Jury finds Live Nation/Ticketmaster is illegal monopoly that overcharged fans
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Proud of the state AGs for sticking it out after the Trump admin tried to undercut them by settling on a Friday mid-trial and not telling anyone until Monday morning when they showed up for trial. It wasn't easy to overcome, but they did it. And, best of all, the real winners are their citizens they protected, if only this time.
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I don't think you'll find a single sympathetic jury candidate in the US unless somehow they got some company execs on the jury.
GET FUCKED TICKETMASTER
GET FUCKED TICKETMASTER
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They were found to have overcharged by only $1.72 per ticket? That seems strangely specific and far too little.
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Well, the feds can be very sure of a change in business practices if the states end up getting an enforced breakup! As they should. Tying sales, promotion, venues, and customer services for venues so tightly has been a problem for, uh, well most of my whole life, I think. The number of independently sold tickets I've purchased on my own has only gone down over the years I've been choosing where to get my live entertainment.
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I dearly hope they’re broken up.
I dearly hope a LOT of companies get broken up eventually.
I dearly hope a LOT of companies get broken up eventually.
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I'm not a subject matter expert by any means, but the way I read it, that's not what they charge per ticket, that's what they've been overcharging. And I imagine that's probably the number they get after adding up the suspected/proven gouging and dividing out by the millions of tickets it is spread over.
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This is a tremendous first step (and a win for states’ rights, eh, Republicans?), and hopefully Judge Subramanian will actually levy appropriate punishment as opposed to Judge Mehta’s inexplicably lax judgment in the recent Google antitrust case.
This has the additional plus of rekindling my hopes that the Nextstar-TEGNA merger will be blocked by the states as well.
This has the additional plus of rekindling my hopes that the Nextstar-TEGNA merger will be blocked by the states as well.
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I’m really confused by the claim that the excess charges were only $1.72 per ticket. When I have bought cover tickets the fees were around $150 each. They’re just running some servers, which cost them pennies per customer, at most. The executives were caught boasting how ridiculously they were gouging us.
Make it make sense.
*Checks notes on the last several decades of US Justice *
Huh. Looks like it’s just another case of corporations receiving trivial hand slaps for egregious behavior. Corporatism and Oligarchy
Make it make sense.
*Checks notes on the last several decades of US Justice *
Huh. Looks like it’s just another case of corporations receiving trivial hand slaps for egregious behavior. Corporatism and Oligarchy
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It's cool, they just need to make a "donation" to the Trump administration and they're all good again.
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Live Nation can go F—- itself. Repeatedly.
Because that’s what it did to concert goers.
Because that’s what it did to concert goers.
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Yeah. There can't be that many small-time shows at small venues to offset such a large take at the stadium-sized events with much, much higher "base" ticket prices. But if it's enough to lever their whole system apart? Sure!
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The convenience fee and print at home fee for the last PickpocketMaster tix I bought was $12.50 and $2.50 per ticket. The real overcharge must be higher than $1.72. Especially once you factor in increased artist’s marketing costs and TicketMaster scalping their own tickets.
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Liberty media, another private mafia capital conglomerate that donates more to a certain illiberal party. Why do theur outlets always sit near casinos?
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For everyone complaining about the $1.72 figure….
The jury was presented with evidence that Ticketmaster keeps $7.xx of each ticket sold on average. The $1.72 is how much the jury found that they overcharged and kept on average per ticket. That’s what I can tell from reading a few articles and AG James’ releases.
Shows cost a lot of money to produce; all those fees trace back to real buckets of money to pay stagehands, roadies, artists, venue staff, valets, etc. Ticketmaster and live nation were able to leverage their monopoly to fleece folks for an extra 20% profit. That sounds more impressive, doesn’t it?
The jury was presented with evidence that Ticketmaster keeps $7.xx of each ticket sold on average. The $1.72 is how much the jury found that they overcharged and kept on average per ticket. That’s what I can tell from reading a few articles and AG James’ releases.
Shows cost a lot of money to produce; all those fees trace back to real buckets of money to pay stagehands, roadies, artists, venue staff, valets, etc. Ticketmaster and live nation were able to leverage their monopoly to fleece folks for an extra 20% profit. That sounds more impressive, doesn’t it?
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“...a pending motion to strike the damages testimony on which the jury’s award was based...”
They tried that at trial, and it was soundly rejected. In my understanding, It would not be possible if the judge ruled the case decison with prejudice.
Still a major win for people who were penned in for too long by Ticketmaster.
They tried that at trial, and it was soundly rejected. In my understanding, It would not be possible if the judge ruled the case decison with prejudice.
Still a major win for people who were penned in for too long by Ticketmaster.
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These guys are vampires. They need to bask in the sun. The amount of fees is utterly ridiculous.
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I hope they will.
I am confident they won’t.
Judges in the past 20 years have gone to great lengths to avoid structural remedies. Google basically got off with a wrist slap: the judge decided that Google, although a monopolist, is too important to actually change. I wish I was making this up. This is typical.
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Their CEO earned $139 million in 2022. I'm guessing all their profits went into stock buybacks so they could pay themselves obscene amounts without having to pay taxes.
And $7 profit per ticket is BS and I'm honestly surprised they didn't claim they lost money on every ticket sold.
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172% seems a more accurate assessment of their price gouging. Or maybe it was 1.72x? Point is they've been price gouging like crazy because they can. They didn't engage in this level of vertical and lateral 'integration' for the fun of it. The whole point of everything they've been doing for the last 20+ years was to build exactly the monopoly they have on every aspect of live performances. It's not a 'coincidental' byproduct of 'shrewd business practices.' The monopoly was the point.
And more to 'the point' -- it's not enough to break them up now. That just stops them from doing further damage to the industry. No, extreme measures should be taken to, for as much as is humanly possible, strip mine the monopoly's owners of every dime to their name in recompense for their crimes against civilized society. Because that's what monopolies are. They're not some 'mildly benign' problem. They're a societal and economic blight that must be eradicated without mercy.
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Seriously, they think they only overcharged by $1.72?
Tickets for the Metallica shows at Mohegan Sun were over $600 for the cheap seats.
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Yes - Hospitals, Airlines, Telecoms / Internet, Power, Media companies, etc. The mergers always "increases shareholder value" while eliminating competition and and ultimately raising prices above the rate of inflation. American Capitalism at its finest.
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That's American 'Exceptionalism' for you -- exceptional corruption, grift, graft, fraud, embezzlement, etc, etc. Which is why Trump is the 'American Exceptionalism' icon -- he has spent a lifetime perfecting and personifying those 'virtues.'
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me too, but not with this administration, which excels at grifting the American public.
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Not all of that money goes to Ticketmaster, though.
It would be very illuminating to see how much of that how much the band members get, how much goes into the cost of putting on the actual show (pyrotechnics, equipment rental, roadie pay, security, amortised cost of tour-specific set dressing, props, costumes etc), and how much is the venue's profit margin. In the case of Live Nation/Ticketmaster, venue profits and ticket-sales "convenience fees" and other bullshit fees all end up getting paid for by the customer, and all end up in LN/TM's pockets, but I'm not sure whether all the different routes for that money were in scope for this trial, or only a subset of them.
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Not only that, but there are probably a lot of tickets that aren't popular enough to be able to gouge on. I'm sure if they looked at some of the more popular products and looked at the gouging in those cases the amount would be higher
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Shouldn't even have to do something wrong for that.
"Too big, split it" should be the default when value starts to near a certain point.
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Can I get some compensation for tix I bought like 40, 45 years ago? Ticket Bastard was screwing us then, too.
I was first in line at the central office one Sunday morning in Oakland CA for Rush tix 1982. The entire 2 front floor section were already "sold out" when the box office window opened. Assholes. Later most of those were available from scalpers.
We got revenge though. We bought an entire row on the floor, and after getting in snuck the floor tix up to our friends in the nosebleeds, so we had like 20 people in 16 seats. Good times.
I was first in line at the central office one Sunday morning in Oakland CA for Rush tix 1982. The entire 2 front floor section were already "sold out" when the box office window opened. Assholes. Later most of those were available from scalpers.
We got revenge though. We bought an entire row on the floor, and after getting in snuck the floor tix up to our friends in the nosebleeds, so we had like 20 people in 16 seats. Good times.
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