John Oliver took a deep dive into the industry of exorbitant pricing for live events on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, and in particular the company Ticketmaster – or, as he called it, “one of the most hated companies on earth”.
The average price for a popular concert has more than tripled since the mid-90s, vastly outpacing inflation, and that’s before the resale market. As the biggest player in the ticket market, Ticketmaster claims that “they strive to put fans first, and that the people we care most about are the fans,” Oliver explained. “And yet, as anyone who has ever bought from them knows, that’s generally not the feeling you get when you’re dealing with them.”
That starts with ticket fees, which “can range from the annoying to the completely batshit”, said Oliver. His research staff found a ticket to a 2019 Kidz Bop concert with fees that amounted to 75% of face value; fees for a Tyler, the Creator concert in Florida next week amounted to 78% of face value.
Ticketmaster has said their fees are determined “in collaboration with our clients” who “share in a portion of the fees we collect” – venues, promoters and sometimes the artists themselves. But some of those “other parties” also include Ticketmaster, because in 2010, the company merged with Live Nation, which owns or operates most of the top music venues in the US. The company has had “somewhat of a chokehold” on live entertainment since, Oliver explained, pointing to a 2020 justice department memo alleging that the company had strong-armed venues into using Ticketmaster and retaliated against venues that refused its services.
That investigation also found that Ticketmaster often holds back the vast majority of tickets from the general public for the resale market, where they are mostly bought by professional ticket brokers with bots – “as I’m sure you all assumed, all of those stupid ‘are you a robot?’ tests have very much not kept them all out,” Oliver quipped.
Brokers flip those tickets on the secondary market for a huge mark-up on sites like SeatGeek, Stubhub and Ticketmaster, again. “These sites badly want you to think of them as fan-to-fan marketplaces,” said Oliver. “But the truth is, resale sites are not just fan-to-fan at all.” A government accountability report from 2018 found that the “overwhelming majority” of ticket sales on these sites were conducted by professional ticket brokers, marked up anywhere from 49% (on average) to as high as 7,000% (a One Direction concert).
“Ticket-selling sites go out of their way to cater to their broker clients, because they bring them in a lot of money,” Oliver continued. For example, the company has allegedly not cracked down on ticket brokers with multiple accounts to circumvent purchase limits. To quote one Ticketmaster rep, asked by an undercover reporter at a 2018 ticket broker conference how many brokers use multiple accounts: “I’d say pretty damn near every one of them.”
“Now, I have to tell you Ticketmaster insists that it spends millions on technology to weed out bad behavior and that that employee’s comments were not reflective of its policies,” said Oliver. “But even taking them at their word – which I am not inclined to do – their whole system is designed to be opaque,” especially on secondary sellers, which are kept anonymous.
Finally, there is the “uncomfortable fact”, said Oliver, of what a ticket is actually worth. “An economist will tell you it’s worth whatever people will pay,” he explained. “So if someone is willing to spend over $2,000 including fees for an Adele ticket” – the going price for one to her Vegas residency – “that is what it’s worth, as gross as that sounds. But if Adele doesn’t want to charge that, there is going to be a gap between the face value of the ticket and what someone can get for it, and a whole industry is going to scramble in to exploit it.
“When you take all of this together,” he later concluded, “the reason tickets are so hard to get when they’re on sale is that they’re often not on sale, and the reason they cost so much on the secondary market is that you’re paying exorbitant fees to the platform and might be buying from a broker or in rare cases, even from the artist themselves.”
The whole ticket-selling ecosystem “enriches a lot of people who do not contribute anything to the actual show that you’re paying to see,” he added. “And at the center of all of this is Ticketmaster, because it turbo-charged many of these shitty practices that have now become industry standard.”
What can be done? Oliver called on Congress to pass policies that would force transparency on ticket-selling sites, “but the truth is, much of the power here is actually in the hands of the artists. Because the biggest ones could do things to tamp down the secondary market,” such as making their tickets non-transferable or offering platforms for fans to resell tickets without a profit, as Pearl Jam did before its 2020 tour was cancelled.
“But if regulators don’t act and artists don’t have the clout or the inclination to require companies to put those guardrails in place,” he concluded, “I’m afraid you as a fan are going to remain vulnerable to the worst parts of this system.”
