Bryan drops a album that vows to combat high ticket prices

Beyoncé Is Alive, but You Haven’t: Taylor Swift’s Ticketmaster Mistaken and Theirs Was Innocent

The rising country star, named among Barack Obama’s favorite musicians this year, surprise dropped a new album on Saturday, a collection of live tracks titled, “All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster (Live at Red Rocks).”

Bryan wrote on social media that he will not play a lot of headline shows next year due to ticket prices that are too high, but he did admit that he has done everything he can to try to make some shows happen.

Bryan said that he was tired of people saying things couldn’t be done about this massive issue while huge monopoly stole money, and that people should still be able to afford tickets to shows.

The Taylor Swift fans are claiming Live Nation Entertainment violated antitrust laws when it sold her tour tickets.

Those quotes are from the Senate Commerce Committee hearing about Ticketmaster in January. Senators Durbin, Klobuchar, and Lee are talking about what happened to lots of people, including me. I spent a day trying to buy tickets to the Taylor Swift tour, like millions of other people, it was a terrible experience.

“It goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans,” Swift wrote on Instagram at the time. “It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse.”

It was like playing the world’s worst video game, if you went through it. And the prize for winning was getting to pay outrageous Ticketmaster fees. Now, the weird thing is that this is far from the first time Ticketmaster has failed in this way, and it’s certainly not the first time fans of a major artist have been pissed at the company. People dislike it. They have low expectations, and somehow, the company still blew it.

The lottery-style process will determine which registered fans receive a unique access code and who is put on the waiting list, according to Ticketmaster.

The tour had been rumored, but it was finally announced by Bey on Wednesday. The star posted a picture titled, simply, “RENAISSANCE WORLD TOUR 2023.” Her website shows tour dates from May to September. Beyoncé will perform in cities around the world, making several stops in the United States.

Live Nation, Ticketmaster, and the BeyHive: How Do Policy Changes Can Save Live Nation and Taylor Swift? Unpacking the 2018 Bey Crowd

The Verified Fan system aims to get tickets to real people and away from bots and professional resellers, by having fans register in advance for their preferred shows and vetting them individually.

Dean Budnick: In 2019, the Department of Justice again looked at the question of the merger between Live Nation and Ticketmaster, because a consent decree had been issued previously. In 2019, the government decided to renew that consent decree, essentially giving permission to this merger of these two companies until 2025.

Today, it’s widely criticized for holding too much power in the sector — effectively barring fans and artists from buying or selling tickets through a competitor.

The singer announced on Wednesday that she will bring her Grammy-nominated album Renaissance to cities across Europe and North America between May and September, opening in Stockholm and ending in New Orleans.

The first round of ticket sales will open to members of Bey’s official fan club on Monday through Ticketmaster, which has already been blasted for its Taylor Swift leak in November.

Swift presale chaos was caused by outsize demand and bot attacks, which the company apologized for. Live Nation President and Chief Financial Officer Joe Berchtold told lawmakers at last month’s hearing that “we need to do better and we will do better.”

Many are wondering (and in some cases, doubting) whether sales will go more smoothly this time around. The BeyHive is bracing for what may be another big Bey frenzy.

In this special episode of Decoder, we learn how a few policy changes in the 1980s led to a firm so thoroughly dominating the live events business that Congress held a hearing about antitrust law in 2023, angering fans of Taylor Swift. That sentence is wild. We’re going to unpack all of this with the help of some experts.

Beyonce was Kicked Out of Ticketmaster, or Why Did She Sign Up for a Presale Preliminary Event?

That’s presumably anyone who signs up for Beyoncé’s mailing list through her official website (though some tweeted that the signup page had disappeared from the site after the tour announcement).

The site kept crashing because it was not equipped to handle all the demand. People waited in the presale queue all day, only to get kicked out again. A few lucky people finally got to the front of the line, had tickets in their cart, and then got kicked out and had to start all over again. This happened to me.

“Beyonce fanshave reason to be worried,” says thechief strategy officer for CHEQ, a cybersecurity company.

If a large scale attack occurs on Ticketmaster, it is likely to occur again unless more robust security measures are put in place.

The Points Guy offers tips for anyone trying to snag presale tickets, including: add your eligible card to your Ticketmaster account ahead of time, sign in early and from a strong Wi-Fi network if possible and only refresh the page in very limited circumstances.

There are other ways fans can try to improve their odds. Members of theVerizon Up rewards program can participate through its website if they register with their credit or debit card number.

The Live Nation Tour: Where Are the Tickets? When Will The Tickets Go Onstage? A Commentary on the U.S. Supreme Court Case

“Hey, remember when concert tour announcements were exciting news drops instead of harbingers of an impossibly complicated and bewilderingly expensive buying process that ruins the entire experience before it ever kicks off?” he wrote, thanking Ticketmaster sarcastically.

It’s not known how much tour tickets will cost in North America, and it’s possible that the price of tickets will be adjusted based on consumer demand.

It said customers of the telecommunications provider O2 were the first to get access, and some reported problems with its app and website. People who did buy tickets paid between $68 to $245 for standard tickets and up to almost $2,500 for “on stage” seats.

The U.S. and Canada are next. Fans are speculating on social media that there may be more stops, and be sure to check the dates and locations of your tour stops.

The Justice Department and a few states sued over the Live Nation deal. Senator Durbin talked about this at the hearing.

According to a report, the Justice Department opened an antitrust investigation before the sale. NPR reached out to the Justice Department.

The Music Industry: Live Nation’s Failures and Promises to the Judiciary Subcommission on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights

Live Nation has acknowledged areas of improvement, especially when it comes to bots and scalpers, but has repeatedly — both in written statements and congressional testimony — denied engaging in behavior that would justify antitrust litigation or changes to its business practices.

On Thursday, the company said that people should focus on the facts. Live Nation has submitted “more than 35 pages of information” in recent weeks in an effort to provide context and transparency to policymakers “on the realities of the industry,” it said.

“We believe that policymakers would benefit from asking more questions about the chaos caused by scalpers and the resale-first side of the industry,” the statement added.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are unhappy with what Live Nation has done so far and they say they don’t like what they’ve gotten.

Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Mike Lee, R-Utah — who lead the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights — sent a letter on Wednesday to the Justice Department presenting evidence from the January hearing and urging it to follow up on unanswered questions.

Writing to Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division, the senators stressed that all of the witnesses except for Live Nation’s president had testified that the company’s practices harm the music industry. They said Live Nation didn’t respond to many of their questions at the hearing and after.

The senators’ letter is divided into two main lists: allegations against Ticketmaster and follow-up questions to which they found the company’s response lacking.

The entertainment industry is dominated by one company and that is what was shown in testimony from antitrust experts, entertainment company executives and a musician at the hearing.

Live Nation’s fees and models, as well as their contracts with competitors and alleged discrimination against artists, are some of the issues that they raised.

There is no competition for tickets, and that makes it impossible for people to purchase tickets. You can complain all you want, but there’s no real alternative, so Ticketmaster can just make a bad product and get away with it. Worse, because there’s no competition, Ticketmaster can suck and charge ever-higher fees for sucking, and that’s exactly what’s going on.

The letter, signed by executive vice president for corporate and regulatory affairs Daniel Wall, also urged Congress to take action against bots, to ban fraudulent resale practices and to mandate the ability for artists and other event providers to set their own resale terms on all ticketing websites.

They also asked Live Nation if it would commit to having third-party audits to confirm that it isn’t retaliating, in threat or actuality, against venues that pursue other ticketing providers.

Live Nation didn’t answer questions about how many of the top 100 arenas it provides ticketing services for and whether or not it entered into any agreements with venues that don’t usually have a contract for five years.

The American Dream: How Did President Theodore Roosevelt Break Up a Bunch of Monopoles? A Special Edition of Bork’s The Chicago School of Economics

We are trying something for the first time since it is a special episode. You can watch the video in this post or on the platform of your choice. Let us know what you think.

The senator says that to have a strong capitalist system, you need competition. I will say we know all too well that it is not possible to have too many consolidations, especially for a country like this one that has always had an affinity for Taylor Swift.

Now, in any normal sort of business situation, being both expensive and horrible at the thing you do, and then screwing up this badly on the biggest possible stage, would have consequences. Artists like Taylor Swift would be able to pick a different company if they wanted to, because a bunch of them would compete for the best user experience with the lowest fees.

Over 70 percent of the market for ticketing is controlled by a company that is not happy with it. In fact, it has had over 80 percent of the market for primary ticketing — that’s the first sale of tickets — since 1995. How did a company with so much money and so little know how to become the leader in the market? The answer, of course, is Ronald Reagan.

That’s Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at the Open Markets Institute. To explain what he means we need to back up a little. In 1890, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act, and President Theodore Roosevelt ran around using it to break up a bunch of monopolies. They called old Teddy the Trust Buster. In 1914, Congress clarified the Sherman Act with the Clayton Act, which specifically prohibits anti-competitive mergers. Up until the ‘80s, this was all working. The government was pretty aggressive about breaking up monopolies.

In 1978, law school professor Robert Bork wrote a book called The Antitrust Paradox, which essentially says we’ve been doing antitrust all wrong. Congress cared about consumers more in the late 19th and early 20th century than they did about economic efficiency. He thinks people will eventually pay less for things due to the fact that big companies are efficient and good at what they do.

Bork is lumped in with other Chicago-based economists and law scholars because he went to the University of Chicago, where he got his undergrad degree. The theories are named the Chicago School. A couple years later in 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president. Reagan and his team were big fans of Robert Bork and the Chicago School. Why does that matter?

SV: President Reagan was really a key figure in the history of antitrust, and he remade antitrust in some major ways by doing two things. The Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission is run by lawyers and economists from the Chicago School of Economics. These officials had a very different view of antitrust than their predecessors.

Second, they said, “Actually, mergers are generally good. Businesses can become larger, attain economies of scale, and possibly even lower prices with a merger. They reduced merger enforcement and adopted guidelines that were quite tolerant of mergers and acquisitions.

President Nixon and President Ford were able to change the Supreme Court in their two-plus terms in the White House. There was less focus on preserving opportunities for small businesses in the Supreme Court decisions from the late 1970s, and more emphasis on efficiency and benefits of scale.

In 1979 the Supreme Court decided a case. In that decision, the court officially endorsed Bork’s claim that Congress had actually intended to adopt the consumer welfare standard when it wrote the first antitrust law in the 19th century. These laws don’t have a consumer welfare standard. Bork convinced everyone that Teddy Roosevelt wanted this, and that he could read his mind. It is kind of amazing.

A side note: Bork cast such a spell on Reagan that Reagan nominated him to be on the Supreme Court. That nomination failed in part because Bork’s videotape rental history was leaked to the press, which eventually led to a federal law making your video rental history private. This is true. It’s also where the term “borked” comes from — the ‘80s.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23645057/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-eras-tour-beyonce-antitrust-monopoly-reagan-senate-hearing-congress

Live Nation and Ticketmaster: Evinvining a Big Artist, Jay-Z, and Miley Cyrus in a Merger

Dean Budnick is one of them. He saw an opportunity, and so what he did is he went around, or his sales team went around, to all of the venues and said to them, “What would you think if we doubled the service fees?” That seems like a bad idea, they said. Why would we want to do that? It is going to make people less likely to buy tickets. What Ticketmaster said was, “Well, if we do it, we’ll share the revenues from this new elevated service fee.”

Florian Ederer: They were direct competitors. horizontal integration occurs when two companies are in the same industry and they are direct competitors. Whenever two companies that are direct competitors, whenever they are merging, there’s a strong concern about abuse of market power. Is this a way to eliminate competition? Whenever we have elimination of competition, that may harm consumers, because suddenly there’s not another competitor around who could lower prices, who could offer better service, who could offer better quality.

Big artists signed huge exclusive deals with Live Nation in the 2000s after music piracy decimated the industry. Jay-Z is an artist. So are U2, Madonna, and Miley Cyrus. Live Nation had exclusive deals with huge artists, owned most major venues, and a lock on the concert promotion business by 2007. Then they decided to start working on a ticketing business to compete with Ticketmaster, which they received a response to, “Why don’t you just acquire us and let us do that for you?”

Vertical integration is a step towards vertical monopolies, which is when the players in one single industry integrate up or down the value chain into other buyers of the products they sell. Then the extreme case, of course, is a vertical monopoly, where at all points of the value chain, there is only a single provider. It would give that player a lot of market power because they are the only buyers and sellers in this value chain and they also control all of the inputs.

Sen. Durbin: The Justice Department and attorneys general from many states, including Illinois, sued to block the merger. The plaintiffs ultimately allowed the merger to go through, but put in place a consent decree with a set of conditions and divestitures designed to ensure competition.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23645057/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-eras-tour-beyonce-antitrust-monopoly-reagan-senate-hearing-congress

The Chicago School, Bork’s ideas and the DICE, the Chicago School and the Senate hearing: A bestselling story about ticketmaster, StubHub, Eventbrite, SeatGeek, and DICE

DB: In 2022, if an artist did want to circumvent Ticketmaster, I think number one, it would be really hard if that artist were playing stadiums. Essentially most, but not all, of the stadiums have relationships with Ticketmaster.

DB: It would’ve been different if they had spread those out over the course of a week, which is often what happens. I think maybe on some level they were trying to push back against scalpers, because otherwise you could have people who want to resell the tickets all focused on a handful of shows. If you spread them out, there would be people who want to get tickets to those shows every day for a week. It felt like a cluster-F in terms of what was happening and what the demands would be on the system.

You’ve already heard from some of the competitors in this episode: SeatGeek is another primary ticketing site that has struggled to compete with Ticketmaster. Ditto for StubHub and Eventbrite. In our reporting for this story, we also talked to Russ Tannen, president of DICE. The startup DICE has made its tickets non transferrable, meaning you can’t swap them at the event.

A lot of the decisions that Ticketmaster would have to make to not suck — no publicly traded company with a responsibility to its shareholders could reasonably make

There has been some opposition to the Chicago School and Bork’s ideas. The new chair of the Federal Trade Commission is named Lina Khan and she has written extensively about the problem with Bork’s approach.

The framework for antitrust, the consumer welfare framework, fails to capture forms of market power and dominance that should be relevant in antitrust.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23645057/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-eras-tour-beyonce-antitrust-monopoly-reagan-senate-hearing-congress

The Biden-Biden Era Revisited: Do We Want to Live in the Bork-Reagan World of Monopoles?

It makes me optimistic that a person who thinks that is now running the FTC. There are some hopeful things happening under the Biden administration. They certainly think so.

SV: I’m hopeful. The appointments of progressives to the DOJ and the FTC by President Biden have been positive, since he has made antitrust reform a key part of his agenda. I believe progress has been slower than anticipated, but we are seeing some positive signs. I think the Department of Justice has made reining in employer power a key part of its enforcement program. They’ve gone after many managers and firms for engaging in wage fixing, no-hire agreements, no-poach agreements.

It is easier said than done. The FTC has aggressively pursued big tech, but its first attempt at a lawsuit has flopped. The court keeps knocking them down because of their disagreement with the new version of antitrust. They are stuck in the consumer welfare standard.

Sen. Klobuchar: I know you, Ms. Bradish, talked about this idea of spinning off companies. The Justice Department is most likely to come up with that remedy. So all we can do here is put forward the evidence, and these are sworn testimonies back and forth under law, so that the Justice Department can look at this discussion.

If Congress changes the antitrust laws we will see. Senator Klobuchar has been pushing to do exactly that for a while now. In the meantime, the question we should all be asking ourselves is, do we want to live in the Bork-Reagan world of weird, regulated monopolies, or do we want these companies to actually compete?