And vertical consolidation enables the managers to adjust which company the profits show up at so that they get the biggest cut. eg in this case if the management owns a bigger share of live nation or it gives better stock options to them than ticketmaster does, they can adjust the pricing and fees so that livenation gets all the profits.
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Livenation also manages tons of venues. So they grab it all.
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Freaking ticket fees are more than tix used to cost when I would wake up at 5am to go get in line at Tower records lol.
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I simply refuse to go to shows that cost more than $50. If I ever wanted to break my own rule of thumb, I would show up the day of and hang out at the box office, waiting for a ticket to be offered for sale at the box office. At least, it worked the one time I tried this.
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Inflation is a hell of a thing
Slightly more than inflation for the most part.
Below is a ticket stub of mine (yes, I used to save them all and scanned them many years ago)
Below that is 13.50 adjusted for inflation. I know for a fact that a ticket to see U2 isn’t WAY more than that. Saw them on the 30th anniversary Joshua Tree tour.
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I think Jefferson warned that the great American experiment would fail because of greed.
I don’t think he saw the full impact of his warning.
I would argue that America is clearly no longer a democracy, but a Plutocracy, and capitalism is anything but a free market.
Wake up people, participate.
We the people can and must create change.
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A couple of bands I see have your name printed on your ticket, and you must present the credit card you used, and an ID that matches the name.
You can still work around this, but at least that one person has to go into the show.
(Like meeting the person at the venue and giving over cash, then accompanying them inside)
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I’m feeling you.
2 things-
- I’ve gotta scan mine!
- You illustrated this perfectly. Thank you!
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There is a sense in which Ticketmaster is itself a scalper, but on a much larger scale.
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It was around 1992 or so that both ticket prices and fees took a really big jump.
Zoo TV tour was one of those first way overpriced tickets in my memory…
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I think they really are The Scalper, their right hand transferring tickets to their left hand. and taking slices from all ends of the transaction and shutting down any competition. A test: how easy would be for Joe Scalper with five tickets to scalp them without the buyers risking being turned away at the gate? hmm. Perhaps that’s not the best test. How about in large quantities similar to what’s blamed on the “scalper bots”?
I think a forensic audit needs to do done of their accounting and servers to see if those “scalper bots” really exist.
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For the time, that was quite a bit.
Got a stub for that, too. 
*Edit - BTW, this show included Public Enemy and the Sugarcubes.
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Ticketmaster: an example of how “economic liberty” works.
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i’ve stopped going to big shows and recommend eeryone do the same. support local art
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That doesn’t work well if we’re stormed in by a blizzard and sell our tickets on stubhub to a fan that can go but couldn’t get the sold-out tickets. Or vice-versa. Not like you’re going to airmail your credit card to some random stranger for one night and trust them to send it back. The ticket should be enough. It’s a ticket, that’s what it is and all that should be needed.
For the cost of one arena ticket alone, you can splurge at not just one but 6-12 small-venue shows, getting plenty of drinks, merch, etc. Plus it’s a lot more fun since you’re not trapped in an arena half a mile from the show. You can actually see and hear it and get up close if you want. You might even get to hang out with the band. Big shows are just never fun, I exclusively go to small-venue shows now. But even those often use ticketmaster.
That sucks. So if there’s a storm or something, they’re playing to a half-empty audience, the venue is losing concession sales, the band’s losing merch sales, all while fans who wanted to go and could can’t, and people who couldn’t lost money on their tickets? That’s not a good solution. Everyone loses. Please name and shame those bands so we won’t accidentally buy tickets to them.
ETA: With these proposed ‘must show ID/credit card’ schemes, I couldn’t, for example, buy tickets for my daughter and her friend to go to a show. Who does that serve? The reason for tickets is that a venue has a limit (say 350 people), it doesn’t matter who those 350 people are. The problem is not that the wrong people are getting in, it’s the organized mass buyouts. Any solution should punish those people, not the concert-goers.
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It feels a little unfair of you to deliberately cut the rest of my comment (“Yes, I am well aware of the myriad reasons why that’s a stupid idea. We’re trying to find solutions to a broken system here so we should at least try to start somewhere”) and then go on to cite some of those myriad problems without offering any sort of solution yourself beyond telling us that the “show ID/credit card” approach won’t work.
I fully accept that the problems you mention exist - indeed, I’m pretty sure that everyone else does too. And we’re also all well aware that if there was a simple (or even relatively simple) solution to the mass buyout problem, someone would probably have found it by now. All of the alternative systems I’ve been able to think of (registration databases, PGP keys etc.) could easily be gamed by the mass buyout bots.
Pretty much the only solution I can think of is for e.g. The Rolling Stones to book every single venue in multiple countries for the same night and simply drive the mass bots into bankruptcy. 
