During a Senate hearing on the Taylor Swift-Ticketmaster ticket sale fiasco, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) grilled president and CFO of Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation Entertainment Joe Berchtold about who sets ticket prices. #CNN #News
Watch lawmaker grill Live Nation CFO on who sets ticket prices
Ticketmaster has been craven for DECADES. I am so glad Swift was the impetus for this hearing and I hope material, substantive changes are made that benefit the public market. I am not a fan of her music but I appreciate her gravitas.
TRUMP IS A PERFECT LANDMARK.
Didn’t work 20 years ago when Pearl Jam fought them…but maybe there are plenty of old men in congress that are Swifty’s. Good Luck.
@john smith Well John I would assume that most of old men in congress are in fact mostly men. Could be wrong though! haha
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Ticketmaster is the scourge of live music.
It’s called a MONOPOLY
unfair hold on the creative expression of artists….by means of greed
Setting Ticket Prices?
I Wonder…How Much will Tickets Cost Us, front row or nose bleed, To the Show aka The American Experiment….if we dont Get Back to Work on rooting out OUR OWN Domestic Terrorist in the House of Representatives? Put the DOJ on This & Get Back To Work, People!
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Ticket Master has been a problem since the 90’s. Just ask Pearl Jam.
ACCOUNTABILITY!!! BREAK THE MONOPOLIES!!! ACCOUNTABILITY!!! BREAK THE MONOPOLIES!!! ACCOUNTABILITY!!! BREAK THE MONOPOLIES!!!
I had the opportunity to see a limited show for Gregory Alan Isakov at the Stanley hotel in Colorado which was one one the best concerts I had ever experienced. However, if my ex who bought the tickets for us and our friends hadn’t jumped on early and the website didn’t make a mistake of selling early, we wouldn’t have been able to buy tickets for under $550. It was sold out one minute into them beginning the sale. We checked later and wow did that price jump from scalpers that were associated with ticket master and Live Nation. I’m glad Taylor Swift fans are pressing this hard. This is a monopoly. They own the board with a hotel on all spaces when it comes to live entertainment.
Back in 1994 Pearl Jam confronted Ticketmaster at the Justice Department. Nothing changed. Later it was found out Ticketmaster gave “free” concert tickets to politicians at the hearing days before the hearings happened. That’s why nothing changed.
Correct, people continue to voluntarily purchase tickets with ticketmaster. The people set the price.
@Joey Garcia You’re either a comment bot or a complete and total moron that was dropped on their head at birth.
1) That isn’t what saintmartins said at all. They highlighted how bribes in the past didn’t change anything and this has been allowed to fester for 3 decades.
2) People continue to purchase tickets with Ticketmaster because they’re the only game in town after town. They are a monopoly. Which is the entire point of the goddamn hearings in the first place.
In 1979, saw a great ac/dc show in Winnipeg for $20.
The problem is the BS ‘booking fee’ in the past if a ticket face value was 25 you went to the venue box office and you paid 25. Now it is impossible to do this and even if you can they still want to charge you some BS fees on top of the face value.
It is a money making slot machine.
The key phrase about transferable tickets was making tickets only transferable at the original rate decided on by the show and the venue.
There’s no need for a resale market; shows and venues should set the price of tickets within the free market, not artificially inflate ticket prices gouging consumers and leaving seats empty that the people putting on the show want filled
Well this is educational for me I didn’t know politicians could agree on something🤔
Ticketmaster provides a service that benefits the wealthy by hoovering up choice tickets then reselling them to people that can afford the higher prices. The USA has about 340M people and when a major act plays in NYC or many other places the number of potential people that might want to go to that concert is higher than the number of seats at the stadium/arena so the wealthy would have no more chance of getting one of the limited number of seats than the average working stiff. But, with companies like Ticketmaster controlling the tickets and being able to charge much higher rates, this weeds out a huge percentage of the potential audience making it easier for the wealthy to get tickets. Yeah, the wealthy have to pay more than face value, but they can afford it and that premium provides exclusivity that the average working types aren’t in a position to take advantage of. There is a reason why celebrities and wealthy types seem to always be able to get tickets to top games and shows — the system is designed to facilitate giving priority to high rollers — for a fee!
This is the problem with capitalism everything depends on the Market so what happens when there are lack of competitors this is what happens. Which is why we need to move to socialism
Live Nation turned big concerts to be something experienced by wealthy people and the people who aren’t wealthy can only view the concert with binoculars.
Maybe we should have the people of the US own the companies equally so we dont have to deal with messes like this
Madonna’s tickets going for $560 + fees on Ticketmaster right now 🤦♀️
They need to go back to the old way, you stand in line at the venue to get tickets. That way you cut out the middle man. Service fees are reason tickets cost too much.
This is what they’re doing, they set the ticket prices at a reasonable level, but they all have insider companies that they also invest in. These, “businesses”, (that they control) then buy all the tickets to these popular events and leverage the resale market. That’s the real issue, is no one is ever buying tickets from the direct seller, they’re sold out the minute they’re available.