back to article Ticketmaster and Live Nation forge unholy alliance

Concert scalper Ticketmaster and concert promoter Live Nation have agreed to merge. Live Nation started life as a promoter of big concerts - Coldplay, Madonna, U2, Jay-Z are all signed to Live Nation. It does some business as a more traditional music label as well as running stadium gigs. Ticketmaster scrapes a living by …

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  1. Ian Ferguson
    Unhappy

    Well, that's me doomed

    I work for one of the few remaining independent theatres, and well, we're fucked then, frankly.

    Live Nation and Ticketmaster now control the whole process end to end - creating, producing, marketing and selling the show, and at their own venues.

    Increasingly we're left out of national advertising for tours; as Live Nation pay for the adverts, they just list all of the venues and a single Ticketmaster phone number and website. When we point out that customers won't find us on the Ticketmaster website and will book somewhere else, they just shrug and say there isn't room to advertise our own website.

    The only solution presented to us is to offer some or all tickets through Ticketmaster, which they often contractually force us to. We make little or no revenue on these tickets (as the theatre really only gets any money from our own booking fee, not the ticket face value), and the customer is screwed too due to massive Ticketmaster ticket fees.

    Live Nation is a soulless corporate entity which cares nothing for artistic value. We are merely a small charity they can stomp all over.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Simple answer to infalted prices....

    ...don't f**king buy them you stupid idiots.

    They will charge what they can get away with (basic rule of consumerism).

    If people are willing to pay £200 a ticket, they will charge £200 a ticket..

    Christ, I'd sell you a loaf of bread for £500 if your stupid enough to pay for it

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    <Shudders>

    Thinks some more

    <SCREAMS>

    This will definitely put me off buying tickets for any gig in future

  4. Murray Pearson

    Ticketmaster and scalping

    The Canadian charges are worse than you imply: Ticketmaster in Ontario is charged with diverting tickets for fast-selling shows not just to "a scalping site" but to THEIR OWN scalping site — with price increases as much as 1,000%.

    "They'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes" — Douglas Adams

  5. Paul
    Unhappy

    Ticketmaster are scum

    They insist they don't keep back tickets for their scalping site - but they bloody do. I know people who were on the phone within seconds for some gigs and the only tickets available were on their scalping site at 300% price.

    Bloody scumbags to a man.

  6. Paul
    Stop

    Oh, and anonymous coward...

    "...don't f**king buy them you stupid idiots."

    The problem there is that it isn't most concert-goers buying them. Idiots are.

    There's always idiots who are going to spoil it for the rest of us :)

  7. A J Stiles
    Stop

    Touts

    The way to put ticket touts out of business is simply not to buy tickets from them. After the concert, the tout is left with so many worthless pieces of paper. That's the sort of expensive mistake people learn from!

    But that's unlikely to happen nowadays. Live music has become over-commercialised. And the promoters aren't the only ones who don't care about anyone but themselves! The Waynes and Sharons of this world don't care about being ripped off; after all, it's not like they had to work for it. Their sort will quite happily spunk any amount of money for something as frivolous as a gig ticket, then complain in the next breath that they can't afford enough McCain Micro Chips to feed their little Liams and Britneys -- they might even have to wear the same pair of trainers for two months at a time.

    As always, it's the genuine fans who lose out. What it comes down to is, you can't count on your neighbour to bleed if you get cut anymore.

  8. censored
    Flame

    The CEO of Seatwave

    Is nothing more than a dirty ticket tout. If it was a true "fan to fan" ticket exchange, then they would not accept prices above face value. Use Scarlet Mist instead.

    As for "if you don't like it, don't pay the prices" - that's fine, but in a monopoly (which is what this will be), you have the choice of either paying the prices or staying at home. Music fans don't want to stay at home, nor should they be forced to by extortion from multi-national firms. That's why we have a Competition Commission and a Monopolies commission.

  9. Lone Gunman
    Unhappy

    excessive charges

    I try not to use Ticketmaster unless I absolutely have to anyway. What does really annoy me (and they aren't the only ones) is the way they charge you a booking fee per ticket not per booking. Surely this can't be right?

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    this

    is not only bad for the consumer, its bad for culture (and potentially society) as a whole.

    Whoever controls the culture controls the people... We welcome liveticketmaster with arms wide open

  11. USA IT, where it all started
    Pirate

    We hate them in the US too

    Ticketmaster is currently under investigation here also. It seems that seconds after tickets go on sale, they are all sold - to a Ticketmaster subsidiary called "Tickets Now". Then if you wanted to buy tickets, you had to go to that site, which is essentially a scalper.

    With the recent high profile shady dealings, this merger will receive quite a bit of scrutiny on our side of the pond. The previous administration would have rubber stamped it, but hopefully, the current regulators will do their job and regulate the industry to prevent the creation of an abusive monopoly.

    (Skull and Cross bones - isn't that the Ticketmaster corporate logo?)

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    It's about time.

    Ticketmaster is also under investigation in Canada...

    They have been passing tickets to scalpers for years, even before the web. You could be first in line and all the good tickets are gone, but some how the guy standing on the corner offering to sell you a ticket for double (or more) the price has a load of the good tickets that "sold" in the first seconds. No 4 ticket limit for him... I've only been to one big event since then, when I won Stones tickets in a Radio station contest. Much better off to listen to some band I've never heard of in a bar then to pay a bag of money to hear a big name band with crap sound in a baseball stadium. Ticketmaster and their buddies can get stuffed.

  13. The Fuzzy Wotnot
    Unhappy

    Rapidly going down the toilet

    Sad thing is TM and their "buddies" have the markets sown up, the only place to get cheap but pot-luck music is local pub! I only go to smaller venues now, last time went to 10,000+ venues was back in '92. I stick to the 500-2500 places, but they still charge you a pound-of-flesh PLUS booking fee, 5 quid to print a hologram on a bit of paper? The bands get next to bugger-all from the promoters, so you end up with 4 or 5 bands on in an evening so they can split enough money to cover costs, which is OK if you have never seen any of them before, but I paid money to see the main act and they are only allowed to play for 60-70 mins as the venue has to close by 11pm!!!

    Once again the good music where genuinely, dedicated musicians turn up, play and work bloody hard for their money, which is appreciated by their fans, are simply being pushed out of the business by the sharks touting the lastest throwaway, chart pop-crap, signed up by the brain-dead morons who run shite like X-Factor and such like. Don't even get me started on the soft, safe, happy Coldplay/Radiohead ilk! Metal is the future!

    Once home-taping was "KILLING MUSIC", now it's scumbags like TM, their scalping, pofit-creaming mates and sod it, Simon Cowell too for good measure!

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Remember

    It's not home taping that is killing music...

  15. Gav H.
    Thumb Down

    I remember when Pearl Jam...

    ...tried and failed to take on the might of Ticketmaster in the mid-90's. It's a sad state of affairs.

  16. Oddbodd

    LiveNation, Soulless indeed

    These are the people who run Sunderland Empire, who tried charging me a £3 fee for box office collection for tickets a while ago. Needless to say, I didn't buy them. Along with booking fee, the extra charges would have amounted to more than 25% of the advertised ticket prices.

  17. Steve B

    Support the other venues.

    Back before "tribute bands" when local groups did their own interpretations, it was often very disappointing to finally see the headline act and find out that they were not as accomplished as the local musicians or the best part of the track was a local impro. I may still stroll down and see a local band in a local pub, but the headline bands are put on locally in large venues that add their extortionate fees to the already extortionate ticket price so would I fork out for a headline band or act often to find lip syncing! - very unlikely.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    LiveNation confirm merger with Ticketmaster!

    MusicWeek issued the story this morning, LiveNation are confirmed to have agreed a $2.5bn merger with TicketMaster.

    Actually, it'll come to about $3.7bn once you've added on the booking fee, convenience charges, and card handling fee.

    Mine's the one with the Springsteen tickets in the pocket.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    No really, who cares?

    Can't we just see the latest band down the local gym?

    Since it costs absolutely nothing to make records, there should be an unlimited supply of artists playing the nearest dive bar - who needs those greedy "Rock Stars" anyway?

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