Author Topic: ticketmaster and live nation merge in completely legal single firm  (Read 6036 times)

SlimPickens

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ticketmaster and live nation merge in completely legal single firm
« Reply #45 on: March 02, 2009, 01:22:32 pm »
Interesting stuff on the TM/LN merger:

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As far as I can tell, the position as articulated by Rapino and Azoff in the press and before Congress is that they would like reality to be different for them. They would like the anti-trust laws to be relaxed, they’d like people to stop complaining about high ticket prices and just pay them, they want to sell tickets and scalp them, they’d like AEG to go away and they would like artists to stop asking for so much money.



Bill Wyman is also covering the hearings:

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Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino said that he doesn\'t hear complaints about high ticket prices (man, those upper-management bubbles must be pretty thick!), that $50 isn\'t a high price for a concert ticket (not that he\'s had to pay for any in a while), and that Ticketmaster\'s service fees also get kicked back to venues and artists, causing Rep. Brad Sherman to respond, "They are forcing [Ticketmaster CEO Irving] Azoff to pretend like he\'s charging a lot when it\'s really coming back to you"; Azoff also said early in the hearing that "if our customers don\'t like [our service] they will go somewhere else." Like what, the movies?

Spacey

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ticketmaster and live nation merge in completely legal single firm
« Reply #46 on: March 02, 2009, 01:44:59 pm »
interesting lunch reads indeed.
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ticketmaster and live nation merge in completely legal single firm
« Reply #47 on: March 02, 2009, 02:28:37 pm »
Quote from: Dyed_Tie;219638
I dunno, for me I\'d rather watch MLB on TV any day of the week.  I don\'t care how great of a game it is supposed to be.  You can\'t see anything at a MLB game unless you are at field level and in a game of inches it really is annoying not being able to see that.  I absolutely hate it when you are watching a game at home and there is a ball that is 3 inches out of the strike zone and the entire crowd is screaming like the umpire just maliciously stepped on a kitten.  You can\'t see it!  Where as i can see exactly what happened on the tube.  

Really the price of admission for a sporting event is so that if something crazy does happen you can say, "I was at that game!"  Yeah that\'s cool but usually you have to deal with traffic, rude people, and getting beer spilled on you.  I can experience that at any frat party.


I couldn\'t disagree with you more.  Having been lucky enough to be present for two perfect games and one pitch away from a 3rd, I would have to say that there is nothing in the world like going to see baseball live.  

As for screaming at a pitch was either called or not, you can\'t tell me that you\'ve never done that in your life whether it\'s in person or when you\'re at home.  The bottom line is that we\'re fans and we\'re going to get upset when a call doesn\'t go our way.  The perfect example is Jeter\'s home run in the series against Baltimore back in \'96.  Yeah, the ball was plucked before it could go in the stands, but would I give it back, no...

As for traffic - that\'s any event (except at the new Prudential Center.  The parking lots are so spread out through Newark that it doesn\'t bottleneck); rude people and getting beer spilled on me - I have both happen to me at Breakfast shows, so what\'s your point?
The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with - Bruce Springsteen

skalnbyc

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« Reply #48 on: March 02, 2009, 07:55:02 pm »
I\'m proud to announce I saved $80 in ticket fees by circumventing Livenation.com/going directly to the Fillmore box office yesterday. Ticket fees: what a frickin\' waste of money.
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boombox

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ticketmaster and live nation merge in completely legal single firm
« Reply #49 on: March 03, 2009, 07:51:43 am »
Ticketmaster and all these agencies are money grubbing thieves - simple as that. There is no way they can legitimately charge the administration charges for tickets they sell. It is a highly immoral industry, which will only be taught a lesson if fans vote with their credit cards and don\'t buy tickets. Yes, you won\'t see your favourite band, but for some of the bigger shows, the fees are as much as I would willingly pay for a ticket and I can\'t justify that. Those of you with kids, in particular, can you?

Bands too have to share some of the responsibility - ticket prices are way too high in the first place. Based on the claculation earlier, if Phish pocket $30 a ticket after expenses, what sort of obscene amount will they get from a 20 thousand seater venue over two or three nights, let alone a tour? No band should be paid that much - whoever they are, not when their average fan might earn $20-30K a year.

I have recently passed on a number of tours in recent years - Neil Young, CSN, Genesis etc simply because the tickets are too expensive in the first place, let alone with the legalised robbery by ticket agencies.

To give an example, Neil Young\'s last tour, tickets (with fees) were just over $140. Added to that, I would need to spend $50 on transport (and the associated 7 hours travel in a day), plus the inevitable concert merch (always overpriced with big bands, but you want it, so...).  So in all, not much change from $250, which to me is a lot for two hours entertainment and a tee shirt.

Compare this with the first leg of the last Jefferson Starship tour:
Tickets: $90 (bought from the venue - $1.50 Paypal handling charge) This was for TWO shows over two nights (each of 2 hours plus), plus a download of the SBD recording from each night.
Hotel room: $40
Transport: $50
Tshirt $20
Beer: $50
Video recording of both shows: FREE
Assorted Chats with band: FREE
Day out in London: FREE
Chewing the fat with taper buddies: FREE

A bit more, but seems like a much better deal to me.

Have recently seen Arlo Guthrie for $25 and have Bridget St John, The Strawbs and Stackridge coming up - all at $15 a pop. Not big names, I know, but they will certainly offer value for money.
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peaches626

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ticketmaster and live nation merge in completely legal single firm
« Reply #50 on: March 03, 2009, 12:39:30 pm »
boombox,

   i may be exposing my newb-ness here, but, What is "chewing the fat"?

    thanks,
          peaches
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Spacey

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ticketmaster and live nation merge in completely legal single firm
« Reply #51 on: March 03, 2009, 12:42:31 pm »
you can\'t be ser.

it means to chat, brah.
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peaches626

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ticketmaster and live nation merge in completely legal single firm
« Reply #52 on: March 03, 2009, 12:49:54 pm »
excellent.

I am smartening up.


Cheers!
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FrankZappa

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ticketmaster and live nation merge in completely legal single firm
« Reply #53 on: March 03, 2009, 01:20:52 pm »
boombox; I have to disagree with you in part. I think the band and agency should be able to charge whatever they feel the market will allow. if paul mccartney thinks people will pay $1,000 to see him and he wants to charge that, go for it. The risk is though that you might not get as many people going to see you.

My problem continues not to be the bands or ticketmaster trying to get as much money as they think they\'re entitled to, but with them controlling the market, and our government doing nothing to break up what to me is a blatent anti-trust case. When that happens, they can charge whatever they want regardless of what the market can handle, because they hold all the cards. This leaves 2 options, 1, get enough people to stop going to shows and concerts to force them to change, or, 2, have the government intervine.

sadly I don\'t see either happening anytime soon, so I\'ll just go to less concerts or do like al and buy tickets at the venue / direct from artist.
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ticketmaster and live nation merge in completely legal single firm
« Reply #54 on: March 26, 2009, 03:42:08 pm »
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123672740386088613.html#articleTabs%3Darticle
MARCH 11, 2009 Concert Tickets Get Set Aside, Marked Up by Artists, Managers »By ETHAN SMITH
Less than a minute after tickets for last August\'s Neil Diamond concerts at New York\'s Madison Square Garden went on sale, more than 100 seats were available for hundreds of dollars more than their normal face value on premium-ticket site TicketExchange.com. The seller? Neil Diamond.

Ticket reselling -- also known as scalping -- is an estimated $3 billion-a-year business in which professional brokers buy seats with the hope of flipping them to the public at a hefty markup.

In the case of the Neil Diamond concerts, however, the source of the higher-priced tickets was the singer, working with Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc., which owns TicketExchange, and concert promoter AEG Live. Ticketmaster\'s former and current chief executives, one of whom is Mr. Diamond\'s personal manager, have acknowledged the arrangement, as has a person familiar with AEG Live, which is owned by Denver-based Anschutz Corp.

Selling premium-priced tickets on TicketExchange, priced and presented as resales by fans, is a practice used by many other top performers, according to people in the industry. Joseph Freeman, Ticketmaster\'s senior vice president for legal affairs, says that the company\'s "Marketplace" pages only rarely list tickets offered by fans.

The vast majority of tickets are sold by the artists and their promoters with the cooperation of Ticketmaster. In fact, he says that for any concert to which Ticketmaster carries so-called platinum seats, the Marketplace sells only artist-sanctioned tickets, not those resold by fans.

Neil Diamond approved premium ticket sales on a Ticketmaster site.
Though scalping tickets is legal in most states, the spiraling prices for tickets sold in the secondary market are frequently the target of ire from consumers, Congress and artists, all of whom say the practice takes advantage of fans while enriching third-party speculators.

Ticketmaster Chief Executive Irving Azoff said in an interview Tuesday that when ticket brokers resell tickets without permission from artists or promoters, it "drives up prices to fans, without putting any money in the pockets of artists or rights holders."

But Ticketmaster facilitates the secondary ticket market and profits from it. According to several managers of top artists and Ticketmaster executives, the company routinely offers to list hundreds of the best tickets per concert on one of its two resale Web sites -- and divides the extra revenue, which can amount to more than $2 million on a major tour, with artists and promoters.

These platinum seats are sold on Ticketmaster\'s TicketExchange, which describes itself as a marketplace for "fan-to-fan" transactions, using the slogan "Buy tickets. Sell tickets. It\'s that simple."

In addition to being Ticketmaster\'s CEO, Mr. Azoff also oversees the company\'s Front Line Management division, which handles the affairs of more musicians than any other competitor in the U.S. -- and represents Mr. Diamond. Ticketmaster is in the process of being acquired by concert promoter Live Nation Inc., an all-stock deal that is under intense regulatory scrutiny in part because it could affect competition in the music business, including the secondary ticket market.

Secondary ticket sales are viewed by Ticketmaster, concert promoters and artists as one of the biggest -- yet thorniest -- sources for revenue gains. In 2006, Ticketmaster launched TicketExchange in response to pressure put on its profit margins by secondary-ticket sellers such as StubHub. But in doing so, it opened the company to criticism by ticket brokers, fans and politicians, who accuse the ticketing giant of profiteering and obfuscation.

Ticketmaster is moving to distance itself from some parts of the secondary ticketing market. It is in the process of hiring an investment bank to try to sell another resale service, TicketsNow, according to people familiar with the matter.

Virtually every major concert tour today involves some official tickets that are priced and sold as if they were offered for resale by fans or brokers, but that are set aside by the artists and promoters, according to a number of people involved in the sales.

That includes recent tours by Bon Jovi, Celine Dion and Van Halen, and a current tour starring Billy Joel and Elton John. Spokesmen for Bon Jovi and Ms. Dion had no comment. A spokesman for Van Halen said that the band could not be reached. A booking agent for Messrs. Joel and John did not respond to requests for comment.

Tickets for a March 27 Britney Spears concert at Mellon Arena in Pittsburgh were priced earlier this week at $39.50 to $125 apiece on Ticketmaster.com. But some of those same classes of seats were being offered at the same time through the "TicketExchange Marketplace" for as much as $1,188.60. The link to the Marketplace page was marked, "Browse premium seats plus tickets posted by fans."

Ms. Spears\' spokeswoman declined to comment.

The ticket listings are offered in small batches, each at a price, such as $1,164.01, that mimics prices set via online auctions. After inquiries from The Wall Street Journal, the "tickets posted by fans" message was removed from the TicketExchange Web site. Prices also fell, narrowing the gap between Ticketmaster and TicketExchange Marketplace.

Tickets that do not sell at the inflated platinum prices can also be moved between TicketExchange and Ticketmaster\'s lower-priced main inventory, without any signal to consumers that the ticket\'s status has been reduced.

Ticket brokers complain that artists sell their own tickets for inflated prices but rarely admit doing so, thus avoiding the appearance of gouging fans. "It\'s not fair for artists to hide behind Ticketmaster-TicketExchange," said Paul McCann, a broker near Baltimore. Ticketmaster says it is working to clarify the origin of tickets on TicketExchange. "It\'s cloudy and has to be cleaned up," Mr. Azoff said.

Bruce Springsteen recently decried a recent incident in which his fans were directed without his permission from Ticketmaster to TicketsNow.com, which caters to ticket brokers.

"As a matter of policy we do not ever release tickets to the secondary ticket market nor do we ever accept payment from them," said his manager, Jon Landau. Ticketmaster has said the incident was a mistake.

Ticketmaster says TicketExchange shouldn\'t be considered scalping. It says the site\'s "goal is to give the most passionate fans fair and safe access to the best tickets."

In a meeting last May with more than 100 ticket brokers, Ticketmaster\'s then-chief executive, Sean Moriarty, acknowledged that the ticketing giant had used TicketExchange to sell 160 Neil Diamond tickets over two shows at marked-up prices.

"That\'s a choice up to Neil and management," Mr. Moriarty said. He did not respond to messages left on his cell phone requesting comment.

"It\'s our job to make our clients aware of every opportunity that exists," Mr. Azoff, who is Mr. Diamond\'s manager, said in an interview last year.

Testifying before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy last month, Mr. Azoff said he believes the secondary market is currently flawed. "We agree that this model is broken," he told the panel, "and it needs a solution."

Write to Ethan Smith at ethan.smith@wsj.com
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davepeck

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ticketmaster and live nation merge in completely legal single firm
« Reply #55 on: March 26, 2009, 03:51:30 pm »
Trent Reznor on the whole thing. really good read:

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As we approach on-sale dates for the upcoming tour, I\'ve noticed lots of you are curious / concerned / outraged at the plethora of tickets that somehow appear on all these reseller sites at inflated prices - even before the pre-sale dates. I\'ll do my best to explain the situation as I see it, as well as clarify my organization\'s stance in the matter.

NIN decides to tour this summer. We arrive at the conclusion outdoor amphitheaters are the right venue for this outing, for a variety of reasons we\'ve throughly considered*. In the past, NIN would sell the shows in each market to local promoters, who then "buy" the show from us to sell to you. Live Nation happens to own all the amphitheaters and bought most of the local promoters - so if you want to play those venues, you\'re being promoted by Live Nation. Live Nation has had an exclusive deal with TicketMaster that has just expired, so Live Nation launched their own ticketing service. Most of the dates on this tour are through Live Nation, some are through TicketMaster - this is determined by the promoter (Live Nation), not us.
Now we get into the issue of secondary markets for tickets, which is the hot issue here. The ticketing marketplace for rock concerts shows a real lack of sophistication, meaning this: the true market value of some tickets for some concerts is much higher than what the act wants to be perceived as charging. For example, there are some people who would be willing to pay $1,000 and up to be in the best seats for various shows, but MOST acts in the rock / pop world don\'t want to come off as greedy pricks asking that much, even though the market says its value is that high. The acts know this, the venue knows this, the promoters know this, the ticketing company knows this and the scalpers really know this. So...

The venue, the promoter, the ticketing agency and often the artist camp (artist, management and agent) take tickets from the pool of available seats and feed them directly to the re-seller (which from this point on will be referred to by their true name: SCALPER). I am not saying every one of the above entities all do this, nor am I saying they do it for all shows but this is a very common practice that happens more often than not. There is money to be made and they feel they should participate in it. There are a number of scams they employ to pull this off which is beyond the scope of this note.

StubHub.com is an example of a re-seller / scalper. So is TicketsNow.com.

Here\'s the rub: TicketMaster has essentially been a monopoly for many years - certainly up until Live Nation\'s exclusive deal ran out. They could have (and can right now) stop the secondary market dead in its tracks by doing the following: limit the amount of sales per customer, print names on the tickets and require ID / ticket matches at the venue. We know this works because we do it for our pre-sales. Why don\'t THEY do it? It\'s obvious - they make a lot of money fueling the secondary market. TicketMaster even bought a re-seller site and often bounces you over to that site to buy tickets (TicketsNow.com)!

NIN gets 10% of the available seats for our own pre-sale. We won a tough (and I mean TOUGH) battle to get the best seats. We require you to sign up at our site (for free) to get tickets. We limit the amount you can buy, we print your name on the tickets and we have our own person let you in a separate entrance where we check your ID to match the ticket. We charge you a surcharge that has been less than TicketMaster\'s or Live Nation\'s in all cases so far to pay for the costs of doing this - it\'s not a profit center for us. We have essentially stopped scalping by doing these things - because we want true fans to be able to get great seats and not get ripped off by these parasites.

I assure you nobody in the NIN camp supplies or supports the practice of supplying tickets to these re-sellers because it\'s not something we morally feel is the right thing to do. We are leaving money on the table here but it\'s not always about money.
Being completely honest, it IS something I\'ve had to consider. If people are willing to pay a lot of money to sit up front AND ARE GOING TO ANYWAY thanks to the rigged system, why let that money go into the hands of the scalpers? I\'m the one busting my ass up there every night. The conclusion really came down to it not feeling like the right thing to do - simple as that.

My guess as to what will eventually happen if / when Live Nation and TicketMaster merges is that they\'ll move to an auction or market-based pricing scheme - which will simply mean it will cost a lot more to get a good seat for a hot show. They will simply BECOME the scalper, eliminating them from the mix.

Nothing\'s going to change until the ticketing entity gets serious about stopping the problem - which of course they don\'t see as a problem. The ultimate way to hurt scalpers is to not support them. Leave them holding the merchandise. If this subject interests you, check out the following links. Don\'t buy from scalpers, and be suspect of artists singing the praises of the Live Nation / TicketMaster merger. What\'s in it for them?

--snip (links)--

* I fully realize by playing those venues we are getting into bed with all these guys. I\'ve learned to choose my fights and at this point in time it would be logistically too difficult to attempt to circumvent the venues / promoter / ticketing infrastructure already in place for this type of tour. For those of you about to snipe "it\'s your fault for playing there, etc... " - I know it is.

NickNels

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« Reply #56 on: March 26, 2009, 03:53:35 pm »
http://www.glidemagazine.com/hiddentrack/ht-interview-exclusive-david-butler-president-of-ticketmaster-north-america/

HT Interview Exclusive: David Butler - President of Ticketmaster North America


Last week, Ticketmaster took some major heat for an unplanned and accidental presale for tickets for Phish’s four performances at Red Rocks this summer. Fans that thought they had stumbled onto a surprise jackpot had their orders canceled and received an email from David Butler, President of Ticketmaster North America, explaining why.

In an exclusive Q&A with Hidden Track, Luke Sacks spoke with Butler, who is responsible for Ticketmaster’s primary ticketing business in the US and Canada, via phone about the cause of the error, how Ticketmaster is working to thwart scalpers, what band he has seen nearly 50 times himself and more.

LUKE SACKS: Let’s start with the incident last week when tickets for the Red Rocks shows went on sale early. Speculation among fans has ranged from a simple computer glitch to Ticketmaster secretly activating that link so scalpers could get in and do their thing. From your perspective, can you walk me through what happened?

DAVID BUTLER: Absolutely. It was fundamentally human error by an employee of Ticketmaster in our Rocky Mountain region. An experienced person, who has been with us for years, accidentally, in releasing the show to be visible on the website that the on-sale was coming, accidentally made it appear to be on sale against the desires of the promoter or the artist. It was really just human error. She was trying to set it up so the show would be apparent with the future on-sale date so the fans would know it was coming. She just goofed.

LS: So that happened, all these orders were filled and eventually the decision was made to cancel these orders. Who made the decision to cancel the orders and subsequently to send out the $50 credit? Were those solely Ticketmaster decisions? Was the band or their management involved?

DB: To be clear, the mistake was totally ours at Ticketmaster and that’s why we sent out the gift certificates. Our policy is, if there is ever an error and the event goes on sale prior to the on-sale date, even if its on our website, that we will invalidate all the orders and if any money is taken we will refund it because we have to protect the integrity of the artist and the promoter that the show goes on sale as announced to the fans. So that’s exactly what we did.

READ ON for more of our exclusive interview with David Butler…

Two other facts just to be clear: We didn’t take any money from any fans. We caught this early enough in the evening that while we might have authorized the card for a fan when they were buying, we never sent the request to the banks for funds. So I held all the orders, we removed those from the settlement process and we are the ones, at Ticketmaster, who came up with the idea to issue a gift certificate for $50 to each of the affected fans along with a letter explaining what happened.

LS: So the band was not involved in those decisions? You made them?

DB: Absolutely. However we were in contact, as you might imagine, with the band’s management and the promoter about the facts of what had occurred and the events. But the error was ours. If anyone is frustrated, as much as nobody wants to be in this situation, I ask that fans shouldn’t be upset with Phish or AEG or Red Rocks. They should realize that we made a human error.

We want all Phish fans to have fair and equal chance to buy the tickets at the announced on-sale date and time, which is set by the promoter and the band. So nobody kept tickets from the accidental availability. We canceled every order on the system. As it turns out there were a little over 1,800 fans that were impacted – about 1,860 or 1,870 total. We are sending out to each of them a $50 gift certificate on our nickel to apologize and we are encouraging them to come this Thursday when the actual on sale will occur. Our policy is to cancel it because we want to do the fair thing for all the fans. It wouldn’t have been fair in this case to let people who stumbled across the mistake keep the tickets. So that’s the reason we took the steps we did. But there is no conspiracy theories and to be clear, there are no links between the Ticketmaster website and any secondary resale environment, like TicketsNow, which we own. There is no link. We in fact barred anyone listing the canceled tickets on TicketsNow because we didn’t want fans to be confused. Unfortunately, I went online and StubHub had tickets for sale for this mistake event a couple of days later. We did notify the band of that.

LS: I’m glad you mentioned TicketsNow. How does TicketsNow get its tickets? Are they just like the rest of the general public where they have employees on the phones and on the internet?

DB: I’m so glad you asked that because it’s the number one misperception about the secondary ticket market. Ticketmaster, for primary tickets, owns zero inventory. We don’t own a single ticket to any Phish concert. We simply provide the mechanism for the band and the venue to sell their tickets to the public. Similarly, we own TicketsNow as you are aware, but we don’t own the tickets on TicketsNow. We simply provide an e-commerce site for buyers and sellers to meet and have a safe transaction between them. The tickets that are listed, typically, for resale on TicketsNow as an example, are owned, some by fans and most by brokers. Brokers get their tickets either by going in the on sale and buying tickets; many times they have season tickets for events so they get them that way. They may have a relationship with a promoter or a band but they don’t get any preferential treatment from Ticketmaster whatsoever.

LS: Does Ticketmaster take proactive efforts to thwart the efforts of scalpers beyond the Captcha software?

DB: Yes. Without giving away any secrets that would make it easier for them, I want you to know that our number one goal is that every ticket ends up in the fans hands. That’s what we try to make happen. So we have a number of layers of technology that we use to identify what appears to be either robotic traffic – if you look at our website you will see that we got an injunction against a company last year because they were selling the software program to brokers to attack our site to try to get tickets. We got the court to block that practice and enjoin the company not to do it anymore. We employ roughly 20 people all day long who are constantly looking at this cat-and-mouse game of automated programs and finding new ways to block or frustrate them.

In a perfect world, we wish every buyer at every on sale were the fan that plans to attend the event. That’s why we released paperless ticketing and if you notice the AC/DC concerts used it and Metallica used it when they played the (London) O2 (Arena) with us. In that scenario, when you buy your ticket, to enter the event you actually use the credit card you used to purchase the ticket to get in. That’s an anti-resale mechanism that our venues and our clients have as an option to make sure the fans are the ones who get the tickets.

LS: Does your battle with scalpers ultimately boil down to technology? You come up with something new and they come up with a way around it and so on?

DB: From a primary sales perspective, we don’t want anyone to get an unfair advantage over anyone else. Having said that, reselling tickets is legal in most of North America with a few exceptions and therefore we own TicketsNow because we know fans want to be able to sell tickets to events they can’t attend. I have season tickets for hockey and I can’t go to every game. There are a lot of fans like that who want the ability to resell their tickets and there are lots of fans who buy at the last minute and want to be able to get great seats and are willing to pay a premium price. I don’t mean to demonize the whole secondary world because I think it provides a valid business service in the marketplace. My point is that in our responsibility as the primary partner helping venues sell tickets for artists, we want to make it that nobody gets an unfair advantage. That’s why we refunded all the (Phish) orders and instead will stick with the scheduled on sale. That’s why we try to block robotic traffic. In both those cases it was an unfair advantage for someone, albeit in the early presale it wasn’t the fans fault, it was our mistake.  We want everything to be fair and transparent so every fan has an equal opportunity to get the tickets.

LS: Your name was on the email that went out to the Phish fans. Have you gotten many responses? If so, have they been along the lines of “thank you for the $50” or more people complaining that $50 doesn’t help them get Phish Red Rocks tickets?

DB: I haven’t had that, in fairness. I have had some that were positive saying this was more than I expected and probably more than you needed to do so thank you. In fact there was a nice article in the Denver Post with a couple of fans quoting that. And I’ve had some fans that were frustrated and said things like, “I’ve been waiting my whole life to get tickets for this” or “I’ve waited 15 years for them to go back to Red Rocks, I can’t believe you are canceling my order” and I have to explain to them that we did it because we were trying to do the fair, right thing for all the fans. I don’t blame a fan for being frustrated; it’s a frustrating situation. I just want them to understand it was an innocent, human error by someone on our staff and we tried to do right by it, and that was canceling it and we tried to do more than just right and that was the purpose of the $50 gift certificate. I ended up paying out almost $100,000 to fans as an apology.

LS: Being a Phish fan myself, I know Phish fans can be rabid when it comes to tickets. Is Phish a unique situation for you? I know there have been problems with Bruce Springsteen and some other artists in the past involving tickets. But do you guys take separate steps or are there certain things you do for artists where the demand is so high versus what you might do for your average hockey or basketball game?

DB: We know the high demand acts based on past history. We work directly with the artists and their agents with our music services group to ensure we give a great experience to the artist on a national level.  There are very few acts that have the passionate following that Phish does. There are some others – Bruce Springsteen is another good example that you raised. Jimmy Buffet is another one that could fall into that group as well.

While I haven’t been to 100 Phish concerts, I think I’ve been to 45 or 50 Jimmy Buffet concerts. So you and I are somewhat comparable there. The reality is that for these really high-demand shows, we make sure the resources are available to have a good, positive selling experience with the fans. But the problem we run into with a venue like Red Rocks, where there are 4,000 seats available to the general public in that on-sale per show, the reality is that they could probably sell 50,000 or 100,000 because the fan base is so large and so committed. This is really an issue of supply and demand and that’s as frustrating as anything to a committed fan. There are so many people that want to attend and only so many seats per venue. If Phish stayed at Red Rocks for three months and played every weekend I bet we’d sell every ticket out. Michael Jackson just went on sale for London at the O2 and we sold out 50 shows in the first three days.

LS: Moving forward, what are some of the steps you have taken or will take to ensure this type of mistake doesn’t happen again?

DB: We have checks and balances for every event set up where an employee and his or her manager independently review all the details of the show and make sure that everything is accurate. In this particular case, that process did not work. We are looking at why that is.

Secondly, we automate the event setup process, as you would imagine, because the artist determines how many seats, what the prices are, when they will go on sale and then we automate that. We are looking at the tools we use to make sure there is a way to take the information we got from the band and check it against the setup to make sure nothing is inaccurate before we publish it.

We constantly are improving those tools, those event-management tools, to make that work better. We do a huge number of events every year and it’s very very very seldom that a mistake like this gets through the system. Nonetheless, it did happen and for the fans impacted, it was 1-1 for them. But for us, we sold over 100 million tickets last year and I can’t remember this happening in this time period. It really was an individual event based on human error yet we are working hard to improve and do a great job as we do 99.9 percent of the time.
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antbach

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ticketmaster and live nation merge in completely legal single firm
« Reply #57 on: May 08, 2009, 06:46:02 pm »
Seems like this is now underway since if you search on Ticketmaster for any show, it lists all shows now and redirects you to Live Nation if it\'s being sold by LN.
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davepeck

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ticketmaster and live nation merge in completely legal single firm
« Reply #58 on: May 08, 2009, 06:52:42 pm »
Quote from: antbach;229906
Seems like this is now underway since if you search on Ticketmaster for any show, it lists all shows now and redirects you to Live Nation if it\'s being sold by LN.


just for livenation venues. it\'s bee like that for a while. LN also list all shows and redirects to TM for tix that they sell.. look up something at mohegan for example on TM.

Wolfman

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ticketmaster and live nation merge in completely legal single firm
« Reply #59 on: January 25, 2010, 07:55:54 pm »
The LN/TM merger has been conditionally approved.  http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2010-01-25-livenation-ticketmaster_N.htm?csp=34

In a related story, guess the face value (not including any shipping charges) for a ticket to see Of Montreal this Wednesday at The Paradise in Boston...

...Take a guess...  

Consider that this band has no hit songs, no hit albums, and the show is on a Wednesday night at a venue with a 600 person capacity.
Last hint: When they played the same venue 9 months ago on 4/20/09, the face value was $20.

Answer: [SPOILER]$54.40[/SPOILER]

To get a sense of the level of inflation in the ticket market in recent months and years, I pulled out some ticket stubs I have from seeing similar bands at the same exact venue (The Paradise.)  Ticket prices are the price plus convenience charges (if any) listed on the face of tickets.  I\'ve also included the percentage of how much less these prices are relative to the $54.40 Of Montreal ticket for 1/27/10.  Finally, I\'ve included the annual inflation rate each ticket would have had to go through in order to be worth $54.40 in January 2010.  Check this out:

Monday 4/20/09 - Of Montreal - $20.00 - 63% less - 229% annual inflation
Tuesday 12/30/08 - Soulive - $28.80 - 47% less - 88% annual inflation
Saturday 12/27/08 - The Slip - $24.75 - 54% less - 120% annual inflation
Friday 2/23/07 - The Slip - $21.25 - 61% less - 78% annual inflation
Friday 8/11/06 - Lyrics Born - $19.75 - 64% less - 53% annual inflation
Thursday 3/16/06 - Tea Leaf Green - $15.70 - 71% less - 88% annual inflation
Thursday 2/18/99 - Percy Hill - $10.00 - 82% less - 40% annual inflation

The generally accepted national annual inflation rate is 1.5-2%.  The most disturbing piece of data here to me is definitely the Of Montreal ticket nearly tripling 9 months later at the same venue.  This may be an augur of things to come in the newly merged LN/TM world.
« Last Edit: January 26, 2010, 01:18:26 am by Wolfman »