Live Nation antitrust czar Dan Wall hit back against widespread assumptions that his company, which has unprecedented global control of the live entertainment business and is facing active allegations that it operates as a monopoly and an open Department of Justice investigation, has anything to do with the surging ticket prices being experienced by anyone who has bought a ticket to an event in the past decade.
Wall, a longtime attorney representing the company in antitrust matters as an outside counsel who went in-house as an Executive Vice President in the spring of 2023, outlined his defense of the company in a lengthy post on the company’s website published this week.
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“Statements to the effect that Live Nation and Ticketmaster “keep ticket prices high” are just flat wrong,” he writes in summation after more than 2,000 words. “Anyone with a basic understanding of the industry knows this. Those who perpetuate this falsehood are cynical at best. They do a disservice to consumers and to rational political discourse.”
The high prices, he argues, are simply a natural progression of the events industry in its modern form, rather than a reflection of an industry where one company serves as both the largest promoter in the world, and the operator of a ticketing platform that handles an estimated 60-80 percent of ticket transaction volume in North America.
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Service charges go to the venue, while the majority of the actual ticket price goes to the artist, who has ultimate say-so over the price that is being paid by the consumer. So it is effectively their fault, rather than his company’s outsized market share and allegations that it regularly engaged in behavior that violated a consent decree it entered as part of the regulatory approval of the Live Nation and Ticketmaster merger more then a decade ago.
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“Tickets are actually priced by artists and [sports] teams,” he wrote. “It’s their show, they get to decide what it costs to get in. The NFL tickets on Ticketmaster were priced by the home teams, concert tickets were priced by the performer’s business teams, Monster Jam tickets were priced by its producer (Feld Entertainment), and so forth.”
“Promoters don’t set prices, artists do,” he added later. “The artist and [their] business team listen to the promoter’s input and then decide. This is the case even with a promoter as large as Live Nation or AEG.”
Naturally, Wall also dedicated hundreds of words to blaming ticket resale for the surging ticket prices charged at the box office. Ticket resale showed artists the true price that consumers were willing to pay to attend events, which artists and their management and teams and their internal pricing experts have all embraced. It is a subject that he devoted an entire previous article to, and a favorite argument among Live Nation and its industry allies when pitching their own preferred ticket regulatory climate – one where venues and promoters like Live Nation are empowered to regulate the entire ticket industry, including methods that would effectively declare their competition illegal.
READ MORE | Live Nation’s Antitrust Chief Continues Gaslighting “Scalper” Blame
We’re curious what our readers think about the argument – weigh in on the poll below and leave your thoughts in the comments:
Live Nation’s Dan Wall says it’s cynical to blame the company for surging ticket prices. Do you agree?
— TicketNews (@TicketNews) March 7, 2024
