to get 90% or more of the net ticket revenues.  The promoter gets only what remains after the guarantee, other show costs, and the artist’s percentage have been paid out.  That depends critically on how many tickets are sold, which is unknown until the night of the show.  To further complicate things, every deal is different, and artists vary widely by their popularity and bargaining power.  Promoter “prices” — whatever one chooses that to mean — vary from deal to deal.

What we can say is that concert promotion is not a highly profitable business, even for Live Nation.  In its annual reports, Live Nation reports billions of dollars of revenue for its Concerts segment because the acts it promotes sell billions of dollars in tickets.  But Live Nation’s own income as a concert promoter is less than 2% of concert revenues.  The Concerts segment’s adjusted operating income margin in 2023 was 1.7%.

On that basis alone it is obvious that what Live Nation earns as a concert promoter can’t be responsible for high ticket prices.  It is not taking nearly enough of the ticket revenue to force up ticket prices meaningfully.  And despite all the talk that Live Nation is becoming more and more powerful, the secular trend in the industry is that artists are getting an increasingly large share of ticket revenues.  Concert promotion is an attractive business today largely because of its relationship to selling corporate sponsorships — an advertising business in which money comes neither from artists nor fans, but rather from big corporations.

We are left, then, with a ticketing distribution “monopoly” that charges a fraction of what most digital platforms charge and a concert promotions “monopoly” with a 1.7% AOI margin.  And neither sets ticket prices.

WHAT REALLY CAUSES HIGH TICKET PRICES

The real explanations for high ticket prices are well-understood and have very little to do with Live Nation or Ticketmaster.  They begin with the economic conditions that explain most pricing:  supply and demand.  For a small percentage of concerts — the high-profile ones — consumer demand greatly exceeds the supply of available tickets.  This is obvious at the apex of the industry, where stars like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Ed Sheeran, Bruce Springsteen and Harry Styles could easily sell out far more shows than they could realistically play.  But it’s not just them.  For the top 5-10% of touring artists, demand is regularly well in excess of the supply of tickets.  We are fortunate that artists in this category choose not to exercise their full pricing power; otherwise, they would charge the much higher prices we see on resale markets.  But basic economics applies to concert tickets too, so strong demand naturally leads to higher ticket pricing.

Closely related to this is the phenomenon of concerts becoming premier “experience goods.”  Much has been written about the advent of the “experience economy,” in which economic value has shifted progressively from the production and supply of goods, to the delivery of services, and now to the staging of experiences.  Music, whether recorded or live, is by its nature experienced, but plainly the live experience is richer and in economic terms more valuable.  Concerts also have the potential to become spectacles, whether though elaborate staging and production or a consumer buzz that makes them “the place to be.”  This factor is magnified by social media, which in addition to creating demand through ongoing connections to artists, allows concerts to be shared experiences when fans upload videos and “Instagrammable moments” to their social media platforms.  The experience value of concerts has been increasing for decades, and with it the price of tickets.

Artists have also become more dependent on touring income over the last 25 years — the factor that Alan Krueger, who served as the Chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, cited as “the primary reason why concert prices have risen so much since the late 1990s.”  This is the direct result of a precipitous decline in the value of recorded music when streaming (and unauthorized duplication) led to drastically lower record sales, which in turn led record companies to withdraw from their traditional role bankrolling touring.  In that environment, concerts could no longer be loss leaders to sell albums.  They became the artist’s principal source of income, and priced accordingly.

HOW RESALE IMPACTS PRICES

Finally, the rise of today’s mammoth online resale markets has profoundly affected concert pricing.  It has done so by undermining to a degree the longstanding practice of performers to substantially underprice tickets to their performances, especially the best seats to the hottest shows.  Artists underprice tickets for several reasons, but mostly out of regard for their fans.  There is a kind of social compact between performers and their devoted fans to charge them fair prices, not whatever the market will bear.  StubHub and the resale marketplaces that followed it changed that forever by presenting artists with 24/7 reminders of what the true market value for their tickets is — and that when they don’t charge those prices scalpers will find ways to acquire tickets and resell them at full market value.  That unquestionably affects what artists charge.  They still don’t charge what the market will bear, not even for the best seats, but most charge more for the best seats than they would in the absence of all that scalping.

The common thread to all these factors is that they have nothing to do with who the promoter is or who sells tickets to the show.  What Taylor Swift charges has nothing to do with whether she is promoted by Live Nation (which she is not) or Louis Messina of AEG (which she is).  What Beyoncé charges has nothing to do with whether Ticketmaster or SeatGeek serves the venues she chooses to play.  Either way, the performer’s business team will work with their chosen promoter and try to come up with the pricing strategy that strikes the right balance between the economic returns from the tour and doing right by their fans.  The first part of that will turn mainly on data-driven judgments about demand.  How did the performer’s last tour sell, and at what prices?  What are comparable artists charging in similar venues in this tour cycle?  How strong is demand for concerts generally at this time?  Does the artist have recent hit songs — or a following that shows up every tour cycle regardless of recent hits?  It may also be affected by venue considerations; for example, amphitheaters have lawn seating that traditionally commands low prices.  The point, again, is that nothing turns on who the promoter or ticketing company is.  Neither has the power to set prices, and the identity of the promoter or ticketing company is unrelated to the actual determinants of pricing.

Statements to the effect that Live Nation and Ticketmaster “keep ticket prices high” are just flat wrong.  Anyone with a basic understanding of the industry knows this.  Those who perpetuate this falsehood are cynical at best.  They do a disservice to consumers and to rational political discourse.