Ticketmaster Was Stealing From You This Whole Time

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Look, I want to say I’m shocked. I really do. But when a federal jury officially rules that Live Nation and Ticketmaster operated as an illegal monopoly and were overcharging fans for years, the only surprising part is that it took this long!

If you’ve bought a concert ticket, lets say in the last decade, you already know in your gut something was way off. You’d find a ticket listed at $75, get all the way to checkout, and somehow end up staring at something like $105 total. Service fee. Facility fee. Order processing fee. A delivery charge for a fucking PDF you’re emailing to yourself! c’mon! It felt like a financial mugging in slow motion, and now a jury in Manhattan has confirmed you weren’t just imagining it.

I think this is a big deal. Not just for music fans, but for anyone who cares about where their money actually goes. Let’s break it all down.

How We Got Here: A Brief (And Infuriating) History

This story goes back further than most people realize. I’ve dropped nuggets on how Ticketmaster inflates the costs by adding fees and shit for years on the blog.

So, Ticketmaster was founded back in 1976 in Phoenix, Arizona. For years it was just another player in the live events space, but it grew aggressively by flipping the traditional model. Instead of charging venues to use their ticketing system, Ticketmaster started paying venues a cut of the service fees in exchange for exclusive ticketing contracts. Of course, venues loved it. Fans got stuck with the bill. And Ticketmaster slowly grew into a near-untouchable giant.

By the 1990s, artists were actually screaming about it. For example, Pearl Jam famously filed an anti-monopoly complaint against Ticketmaster in the early ’90s trying to route around them on their own tours. Unfortunately, this basically got nowhere. Ticketmaster’s grip was just too damn strong.

The scale of the company did in fact attract some antitrust scrutiny from the DOJ’s Antitrust Division before 2010, but after a review, the Ticketmaster + Live Nation merger was allowed to proceed but with the understanding to limit the combined company’s ability to bully its competitors. Spoiler alert. That obviously didn’t work.

Ticketmaster was acquired by Live Nation in 2010. After merging, the new entity called itself as the “largest live entertainment company in the world” and the “largest producer of live music concerts in the world.” Okay, let’s get this straight? One company now controlled the venues, the promoters, the artists’ management in many cases, and the ticketing platform! That’s every single lever of live entertainment, all in one set of hands… hmmm.

Over the course of the next decade or so, the merged entity continued to extend its ownership stake in multiple layers of the live entertainment industry. So, now the DOJ saw enough evidence of potentially anti-competitive practices over the years after the merger that it received a five-year extension of the consent decree in 2020. I mean they’d basically already violated the original agreement by 2019. And got just a slap on the wrist, an extension, and business as usual. Shame on you, you shouldn’t do that. That’s it!

Then came the unstoppable force of Taylor Swift. Haha!

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