https:\/\/shorturl.at\/aG189<\/p>\n
This went up yesterday, but I didn’t find out about it until today, from a tweet by analyst Brandon Ross.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I Googled. I couldn’t find one reference to this post, NOT ONE!<\/p>\n
Then I went to the Apple News. Ditto.<\/p>\n
I’m a pretty good Googler, there’s a chance I missed something, but I don’t think so.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
You’ve even got Zach Bryan deriding Live Nation with the title of an album!<\/p>\n
And you wonder how come truth can’t penetrate politics…<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Of course not everything in the concert world is covered. But as far as this post goes, it’s right.<\/p>\n
“The Truth About Ticket Prices”<\/strong><\/p>\n
By Dan Wall<\/p>\n
In the ongoing antitrust attacks on Live Nation and Ticketmaster, a constant theme is that their alleged \u00e2\u20ac\u0153monopolies\u00e2\u20ac\u009d are responsible for high ticket prices.\u00c2\u00a0 Rhetorically, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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?\u00c2\u00a0 That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the subject of today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s post.<\/p>\n
The starting point is what Live Nation and Ticketmaster actually do.\u00c2\u00a0 What roles do they play in the concert industry and what power does that give them to influence ticket prices?\u00c2\u00a0 We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll start with Ticketmaster, since it tends to get the lion\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s share of the blame for high ticket prices even though, as we shall see, it has the least influence over prices.<\/p>\n
HOW TICKETING WORKS<\/p>\n
Ticketmaster and other \u00e2\u20ac\u0153primary ticketing companies\u00e2\u20ac\u009d provide the technology and services that venues need to manage and market shows, sell tickets, and validate tickets for entry.\u00c2\u00a0 Typically, one primary ticketing company provides these services for all events at a given venue.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Fans tend not to understand that.\u00c2\u00a0 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c an assumption that makes it easy to blame Ticketmaster for high ticket prices.\u00c2\u00a0 But that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not true.<\/p>\n
Tickets are actually priced by artists and teams.\u00c2\u00a0 It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s their show, they get to decide what it costs to get in.\u00c2\u00a0 The NFL tickets on Ticketmaster were priced by the home teams, concert tickets were priced by the performer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s business teams, Monster Jam tickets were priced by its producer (Feld Entertainment), and so forth.<\/p>\n
THE TRUTH ABOUT FEES<\/p>\n
The argument that Ticketmaster is responsible for high prices is really about service charges.\u00c2\u00a0 The practice in the U.S. for decades has been to break down the cost of admission into a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153face value\u00e2\u20ac\u009d sum and one or more fees added to face value.\u00c2\u00a0 There is a common perception that service charges are \u00e2\u20ac\u0153junk fees\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and that Ticketmaster sets the fees and pockets the money.\u00c2\u00a0 Again, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not true.<\/p>\n
Service charges are added to the face value of concert tickets because two important players in the concert ecosystem \u00e2\u20ac\u201c venues and primary ticketing companies \u00e2\u20ac\u201c get little or nothing out of the revenues derived from the ticket\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s face value.\u00c2\u00a0 That money goes mostly to the performers, secondarily to cover certain show costs, and if anything is left over to the promoters. \u00c2\u00a0So, the practice developed to add a percentage service charge to a ticket\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s face value to pay the venue for hosting the event and the primary ticketing company for servicing venues and distributing tickets.\u00c2\u00a0 The add-on nature of the service fee is annoying to many fans and fuels the narrative that these are junk fees.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Fans are also told that service charges are Ticketmaster\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s way of raising ticket prices.\u00c2\u00a0 In fact, Ticketmaster does not set service charges, venues do, and most of the money goes to the venues.\u00c2\u00a0 Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s break that down.<\/p>\n
Primary ticketing service charges are a product of the hundreds of contracts that exist between venues and their exclusive ticketing providers.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 The venue decides on the service fees.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
However the contract turns out, the\u00c2\u00a0venue\u00c2\u00a0gets most of the service fee, not Ticketmaster or any other primary ticketing company.\u00c2\u00a0 In fact, the venue normally gets around two-thirds of the service charge and in many cases a facility fee as well.\u00c2\u00a0 So, if fees add, say, 30% to the face value of a ticket, the primary ticketing company is getting perhaps a quarter of that \u00e2\u20ac\u201c something in the range of 5-7%.\u00c2\u00a0 And the primary ticketing company is not\u00c2\u00a0making\u00c2\u00a05-7% 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.\u00c2\u00a0 A primary ticketing company\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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.<\/p>\n
But let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ignore costs and just ask whether getting a 5-7% commission on the sale of a concert ticket is abnormal or unreasonable.\u00c2\u00a0 In today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s economy we have a lot of data points about what digital distribution usually costs.\u00c2\u00a0 We can, for example, compare Ticketmaster\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 5-7% commission rate with what other digital distribution platforms charge.\u00c2\u00a0 The fact is that the 5-7% fee that primary ticketing companies earn on ticket sales is\u00c2\u00a0extremely\u00c2\u00a0low\u00c2\u00a0by the standards<\/p>\n
of digital distribution.\u00c2\u00a0 Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how it stacks up against a collection of other fees charged by online marketplaces.<\/p>\n
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.\u00c2\u00a0 But at just 5-7%, there is no rational basis for thinking that primary ticketing companies are the cause of high concert ticket prices.\u00c2\u00a0 They charge too little, and even if one were to assume \u00e2\u20ac\u201d without any evidence \u00e2\u20ac\u201d that there is some amount of unjustified \u00e2\u20ac\u0153monopoly profit\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in a 5-7% commission, it could not affect ticket prices by more than one or two percent at worst.\u00c2\u00a0 So the narrative that Ticketmaster fees are responsible for high ticket prices makes no sense.\u00c2\u00a0 There is no way that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s true.<\/p>\n
THE ROLE OF THE PROMOTER<\/p>\n
Now let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s consider Live Nation in its role as a concert promoter.\u00c2\u00a0 The arguments we hear about Live Nation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s role in concert pricing are inconsistent.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Neither argument is plausible.<\/p>\n
Concert promoters provide an array of services related to putting on memorable and financially successful concerts.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 But promoters don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get paid for their services directly, the way a lawyer or an accountant might.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Promoters do not set ticket prices.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Think about a simple guarantee to an artist of $100,000 for one show at a 5,000 seat venue:\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 This is the same reason why the investors on\u00c2\u00a0Shark Tank ask potential partners how much they charge for their products.\u00c2\u00a0 If your money is at risk, you pay attention to pricing.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, promoters don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t set prices, artists do.\u00c2\u00a0 The artist and her business team listen to the promoter\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s input and then decide.\u00c2\u00a0 This is the case even with a promoter as large as Live Nation or AEG.\u00c2\u00a0 Furthermore, if you want to talk about a promoter\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pricing incentives, the last thing a concert promoter wants to do is charge too much for a show.\u00c2\u00a0 That is a surefire way for the promoter to lose money.\u00c2\u00a0 The promoter\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s incentive is to find the sweet spot that balances ticket revenues and the probability of a sellout.\u00c2\u00a0 That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what gives promoters a reasonable chance of making money on the show.<\/p>\n
There is even less merit to the idea that the promoter\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s take from a concert pushes up ticket prices.\u00c2\u00a0 Concert promotion services are not remotely expensive enough, let alone profitable enough, to have that effect.<\/p>\n
A promoter\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s compensation is the product of numerous terms in its contract with an artist.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 The guarantee is a fixed amount paid by the promoter to the artist regardless of whether the promoter loses money. \u00c2\u00a0For example, a band might be guaranteed $100,000, in which case it will be paid $100,000 irrespective of whether the concert makes money.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Nowadays, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s common for top artists to get 90% or more of the net ticket revenues.\u00c2\u00a0 The promoter gets only what remains after the guarantee, other show costs, and the artist\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s percentage have been paid out.\u00c2\u00a0 That depends critically on how many tickets are sold, which is unknown until the night of the show.\u00c2\u00a0 To further complicate things, every deal is different, and artists vary widely by their popularity and bargaining power.\u00c2\u00a0 Promoter \u00e2\u20ac\u0153prices\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201d whatever one chooses that to mean \u00e2\u20ac\u201d vary from deal to deal.<\/p>\n
What we can say is that concert promotion is not a highly profitable business, even for Live Nation.\u00c2\u00a0 In its annual reports, Live Nation reports billions of dollars of\u00c2\u00a0revenue\u00c2\u00a0for its Concerts segment because the acts it promotes sell billions of dollars in tickets.\u00c2\u00a0 But Live Nation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s own\u00c2\u00a0income\u00c2\u00a0as a concert promoter is less than 2% of concert revenues.\u00c2\u00a0 The Concerts segment\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s adjusted operating income margin in 2023 was 1.7%.<\/p>\n
On that basis alone it is obvious that what Live Nation earns as a concert promoter can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be responsible for high ticket prices.\u00c2\u00a0 It is not taking nearly enough of the ticket revenue to force up ticket prices meaningfully.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Concert promotion is an attractive business today largely because of its relationship to selling corporate sponsorships \u00e2\u20ac\u201d an advertising business in which money comes neither from artists nor fans, but rather from big corporations.<\/p>\n
We are left, then, with a ticketing distribution \u00e2\u20ac\u0153monopoly\u00e2\u20ac\u009d that charges a fraction of what most digital platforms charge and a concert promotions \u00e2\u20ac\u0153monopoly\u00e2\u20ac\u009d with a 1.7% AOI margin.\u00c2\u00a0 And neither sets ticket prices.<\/p>\n
WHAT REALLY CAUSES HIGH TICKET PRICES<\/p>\n
The real explanations for high ticket prices are well-understood and have very little to do with Live Nation or Ticketmaster.\u00c2\u00a0 They begin with the economic conditions that explain most pricing:\u00c2\u00a0 supply and demand.\u00c2\u00a0 For a small percentage of concerts \u00e2\u20ac\u201d the high-profile ones \u00e2\u20ac\u201d consumer demand\u00c2\u00a0greatly\u00c2\u00a0exceeds the supply of available tickets.\u00c2\u00a0 This is obvious at the apex of the industry, where stars like Taylor Swift, Beyonc\u00c3\u00a9, Ed Sheeran, Bruce Springsteen and Harry Styles could easily sell out far more shows than they could realistically play.\u00c2\u00a0 But it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not just them.\u00c2\u00a0 For the top 5-10% of touring artists, demand is regularly well in excess of the supply of tickets.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 But basic economics applies to concert tickets too, so strong demand naturally leads to higher ticket pricing.<\/p>\n
Closely related to this is the phenomenon of concerts becoming premier \u00e2\u20ac\u0153experience goods.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 Much has been written about the advent of the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153experience economy,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Music, whether recorded or live, is by its nature experienced, but plainly the live experience is richer and in economic terms more valuable.\u00c2\u00a0 Concerts also have the potential to become spectacles, whether though elaborate staging and production or a consumer buzz that makes them \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the place to be.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Instagrammable moments\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to their social media platforms.\u00c2\u00a0 The experience value of concerts has been increasing for decades, and with it the price of tickets.<\/p>\n
Artists have also become more dependent on touring income over the last 25 years \u00e2\u20ac\u201d the factor that Alan Krueger, who served as the Chairman of President Barack Obama\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Council of Economic Advisers, cited as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the primary reason why concert prices have risen so much since the late 1990s.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 In that environment, concerts could no longer be loss leaders to sell albums.\u00c2\u00a0 They became the artist\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s principal source of income, and priced accordingly.<\/p>\n
HOW RESALE IMPACTS PRICES<\/p>\n
Finally, the rise of today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mammoth online resale markets has profoundly affected concert pricing.\u00c2\u00a0 It has done so by undermining to a degree the longstanding practice of performers to substantially\u00c2\u00a0underprice\u00c2\u00a0tickets to their performances, especially the best seats to the hottest shows.\u00c2\u00a0 Artists underprice tickets for several reasons, but mostly out of regard for their fans.\u00c2\u00a0 There is a kind of social compact between performers and their devoted fans to charge them fair prices, not whatever the market will bear.\u00c2\u00a0 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and that when they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t charge those prices scalpers will find ways to acquire tickets and resell them at full market value.\u00c2\u00a0 That unquestionably affects what artists charge.\u00c2\u00a0 They still don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00c2\u00a0 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).\u00c2\u00a0 What Beyonc\u00c3\u00a9 charges has nothing to do with whether Ticketmaster or SeatGeek serves the venues she chooses to play.\u00c2\u00a0 Either way, the performer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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.\u00c2\u00a0 The first part of that will turn mainly on data-driven judgments about demand.\u00c2\u00a0 How did the performer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s last tour sell, and at what prices?\u00c2\u00a0 What are comparable artists charging in similar venues in this tour cycle?\u00c2\u00a0 How strong is demand for concerts generally at this time?\u00c2\u00a0 Does the artist have recent hit songs \u00e2\u20ac\u201d or a following that shows up every tour cycle regardless of recent hits?\u00c2\u00a0 It may also be affected by venue considerations; for example, amphitheaters have lawn seating that traditionally commands low prices.\u00c2\u00a0 The point, again, is that nothing turns on who the promoter or ticketing company is.\u00c2\u00a0 Neither has the power to set prices, and the identity of the promoter or ticketing company is unrelated to the actual determinants of pricing.<\/p>\n
Statements to the effect that Live Nation and Ticketmaster \u00e2\u20ac\u0153keep ticket prices high\u00e2\u20ac\u009d are just flat wrong.\u00c2\u00a0 Anyone with a basic understanding of the industry knows this.\u00c2\u00a0 Those who perpetuate this falsehood are cynical at best.\u00c2\u00a0 They do a disservice to consumers and to rational political discourse.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-shows","category-music-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-5mm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20606"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20609,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20606\/revisions\/20609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}