In the fall of 2023 when Olivia Rodrigo announced her Guts World Tour, my roommates and I knew we had to get tickets. After countless moments screaming Drivers License and Good 4 U in the car and around the house, it was the only option. But sadly, I logged on to buy tickets just a few minutes after the sale started, and was immediately the 2,000th person in line. When I was finally able to purchase tickets the only ones left were $500+ tickets, which we knew would just inflate with fees – we definitely couldn’t afford it. I first thought it was because as a 27 year old, I just couldn’t keep up with the kids anymore – but really it was because the whole ticket selling system is a scam.
Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation, is a monopoly. About 70% of tickets for all major concerts are sold through Ticketmaster and the company has its hands in 256 concert venues around the country. What does Ticketmaster do with that control over this process? Jack up prices. Ticketmaster routinely adds fees to purchases that are up to 80% of the original ticket price. It’s so clearly violating antitrust laws that the Department of Justice has had to step in and sue the company, and even Biden, a staunch defender of capitalism, has criticized their practices. These sky-high fees make the cost of going to see your favorite artist out of reach for many working people and youth.
Though seeing your favorite artist live is priced like luxury, and we all know that if we just stopped indulging in Starbucks and having fun on a Friday night we could all afford a house, fun shouldn’t actually be an infrequent luxury. Gathering with friends and community to listen to music and enjoy ourselves is much more fundamental to the human experience than paying rent. Music is important to the human psyche, a timeless part of culture, and a necessary break from an often crushing reality under capitalism.
Music is a huge and vital part of human expression across the globe. Ticketmaster as a company is a symptom of capitalism’s reach into every aspect of our lives and its ability to exploit even our most organic experiences. Ticketmaster and their monopoly choke out small performers who, in the era of streaming, have to gamble on making revenue by touring in order to make a living, as well as the many workers who make the performance industry run, like sound and light engineers, coordinators, and designers.
Even if an artist outwardly calls out Ticketmaster and sympathizes with fans about the outrageous prices, there’s little they can do as individuals to get around it. Ticketmaster has deals with many major concert venues who can then only sell tickets through Ticketmaster. During their 1995 tour, Pearl Jam attempted to work around Ticketmaster by having shows outside of Ticketmaster-controlled venues, but this meant they had to perform in state parks, fair grounds, and soccer fields outside of or far away from major metropolitan areas. This was nearly 30 years ago, and Ticketmaster has only acquired more exclusive deals since then. Most small or medium-audience artists are stuck with wanting to perform and needing to make a living from it, but only being able to do it within the confines of Ticketmaster’s rules.
Some artists, like Maggie Rogers, have attempted to work around these confines by having tickets sold in person at venues for a specific amount of time which limits the service fees that can be charged. But these concerts are still happening at Ticketmaster venues and the venue workers and artists are still seeing little of the profit that Ticketmaster is making. Everyone in the industry is getting screwed over except the Ticketmaster bosses.
From 2022 to 2023 the CEO of Ticketmaster’s pay jumped from $13.8 million to $139 million, which is 5,414 times the median income of a Tickermaster employee, $25,673 a year. This profit is being brought in by the Ticketmaster employees who saved the site when it crashed selling Taylor Swift tickets, the artists bringing in thousands of fans, the workers who run the lights and behind the scenes of these major shows, and the workers at the venues. The people in the executive suite are doing little to bring in profit for this massive company – it’s their workers filling their pockets.
Workers and artists can liberate art from the hands of corporations. The precedent set by the WGA strike, which won profit-sharing from streaming for the first time last year, shows that these same fights can be taken on in the music industry.
The streaming giant Spotify has made record profits in 2024 after laying off 1,500 staff. Spotify pays artists a paltry amount per listen, when their domination over streaming depends on having the biggest collection of music available. A strike of music industry artists and workers could win profit-sharing from Spotify like writers did, as well as develop a program for what else workers and artists need, like residency programs with venues to reduce dependency on touring which is often bankrupting and exhausting, and taxing the rich to fund arts programs and state grants for independent venues.
Massive companies like Ticketmaster need to be in the hands of the workers and run in a way that works for all of us and ensures that the profits are shared fairly among the people actually running the company and the artists and workers making the shows possible. Having one site where many venues can share infrastructure for online purchases is useful, and reduces duplicate work in the industry. But done on the basis of capitalism, all this does is make bank for a few “shareholders” rather than make music easier to access and more enjoyable. Concerts and leisure activities are not luxury, but a necessity to human existence. Capitalism can’t be allowed to control our culture – from concerts and music, to fashion and makeup, to sports, to art; we deserve to be able to enrich our lives, rather than enriching CEOs.