It’s about damn time.
For years, Live Nation and Ticketmaster have made the ticket buying experience one full of dread and an inordinate amount of additional fees. It’s no secret that the ticket market for live events is all the way corrupt. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to buy a $45 ticket and when I go to checkout, it’s $145 after all of the services fees and transaction fees are tacked on.
There has long been a call for Ticketmaster, which is under the Live Nation Entertainment umbrella, to change their ways and do something about the excessive prices. It’s a very complicated issue, and in short, the problem is that ticket sales are intertwined with booking and management and venues and promoters, which we broke down in way more detail here.
But hopefully things in the ticketing industry will improve sooner rather than later, considering that the Justice Department just came to the conclusion that they will file an antitrust suit against Live Nation, which will “allege that Live Nation had leveraged its dominance in a way that undermined competition for ticketing live events,” as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The Justice Department won’t waste any time with it either. Live Nation is expected to be hit with the official lawsuit next month. And I think we all should thank the “Swifties” for this happening, because this entire process seemed to be expedited after Ticketmaster embarrassingly botched Taylor Swift ticket sales in 2022. It was after that fiasco that demands really started to pour in for Live Nation and its subsidiary Ticketmaster to be investigated for causing harm to consumers.
But all the credit can’t go to Taylor Swift (please don’t be mad at me for saying that “Swifties”). There have been many artists as of late that have been outspoken against Ticketmaster, from Kid Rock saying the ticket sellers were a monopoly, to Zach Bryan almost making it his life’s work to speak out against Ticketmaster.
There was even a recent bombshell report that accused Ticketmaster of negotiating increased rates with vendors so that they didn’t have to pay as much out to artists. I’ve gotten this far into the story without saying it, but what Zach Bryan said is true.
All my homies hate Ticketmaster, and now the “homies” at Ticketmaster are hopefully going to face the music.
Cue up Zach Bryan’s “Burn, Burn, Burn” from his All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster: Live From Red Rocks album:
