You're Probably Getting Screwed by the Ticket Monopoly
American singer-songwriter Zach Bryan has had a big year. His major label debut album “American Heartbreak” was one of the top albums of 2022.
After criticizing Ticketmaster in several social media posts, he took dead aim at the ticketing monopoly on Christmas Day by releasing a live album titled “All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster.”
This comes after Bruce Springsteen fans were irate in July when the Boss’s 2023 tour dates were announced and tickets were jacked up to $5,000 a piece for Ticketmaster’s new dynamic pricing experiment.
In December, Ticketmaster again was in hot water when “many hundreds of concertgoers with legitimate tickets were turned away from a Bad Bunny concert in Mexico City, leading to widespread confusion at the venue and delaying the show by an hour.”
Live Nation now owns Ticketmaster. In the days before the 2010 merger, for the most part, venues, promoters and ticket companies operated independently.
Today, Live Nation Entertainment controls 70% of the primary ticketing and live-event venue marketplace.
The band Lawerence wrote a song “False Alarms” in 2021 about the challenges of pursuing a music career, including the lyric “Live Nation is a Monopoly.” According to the band, if they sell tickets for $30 the fan actually pays $42 because of ticket fees. Of that, the band gets about $12. Typically, half of it goes to tour costs so the band ends up with $6 of the fans’ $42.
In the music industry, there are other forms of Monopolies. Sony, Universal, and Warner control 80 percent of the record label market, which designed the streaming industry. Spotify, which is partly owned by Sony, Universal, and Warner, along with 4 other companies control 80% of the global streaming market.
The music industry is just another example of America’s monopoly problem. While Live Nation is bragging about record revenue, corporations like it are “extracting the maximum capital from artists’ labor, and they’re not sharing it anymore” and making the fans pay for it.
To all the Swifties out there, the Zach Bryan fans, or all the casual fans to the scenesters who like going to see live music, come join the anti-monopoly movement and let's take on Live Nation.
Until then, we will continue to get screwed!
YOU’RE PROBABLY (ALSO) GETTING SCREWED BY:
BIG TECH
One thing Elon Musk has done really well since buying Twitter is showing us how too much power in one person’s hand is not a good thing. Why hasn’t there been more of a push to break up tech behemoths? Because these huge multinational corporations “lobby, donate, hire and repeat.”
CROPORATE GREED
SUPPLY CHAINS
According to a Morning Consult poll, do you know what the 8th fastest growing product is in the U.S.? That’s right, Walmart’s generic brand of cream cheese.
ECONOMIC CONCENTRATION
One way our government can help places left behind economically is by enforcing our antitrust laws. We need to start focusing on regional economies and policies that don’t leave mass amount of communities behind.
HEALTHCARE
Just a reminder that, we pay more than twice as much per person on total health care spending and on prescription drugs in comparison to other developed countries. This spending totals nearly 18 percent of our economy.
BEFORE YOU GO
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Standing Tall for All,
J.D. Scholten
