On the face of it Ticketmaster has very little incentive to pay artists more. They have an effective monopoly on large venues and ticket sales at this point, not to mention radio advertising and promotion, so it's not like the artists have a competitor to switch to. It's not like Blink-182 is going to just stop touring.

Once you get big enough you are pretty much forced to get into bed with Ticketmaster and take whatever deal they offer.

Citation needed, seriously.

There are so many comments in here saying dynamic pricing is screwing over artists but it seems like a huge win for them since it doesn't result in tickets being sold in secondary markets where they can't capture the margins.

Mark Hoppus has a complaint about the _experience_ of dynamic pricing but note that he isn't complaining about the actual prices.

It's impossible to know. Ticketmaster is opaque and the artists are under NDAs. However, if you think about it logically what incentive does Ticketmaster have to pass on the profits to the artists? The deck is hugely stacked in their favor and the artists don't have a lot to negotiate with. It's not like they're going to switch to a competitor. The most they can do is threaten to not tour or tour only in small to medium venues--and even those medium venues are getting gobbled up by TM.

To be fair, I'm sure artists like Blink-182 are still getting a decent chunk of change from the tour, especially from merch sales. But I also think Ticketmaster/Livenation is feeing them like mad and walking away with the lion's share of the revenue.

Is that because ticket master owns most of the venues or is it some legality thing? I don’t understand why artists have to use ticket master

They own some venues, but certainly not "most" of them. Think about who owns all of the sports stadiums in your city (the ones where mega artists would play), it's not TM.

It is very convenient for venue owners to let TM handle ticketing for the events. TM handles more than just sports and concert tickets. Since so many forms of live entertainment use TM, the company can bring in a lot of events to fill in off-season time. So an arena can host basketball & concerts on the weekend, then fill the weekdays with minor things like dirt bike races.

The sports stadiums are owned by LiveNation not Ticketmaster, so you are correct. But also wrong at the same time.

Stadiums are generally owned by the team(s) that play in them and/or the city. Live Nation doesn’t own any stadiums that I’m aware of, but they do own Ticketmaster.

No, Live Nation owns/leases small/midsize places like House of Blues. But they don't own the Honda Center. That's owned by the City of Anaheim. When Jay Z comes to down, he's not playing the House of Blues.

This situation repeats in practically every major metro. The massive arenas are probably owned by the city, or maybe the owner of the team that plays in them.

Which goes back into my argument, they own some venues. But not all of them, and certainly not the major arenas that mega artists play in.

AEG/AXS owns a number of large venues like the Oakland Coliseum + Arena, LA Crypto.com arena, and London O2. Presumably those are ticketed through AXS rather than Live Nation/Ticketmaster.

An interesting thing about AXS tickets is that they are presented using a smartphone app and are only valid for something like 60s before they need to be refreshed. This presumably makes tickets harder to resell outside of AXS's system.

If I wanted tickets to blink182 I'd DDG blink182, which obviously has blink182.com as the top result.

I'd then click "book tickets". That might be a link to ticketmaster, but it could be a link to seetickets or any other ticket system.

If blink182 used seetickets, and I wanted to go to their concert, even if I went to ticketmaster, once I found that I couldn't buy a ticket, I'd go elsewhere.

If Blink182 used Seetickets they wouldn't be playing in any of those large venues and wouldn't be getting radio airtime plugging their tour.

So the ticketmaster product is better for the customer (blink182), doesn't mean there's no competition.

Ticketmaster doesn't pay the artist.

The tickets are owned by the promoter. The promoter is one who pays the artist.

People often underestimate how risky live events are, as whey they think about a concert they think about U2, Jay Z or other major artists.

In reality, less than 50% of live events sell out.

And there's a fair bit of risk in putting them on. You need to layout the initial capital for things like venues (far from cheaps) and artists often want to get paid a minimum amount, regardless of ticket sales. The promoter needs to figure out how to market & get butts in seats -- including how to effectively price tickets, etc.

Artists typically don't want to deal with all that. They just want to produce their art.

And I just wanna code and not deal with the business people. Ohhh so that's why Twitter has 7500 people.

I don't really understand how it is worse for the average fan. It's worse for the average fan who might have won the lottery in getting a face-value ticket, but on average, the average fan doesn't actually get a face-value ticket even if scalping didn't happen, since demand >> supply, so nothing is different for them.

Generally, tickets sell out immediately, and then scalpers set the price. The average fan has very little chance to get a face-value ticket since they are gone as soon as they're released. You also have the situation where the average fan who gets lucky with a ticket then has to do the calculus of "I got lucky buying 4x$55 tickets, should I sell them $7k instead of going to the show?"