For the past four decades, Backstreets Magazine has devoted itself entirely to the world of Bruce Springsteen. Longtime editor and superfan Christopher Phillips and his team treat every new album, archival release, and concert as joyous affairs. But on July 24, days after Springsteen’s long-awaited E Street Band tour went on sale and stunned fans who came across tickets costing upwards of $5,000, Phillips and company found themselves in the unusual position of writing a deeply critical editorial about their hero.
“This past week, too many Springsteen fans got thrown to the wolves, pushed aside in a way that seems as unfathomable as it was avoidable,” they wrote. “The artist has maintained that he understands the essential role of his audience. How, then, did we end up facing, in far too many instances, prices for tickets that exceeded normalcy, then departed from reality entirely by orders of magnitude?”
The Springsteen fans were far from alone. Around the same time, Adele fans looking to buy tickets for her rescheduled Las Vegas residency on StubHub saw seats starting at $670 for nosebleeds and capping out at $40,000 for the front row. A quick glance at Ticketmaster reveals that “side view” seats for Lady Gaga at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium are $445.80 (general admission front pit tickets are $923.40), and primo floor seats to Motley Crue/Def Leppard/Poison at PNC Park in Pittsburgh will set you back $987.50.
Eye-popping prices like these have generated furious op-eds and social media posts in recent weeks (“So this is what a crisis of faith feels like,” Backstreets wrote in a widely-shared tweet), and caused many to conclude this was simply a matter of rock star greed.
The truth is far more complicated. For decades, the ticketing industry has formed into the current price-gouging headache it is, due to a combination of factors such as Live Nation’s near-monopoly over live music, artists’ growing reliance on touring for their revenue, new technology giving scalpers a larger platform to hike up prices, and limited government intervention to help control the market.
So this is what a crisis of faith feels like.
— Backstreets Magazine (@backstreetsmag) July 23, 2022
How Live Nation’s Near-Monopoly on the Concert Business Changed Live Music
In 1995, Pearl Jam grew so frustrated by Ticketmaster’s exorbitant service fees and stranglehold on the live music industry that they attempted to play only venues that used competing ticketing services. As they soon learned, this meant playing non-traditional venues like The Adams Field House at the University of Montana. When they went back out in 1998, they simply gave up and played largely Ticketmaster venues.
It’s been over 25 years since Pearl Jam found out that touring on a large scale without Ticketmaster is basically impossible, and the situation has only grown worse. Companies like SeatGeek may have inked deals with major venues like the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, but Ticketmaster still controls over 80 percent of major concert venues in America.
“They are a monopoly,” says New York State Senator James Skoufis. “That comes with all of the standard problems that are associated with monopolies, not the least of which is there is not a healthy competitive market. They are able to charge whatever they want without any sort of consequence in what would otherwise be a competitive marketplace.”
“They are a monopoly. That comes with all of the standard problems that are associated with monopolies” – New York State Senator James Skoufis on Ticketmaster
Ticketmaster’s 2010 merger with Live Nation made the two companies exponentially more powerful. In 2021, Live Nation sold over 13 million tickets and grossed over a billion dollars. AEG, its chief competitor, sold 3 million tickets and grossed $281 million. Simply put, Live Nation would be the hegemonic power in the live event space even without Ticketmaster. But…
Read More: The Ticket Marketplace is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It