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Chambers calls ticketing a “bad-news business”: it only makes headlines when things go wrong, especially if journalists and politicians are directly affected. The intense publicity around the Oasis reunion, which Rapino called “the biggest on-sale in history”, shone a light on the state of the industry last summer.

First, prices have gone bananas. A standing ticket to see Oasis at Wembley Stadium on their last tour, in 2009, cost £44 (£69 adjusted for inflation). It will now set you back £151. Great for the Gallaghers, who will take home millions, but ominous for live music in the long term. High prices don’t just attract older, wealthier crowds but leave less money in fans’ pockets for the smaller shows that breed the headliners of tomorrow.

Second, demand at the top level is insatiable. With an estimated 14 million fans seeking tickets, Oasis would have had to play a stadium every night for six months to satisfy them all.

Third, the Oasis on-sale exposed the relatively new tactic of demand-driven “dynamic pricing”, which more than doubled the price of some tickets without warning. In response, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched an investigation into breaches of consumer protection law, while Labour MP Rupa Huq proposed a bill that would enforce transparency about the availability and cost of tickets. The uproar was so great that “dynamic pricing” made the shortlist for the Oxford University Press’s word of the year. A recent More in Common poll found that 58% of Britons would like to see Ticketmaster nationalised: an impossible demand yet symptomatic of populist anger towards the company.

In the US, Ticketmaster’s current problems stem from a cardinal error: getting on the wrong side of Swifties. In November 2022, the company failed to stagger the presale for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, listing all 2m tickets simultaneously. The colossal demand overwhelmed the servers, causing myriad problems. Swift expressed her disappointment. Ticketmaster grovelled. Last May, the US justice department (DOJ) filed an antitrust suit, now backed by 39 states, which alleges that Live Nation and Ticketmaster use their “power and influence … to freeze innovation and bend the industry to their own benefit”.

Live Nation protests that its profit margins are less than 2% and its US market share has actually fallen since 2010. An emollient spokesperson, Rapino likes to imply that Ticketmaster is a convenient whipping boy for complex structural factors beyond its control. “There’s so much confusion around this business,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “We need to do more work for fans to understand why they can’t get tickets, or why it’s three times the price on secondary markets.”

On the one hand, he would say that, wouldn’t he? On the other, he has a case. Ticketmaster’s competitors charge almost identical prices and fees. “They all act very similarly,” says Chambers. “It’s not a consumer-friendly industry.” He describes a pyramid of financial priorities in the concert business. At the top, of course, is the artist. Below them, in descending order, sit the manager, the promoter, the venue, the sponsor or partner, and the ticket-seller. And right at the bottom are the fans.

So is Ticketmaster the cause of fans’ frustrations or merely the public face? Why are tickets so expensive and hard to get? And is there a better way?

* * *

There has never been a golden age of ticket-buying, when the biggest fans got the best tickets for a fair price. Queues, scams and disappointments spring eternal. In the mid-70s, the industry leader was Ticketron, selling tickets via terminals installed in retail outlets, or by telephone. Three men in Phoenix, Arizona, thought they could do it faster and cheaper. They designed a computer system that would allow venues to share a database. On 2 October 1976, Ticketmaster was born.

The company grew slowly. When it was bought by Chicago investor Jay Pritzker in 1982, it had just 25 employees and $1m in sales. But the new CEO, bullish New York lawyer Fred Rosen, set out to destroy Ticketron with a radical new business model. Ticketron billed clients to use its terminals, while charging fans a flat booking fee of $2. “We can’t finance this business on the backs of the consumer,” insisted Ticketron vice-president Bob Gorra.

Rosen disagreed. He demanded exclusive deals with venues – 100% of the tickets available. In return, he promised to double surcharges and split the additional revenue with his clients, while offering generous signing bonuses and supplying the software and hardware for free. The people paying for all this were the fans, who had to suck it up or miss out. According to former Ticketmaster executive Alan Citron, Rosen promised that his company would become “the face of ticketing” and “take the bruises from people who don’t like the process”.

The Los Angeles Times described Ticketmaster as “an agile David tackling an ageing Goliath”, and David won. In 1990, Ticketron was liquidated, with its assets sold to the giant-killer. Soon, the company held the exclusive rights to two-thirds of the tickets sold in major US venues and sold a good chunk of the remaining one-third, too. It had become a prize asset, acquired by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in 1993 and by media magnate Barry Diller in 1997.

Meanwhile, a New York entrepreneur called Robert FX Sillerman was remaking the concert promotion business at dizzying speed. Having gobbled up so many radio stations that one trade publication compared him to Pac-Man, he saw a similar opportunity with promoters and venues: consolidation would make tours more efficient and facilitate big-money sponsorship and advertising deals. Sillerman’s company SFX Entertainment embarked on a debt-financed $2bn spending spree that corporatised the last area of the music industry where independent operators had still prevailed. By the time he sold SFX to the radio chain Clear Channel Communications for $4.4bn in 2000, a Goldman Sachs report stated that it was “virtually impossible” to tour the US without playing an SFX venue.

The most consequential of Sillerman’s acquisitions was the Canadian promoter Core Audience Entertainment, because its co-founder was Michael Rapino. Rapino says he “came from nothing”, specifically Thunder Bay, Ontario. He began promoting bands in local bars as marketing for Labatt Breweries while still a student at Lakehead University. When Clear Channel spun off its debt-laden promotions company as Live Nation in 2005, 40-year-old Rapino became its first CEO.

Rapino is a very modern pop mogul: slick, unflashy, fluent in corporatese. He describes artists as “billion-dollar brands” and music as “one of the most passionate consumer experiences”. Married to Star Trek actor Jolene Blalock since 2003, he’s a vegan father of three who starts every day with meditation. While fellow Canadian Arthur Fogel, Live Nation’s CEO of Global Touring, is an outgoing enthusiast, personally beloved by clients such as Madonna, Beyoncé and Sting, Rapino describes himself as an introvert who doesn’t enjoy working the phones or wining and dining managers. “I don’t think relationships are as important as they historically were,” he told Billboard. “I think great products speak for themselves.”

Rapino aggressively expanded Live Nation’s operations, buying majority shares in venue chains around the world and moving into the festival market. He also launched a management division, Artist Nation, which offered so-called “360” deals to artists including U2 and Jay-Z, handling not just artists’ tours but their entire careers. Ticketmaster also expanded into management.

But both companies were in the red, especially when the 2008 recession hit the concert market. In February 2009, the two giants announced merger talks in the interest of mutual survival, which raised fears of a vertical monopoly (when one company controls multiple stages of a supply chain). As the New Yorker put it, the fusion would combine “the world’s largest ticket seller and the world’s largest management company with the world’s largest concert promoter and the world’s largest venue operator”. Bruce Springsteen called the proposed merger “the one thing that would make the current ticket situation even worse for the fan than it is now”.

Nonetheless, in January 2010 the DOJ approved the merger under certain conditions to protect competition, and Rapino became the CEO of Live Nation Entertainment. Its new chair, hard-nosed veteran manager Irving Azoff, gave a congressional hearing a version of Rosen’s scapegoat strategy: “Ticketmaster was set up as a system where they took the heat for everybody … We’re like the IRS. We deliver bad news.”

Rapino has continued to grow Live Nation by expanding into international markets such as Brazil and India while building more of its own venues from scratch. In the UK, its properties include the vast Academy Music Group and Reading and Leeds festivals. Currently valued at $30bn, the company makes more than 80% of its revenue from concerts but more than half of its profit from ticketing, sponsorship and advertising.

“He’s remained true to the mission of leveraging the various aspects of the company to support one another,” says Dean Bundick, co-author of Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped. “He’s realised the goals of Robert FX Sillerman.” In 2022, Rapino’s total remuneration package of $139m made him the fifth highest-paid CEO in the US.

* * *

How much should it cost to see your favourite band? The industry’s answer is always: more. Thirty years ago, Fred Rosen called concert tickets “the most underpriced commodity in America” and Rapino still claims that they are “massively underpriced”. Speaking on Lefsetz’s podcast, he claimed that even people on modest incomes will find the money for a unique experience. While his comparison of a concert ticket to a Gucci bag or a seat at the Super Bowl suggests an unusual definition of a modest income, he isn’t wrong about fans’ willingness to pay sky-high prices.

We’ve already seen how tickets got so expensive. It began in the 1980s, when Rosen escalated service charges to woo venues. Simultaneously, managers of major artists demanded a better split of the gross for their clients, pushing the industry standard from 70/30 to 90/10 and beyond. Surcharges aren’t really payment for a service – it goes without saying that it doesn’t cost £20 to sell a ticket online – but a way for venues and ticketers to get paid.

Currently, three add-ons increase the price of a Ticketmaster ticket by an average of 20-30%: a service charge, a facility fee and a processing fee. The venue (which may be owned by Live Nation) takes about two-thirds of the service charge and all of the facility fee. Ticketmaster gets the remainder. “Everyone has their hand out,” says Chambers, “especially since Covid, when they all lost two years of revenues.”

In the 1990s, Robert FX Sillerman caused further inflation by overpaying performers in order to net big sponsorship deals. According to the trade publication Pollstar, between 1996 and 2003 the average ticket price of the top 100 tours almost doubled from $25.81 to $50.35 – more than five times the rate of inflation. By then, digital piracy had demolished record sales so that concert revenue represented up to 95% of an artist’s income. And technological advances in the field of concert design created a costly audiovisual arms race. As a result, the top 100 ticket price rose 55% during the 2010s, reaching $92.42 in 2019, just before the industry went into lockdown.

After the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine, worldwide inflation afflicted every element of the concert business, from transport to venue hire to salaries. This coincided with an explosion of pent-up demand that Pollstar called the “Golden Age of Live”. In 2019, 98 million people attended a Live Nation show; last year, it was 151 million. With most small and mid-sized shows, affordability and availability are not an issue. The majority never sell out and many artists struggle to cover their costs. But with A-listers such as Taylor Swift and Coldplay, demand will always exceed supply. Factor in the industry’s need to compensate for 18 months of blackout and the average price spiralled, hitting $135.92 in 2024. Yet Rapino maintains that prices are, in fact, still too low because resale reveals a ticket’s true market value. By this logic, a £100 ticket is underpriced if a secondary seller can list it on StubHub for £400.

Artists have always loathed scalpers. “We are at our wits’ end how to keep tickets out of the hands of speculators,” Charles Dickens complained during his 1867 American tour. Yet there is a long and murky history of artists and promoters secretly funnelling tickets to scalpers and taking a cut. Scalping went “from the streets to the internet”, as Rapino puts it, in 2000, when StubHub launched with the euphemistic rebrand “secondary ticketing”.

Back then, it was the only way for fans to sell unwanted tickets for legitimate reasons, but the emergence of face-value, fan-to-fan platforms such as Twickets has eliminated that justification. Many tickets on resale sites have been obtained en masse by professional scalpers, sometimes by illegal means, and listed for sale anonymously. Some are even listed speculatively by people who haven’t actually bought them yet. The CMA has proposed a price cap of 10% above face value, but the campaign group FanFair Alliance wants the UK to follow Ireland in criminalising for-profit resale altogether.

In the meantime, the industry has three responses to scalpers. One is to throw up obstacles, such as anti-bot software and stringent resale restrictions. (Bots are illegal in many European countries but not the US.) Yet the scalpers, incredibly well organised and technologically adept, always find a way through, while some legitimate fans get caught in the digital net.

Another strategy is to get a piece of the action, but that can go badly wrong. In 2009, Ticketmaster directed Bruce Springsteen fans to its own secondary marketplace TicketsNow before the shows had even sold out – the primary seller was also the scalper. “The abuse of our fans and our trust by Ticketmaster has made us as furious as it has made many of you,” Springsteen raged. Ticketmaster blamed a glitch, apologised fulsomely and partly refunded some customers, but the optics remained terrible. In 2018, it closed its resale sites, Seatwave and Get Me In!, and replaced them with a face-value marketplace.

The third approach is to charge more to reflect the supposed market value. So prices keep climbing in increasingly inventive ways, such as greater price differentials between the front and back rows or tiered pricing: as each batch of tickets sells out, a more expensive one goes on sale. Then there are numerous premium options targeted at superfans and corporate hospitality. The problem for fans is that VIP packages, along with presales via fanclubs and brand partners, eat away at the number of tickets available for the general on-sale. A 2016 investigation by New York’s attorney general found that it was fewer than half.

The most contentious mechanism, as Oasis discovered, is dynamic pricing: the greater the demand, the higher the price. This is standard practice with airline seats, hotel rooms and Uber rides, but caused uproar when Ticketmaster first applied “Official Platinum” pricing to a Springsteen tour in 2022. Ticketmaster responded that only one in 10 tickets was allocated to dynamic pricing, but it had failed to warn in advance that they could go as high as $5,000.

“Ticket buying has gotten very confusing,” Springsteen complained, “not just for the fans, but for the artists also.” Unlike most businesses, musicians are expected to have a special relationship with their customers, so pricing is a moral and reputational question, not just a financial one. After the Oasis furore, the band turned off dynamic pricing for their US dates. “The execution of the plan failed to meet expectations,” Oasis said in a bland statement.

How long can ticket inflation continue? Attendance has dipped slightly since the post-lockdown boom, even as prices have kept climbing. Last year, many arenas and stadiums were left with empty seats while some tours, including those by Jennifer Lopez and the Black Keys, were cancelled altogether. “It reminds me of 1999 when record labels thought: we’re manufacturing CDs and this is going to go on for ever,” says one industry insider. “It’s the same kind of thing: we’re recession-proof, demand’s off the scale, growth, growth, growth …” We all  know what happened next.

* * *

The first artists to take a public swing at Ticketmaster’s imperial dominance were the Seattle band Pearl Jam. The hottest group in the US wanted to sell tickets to their summer 1994 tour for just $20: $18 for them, $2 for Ticketmaster. Fred Rosen wasn’t having that. When Ticketmaster pushed back and threatened promoters who broke ranks, the band pulled the whole tour. “Ticketmaster said: ‘If you don’t like us, go someplace else,’” the band’s manager, Kelly Curtis, told the New York Times. “But we found out that there wasn’t anyplace else.” The DOJ invited Pearl Jam to file an antitrust complaint, alleging uncompetitive practices, and testify to Congress.

In 2023, the Cure’s Robert Smith made their US tour tickets available for as little as $20. He soon discovered Ticketmaster’s fees cost more than the tickets themselves

The battle was lost the following summer. The antitrust investigation was abruptly dropped, while Pearl Jam’s efforts to swerve Ticketmaster by using a grassroots ticketing company and independent venues such as fairgrounds and state parks proved a disaster. Even as they succeeded in drawing attention to Ticketmaster’s outsized power and hidden surcharges, Pearl Jam’s defeat discouraged their peers from taking a similar stand. “If Pearl Jam couldn’t do it,” asked Rolling Stone, “who can?”

Right now, Ticketmaster’s most dogged celebrity antagonist is Robert Smith of the Cure. For the Cure’s 2023 US tour, their first in seven years, the frontman decided on a radically fan-friendly approach. He rejected dynamic pricing, prohibited resale and made tickets available for as little as $20 – adjusted for inflation, that’s half what Pearl Jam considered low in 1994. But he soon discovered that Ticketmaster’s fees cost more than the tickets themselves. Smith cried foul and Ticketmaster offered partial refunds, claiming that Smith’s freakishly low prices had short-circuited the system.

Although artists including Coldplay and Neil Young have also ditched dynamic pricing, Smith’s heroic stubbornness remains unusual. “People are terrified of upsetting Live Nation and Ticketmaster,” he told the New York Times. “It’s really bizarre, actually, because the power of the artist, it’s the ultimate power.” In fact, he made things awkward for artists by proving that they set the prices and dictate the conditions, in the knowledge that fans would sooner blame a corporation.

Live Nation is still in the line of fire. Its share price jumped after Donald Trump’s election victory in the expectation that his DOJ would drop the antitrust suit, but it remains ongoing, and enjoys rare cross-party support. Unwinding the merger would certainly increase competition, but it’s unclear whether it would actually help fans because rival promoters and ticketers would try to outbid each other for exclusive deals and then have to recoup those advances by raising prices. “The economic environment of the live music industry is odd, as competition often leads to higher prices for consumers,” says Dean Bundick.

Meanwhile, bad headlines and social media storms are the most effective spurs to reform. Unlike Fred Rosen, who put criticisms of Ticketmaster down to nothing more than “jealousy and envy”, the smooth-talking Rapino is quicker to make tactical concessions, such as withdrawing from the secondary market, no longer taking a cut of merchandise sales, and pre-empting legislation to include fees in the upfront price.

Rapino’s immense wealth and power hardly make him a victim, but nor is he the villain some would like. Even Ticketmaster’s sharpest critics acknowledge that there are no easy fixes to the core problems of affordability and availability unless demand falls dramatically. Fans’ expectations have yet to catch up with the economics of live music.

So when Ticketmaster, for all its sins, protests that it is a convenient Aunt Sally, it has a point. Then again, that was Fred Rosen’s promise to his clients 40 years ago. “Ticketmaster’s job has been to take that punch in the head for the industry,” Rapino told Lefsetz. “That’s part of why they hire you.”