The rise and fall of Ticketmaster

So you learn that your favorite artist is going to come to your town and they're going to have a concert. And you log in dutifully that morning when tickets are going to go on sale. But suddenly you discover that 40,000 people are ahead of you in line. And when you finally do get through 2 hours later, you discover that the only tickets that are available are priced at 5 to 10 times what the list price was. And suddenly you have a choice: either skip the concert of a lifetime or go in debt on your credit card in order to be able to attend. This is the nightmare that many of us have lived for decades, all because of one company. Ticketmaster.

But it turns out our long national nightmare may be actually changing. A lot of people are involved in this. Taylor Swift, Metallica, Pearl Jam, and the US government and your local state's attorneys general. This story is the wild rise and potential fall of Ticketmaster. By the way, today's video is sponsored by my company, Bedrock. More on them later.

Story of Ticketmaster actually starts back in Phoenix, Arizona, back in 1976. 4 co-founders, of which nobody remembers their names, invented the very first electronic ticketing management system. To that point, every single venue would run their own ticketing system. You wanted to go to a basically a show in your town, you had to go up to their window and buy stuff or call them. And in this case, Ticketmaster was the very first group to put every single show and every single ticket on one network. Their first shows was a band called ELO, Electric Light Orchestra.

That's how old these guys are.

And for a while, nobody really cared. They eventually just got to some small revenue in their small little corner of the United States. And then in 1982, they were bought by a name that's pretty famous, the Pritzker family.

That name name may be familiar to some of you.

They're one of the wealthiest families in the United States. They started the Hyatt chain of hotels. The Pritzkers bring in a guy named Fred Rosen as CEO, and the first thing he does is move the whole company to Los Angeles. The second thing he does is start asking, who's the real customer? Before I answer that question, let's talk about who we should really be getting mad at when you or I buy tickets on Ticketmaster. Is it Ticketmaster itself that makes us charge all that fees, or is it somebody else? But what Rosen figured out was that the real customer wasn't you or me. The real customer was the venues, the people who controlled the stadium. The fan basically has no choice. We got to buy tickets wherever the venue says we're going to buy them. If you and Bruce Springsteen decides to go to one venue or another, we're going to go wherever Bruce Springsteen is or Madonna or whoever. Rosen took this realization and flipped the entire model that the four founders from Phoenix had gotten wrong. Instead of being a software business, he suddenly went into cahoots with these local venues, whereas the software guys had just charged a small fee to people and kept it all themselves. Rosen went to actual venues and created revenue sharing deals with them. He added huge fees to the tickets with Ticketmaster as the front person taking all the heat, and then they split those fees with the venues themselves. Ticketmaster keeps none of that. It goes straight to the venues, all profit for them. So high service fees that Ticketmaster would charge, $20, $30, $40, $50, they would turn around and split those with the venues and sometimes with the people who manage the artists themselves. Rosen would take the Pritzker cash and then go to venues and offer them upfront signing bonuses and sign 5 to 10 year deals with venues so they were locked into working with Ticketmaster.

So imagine you or I today is spending $200 on a ticket and there's $75 in fees, well, half of that is going straight to the venue. The artist may be in on it as well. They're charging these high fees and it sometimes gets split back to them as well. Ticketmaster was basically being the outsourced villain for the venues and the artists who didn't want to raise prices and look like they hated their fans or customers. And Ticketmaster was just the bad guy. But everybody was starting to make money, a lot of it. And everybody's winning except for you and me, the people that are trying to buy tickets. And in 1990, Rosen did $600 million per year for the Pritzkers. A business they had bought for just a handful of millions of dollars a few years before. Rosen is aggressive. In 1991, he goes and buys Ticketron, which was the only real competitor to Ticketmaster. By 1994, Ticketmaster sells 52 million tickets a year in the United States. They had an astounding 80% market share. In 1993, a billionaire steps in, one of the co-founders of Microsoft, a guy named Paul Allen. He buys 80% of the company, and the $4 million bet that the Pritzkers had done just a decade or so earlier was now worth hundreds of millions of $100.

But it turns out somebody was watching all this, and as the late '90s came around, there was a young group of Gen X bands, uh, and them and pop stars were about to challenge the stranglehold that Ticketmaster had on the entire industry. If you find this useful, do me a favor and subscribe to my channel. Uh, I would love to have you here, and so you can see more of these as I put them out and as I walk in this drainage ditch. It's so beautiful. In 1994, Pearl Jam is the biggest rock band on the planet, and they want to cap tickets for their upcoming tour at $18 a ticket and cap fees at 10%. But there's a problem. Ticketmaster is accustomed to charging 25% per fees, and Rosen, he and Ticketmaster say hell no. And their answer? Well, if Pearl Jam wants to distribute their tickets for free, Ticketmaster will be happy to give their tickets away for free. The boys are determined, and in 1994, they file a formal complaint with the Department of Justice. They get in front of Congress and start to testify against Ticketmaster. They try to go around the system. I remember by then, Ticketmaster has locked up every venue in the country that mattered, that was appropriate for Pearl Jam. So they to play oddball places like polo fields and fairgrounds and stuff like that. They were the biggest band on the planet. Pearl Jam was in that year, and even they couldn't get away from the monopoly. They couldn't find enough places to play, and they lost an estimated $15 million in tour revenue that year alone. No other artist at the time joined them. Aerosmith, R.E.M., all the big boys. They just kept going with Ticketmaster. And in 1995, the Department of Justice quietly closed the case on the complaint. By then, Ticketmaster has locked up so many venues and has such exclusivity across the country that artists have no choice but to capitulate. And that's exactly what Pearl Jam does in 1998.

They throw in the towel, wave the white flag, and go back to letting Ticketmaster charge high fees on their tickets.

Then, as 1999 came around, something amazing happened, which was this was the peak of the dot-com boom era, and the internet was proliferating across every household in the United States. And one thing was about to happen that would change everything. Well, Unfortunately, for the worse. So today's video is actually sponsored by a company I started called Bedrock Quality of Earnings. And Bedrock is a service for business buyers. If you're going out to buy a business, one thing you don't want are surprises. There are tons of stories out there of people who buy businesses, they get into them, and 3 months later they realize the numbers that the seller told them, well, they weren't true. And in a situation where people are often buying businesses and signing personal guarantees, meaning they're really on the hook to return that money to a bank or anybody they borrow it from, That could be a disaster. So Bedrock is a quality of earnings firm. They're people you hire that go in and look at the seller's books to make sure what you're being told is actually true. And there's lots of quality of earnings firms out there. What makes Bedrock different is it's the only one that has 3 things. Number 1, a CEO, a guy who comes to us from a Big 4 firm and has been doing quality of earnings reports, well, basically for a long time, his whole career, basically.

Bedrock is also backed by people you trust and know, including me. You know where to find me. If you're unhappy with their service.

And number 3, Bedrock uses the latest technology, AI and all that different kind of stuff to make sure you get the best results at the best price. So if you're interested, book a call with the CEO, Will. You can go to bedrockqoe.com or check out the link in the comments below or the one on the screen. Thanks. Up until then, people had basically gone into music stores and paid $15 or $18, $30 to $40 in today's money to buy CDs from their favorite bands. But in 1998, that revenue stream for bands started to decline. Because the thing that came along was P2P file sharing for music. At the head of that was an application called Napster. Before Napster, a typical artist made 80% of their income from their CD or record sales. After that, the music industry started to flip, and suddenly the 20% that they had been making from tours became the majority of their revenue. Here's the fact to back that up. In 1996, the average concert ticket was $93. By 2019, it was $96. 2023, it was $150. While inflation during this period rose 100%, meaning money got half the value that it was before, ticket prices went up 380%. Remember, Ticketmaster charges percentage of fees on the ticket price, uh, went through and helped fuel the Ticketmaster monopoly. Whereas other parts of the music business were getting disrupted by the internet, Ticketmaster was getting jet fuel put on it because of the internet. Then Ticketmaster would do something to increase their monopoly. They bought a company who is named Irving Azoff. You don't know him, but he was the manager and promoter of some of the most famous bands in the United States at the time. And remember, Azoff was the most powerful manager in music, managing all these big stars. And he took his company Frontline Management and he sold it to another company that was doing artist management called Live Nation.

And then suddenly unemployed, he took the job as CEO of Ticketmaster in 2008.

Nobody was more attuned to how to create leverage than he was. And in 2010, Live Nation and Ticketmaster announced a partnership. They were going to merge. The DOJ at at the time, as I've talked about on this channel, was asleep at the wheel, allowing industry consolidation in many things. Tickets was one of them. Airlines, government contracting all happened in the late '90s into the 2010s. And the Department of Justice in 2010 approved the merger.

And now a single company was managing the artist, booking the venues, and selling the tickets all at once.

And in many cases, they also were buying up venues. So they not only owned the place the artist would pay, they owned everything else too. I've talked on this channel about the concept of a flywheel. Disney has one, for example. The more people show up at the park, the more people go to their movies, the more people buy the toys.

Same thing happens with tickets. When you own the venues, you get better artists. The artists book those venues, they sell higher tickets, all that kind of stuff.

And the flywheel just circulates.

And behind it all, Ticketmaster makes more money because they can charge whatever the hell they want. After the merger, Live Nation had 86% of the major concert venue ticketing market. Just insane. At this time, the Department of Justice would kind of just like wave a white flag and then say, oh, please don't be mean. And that's exactly what they did here around the time they did the consent decree, which said, okay, we know you're going to dominate the entire market and have an unfair monopoly, but we want you to just not pick on any venues that refuse to play along and use your ticketing system. In 2019, the DOJ woke up and did their homework and discovered that Live Nation had been doing exactly that, threatening to pull venues from their system for anybody who didn't play along and buy the entire package from them. GOJ extended this consent decree to 2025, promising a $1 million per incident penalty. But what it did was allow Live Nation to basically turn around and via Ticketmaster start to charge 25%, 35%, even 40% fees on tickets. But it didn't matter because the flywheel kept turning. And then in 2022, everything would change again.

And that was when Taylor Swift entered the picture. She announced the Eras Tour and 3.5 million people signed up for the presale. Heck, I did. I wanted to go. I love Taylor Swift. But the problem was Ticketmaster system was only set up to handle 1.5 million. November 15th, 2022, the presale goes live and the entire Ticketmaster system crashes. Lifelong fans of Taylor Swift are left screaming and crying because they weren't going to be able to get tickets. And look, the whole thing ended up selling a record number of tickets and they sold 2.4 million tickets. And Taylor, for her part, had been great. She'd not wanted dynamic pricing. She wanted availability for people who wanted to come to be able to afford it. Taylor Swift has a platform. She goes on Instagram and basically announces how mad she is. She feels like people had to go through, quote unquote, multiple bear attacks to be able to attend her concerts. And the politicians, they're getting calls too. It turns out Swifties, they're mad. And the Tennessee Attorney General files a complaint within 48 hours. January 2023, things are so bad that they end up having hearings on Capitol Hill. Senator Mike Lee comes out and says, basically quoting Taylor Swift lyrics in his speech from the bench. Like, it's just crazy. He said, he said basically Live Nation should come out and say, it's me, I'm the problem. It's me. Yeah. Can't make this stuff up. June 2023, the Biden administration finally steps in under pressure from all these pissed off people, and Live Nation agrees to have all-in pricing. No more junk fees and no more scammy stuff. They quietly raised other fees just to make up for the revenue.

That's how bad these dudes are at Live Nation and Ticketmaster.

The Oasis tour that was announced in 2025 basically was emblematic of this whole situation. Whereas tickets were supposed to be $150, by the time people got through the queue, they were nearly $400. But wait, there's something even worse in this whole thing. One thing you'll have noticed is that Live Nation for years used the idea of trying to fight scalpers as their reason to have all these big fees. They need to make sure, you know, the playground was fair for everybody to shop and they didn't get ripped off. Reality, if you go look at some of these things like platinum tickets and stuff like that, behind the scenes, that's Ticketmaster buying their own tickets and being the scalper per right in front of you. And I've done it before. You go spend time waiting in a queue for Ticketmaster, and an hour later you finally get to the front and discover the only tickets that are available are $1,000, whereas the list price was $150. And behind it all in these platinum tickets and the scams is Ticketmaster collecting dollars from you and me. In late 2024, the government finally steps up and starts to act on our behalf. 30 states' attorneys general and the Department of Justice filed suit against Ticketmaster. September 2025. The FTC sues them again for deceptive pricing.

Then, you know, the courts are not fast.

And in January 2025, while this is all kind of heading towards a trial in the future, Live Nation, they're not stupid.

They go hunting for political cover and they go look at the friends and acquaintances of the new president, Donald J. Trump, who takes office in January 2025. Three Trump loyalists join the board of Live Nation. Kellyanne Conway, who you may remember from the very first administration, a guy who's the director of national intelligence, and another Trump insider— I forgot his name— all joined the board. Friends of the president are suddenly, uh, financially interested in what's going on with Live Nation. In February 2026, a person named Gail Slater, who had been at the Department of Justice leading the antitrust effort against Live Nation, suddenly resigns, pledged publicly to resist political interference. Reports are that she had clashed with the White House in terms of not dropping the case and fighting it. Trump associate Mike Davis, who's on the board, he, he basically takes public credit for stopping the investigation and getting her out of the way. And senators even see this in the United States Senate. Klobuchar, who's one of the senators, she actually files legislation to stop the White House from getting involved in antitrust stuff like this.

March 2nd, 2026, the trial begins in Manhattan, and then something weird happens. The Department of Justice suddenly cuts a very quick deal. With Live Nation. Agreed a $280 million fine, 15 more years of the consent decree, which is basically like, please be nice, don't break any rules. And they agreed to divest themselves of a handful of venues and they agreed to a 15% service fee cap. But really, this doesn't fix anything. We've seen this before. The consent decrees basically just allow Ticketmaster and Live Nation to figure out other ways to gouge the consumers. And look, the state attorneys general, they're not dumb. 30 of them say we're not going to go along with this deal that the federal government just agreed to. New York State Attorney General Latisha James, said it doesn't address the fact that Live Nation and Ticketmaster are an unfair monopoly that really hurt consumers.

And she and the other states' attorneys general, they stay at it and keep fighting, even though the federal government, well, basically got corrupted and gave in. It's 5 weeks of testimony in the courtroom, and they bring out some pretty damning stuff. There's some Slack messages between employees of, uh, of Ticketmaster basically calling customers stupid and how they're robbing them blind. The guy's name is Benjamin Baker, who worked at Live Nation, and he calls his, his Slack messages immature and inappropriate. Here's the deal. Since writing those messages and taking that tact and attitude towards customers, Benjamin Baker had been actually promoted twice at Live Nation. 4 days of deliberation on April 15th, 2026. They get a verdict. And the verdict is that Live Nation and Ticketmaster are guilty of being a monopoly basically on all counts. The computation is that the average ticket customer gets overcharged $1.72 per transaction. 8 days later, things get worse. A former EVP of Live Nation files suit against the company, uh, basically accusing them of running a deceptive trade practice. Live Nation decides they're gonna appeal the verdict, and behind the scenes, other countries take notice. Australia themselves, where Ticketmaster also does business, they open an investigation.

Interestingly enough, Live Nation wasn't just a monopoly. They were also what's called monopsony. And businesses like Walmart or Target or Home Depot get big because they're just one buyer in a sea of sellers. And so monopolies basically have the ability to dictate prices. And Live Nation plus Ticketmaster basically were monopoly on ticket creation and selling and monopsony on the venues and the artists themselves, the only people offering those services, which enabled them to basically run their entire game.

And if there's something to make you as an individual mad about this whole story, if you go look at all the industries in which people like you and me as consumers are incredibly angry these days. Higher education, uh, ticketing and concerts, uh, and then healthcare and government contracting. There has been mass consolidation over the past 20 years, reducing competition while pushing the prices up for you and me, all while the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, and Department of Justice basically just sat and did nothing. Thing that Ticketmaster has going for them despite this, uh, basically judgment, uh, is that they've got the most powerful house in the land, the White House, on their side. They were smart. They went and hired these people who know how to get, you know, deals done, I guess. Small business owner, an entrepreneur thinking about, you know, how to do business and how to feed your family and do well. The concept of leverage comes up and it's important for you to understand how these things work. And in this case, Ticketmaster over decades created an enormous amount of leverage over everybody in the industry. And a band even as popular as Pearl Jam in the 1990s couldn't overcome that.

And often the difference between being in a great business where you make a lot of money and live a nice life life or being in a bad business where you feel like you're barely making payroll each week is whether you have leverage or not. If you hate Ticketmaster, do me a favor, write in the comments. The algorithm loves it. And if you enjoyed this video, definitely write that in the comments below too. It encouraged me to make more.