It’s a rare day when two of music’s biggest rockers weigh in on public policy. But that’s exactly what happened when Kid Rock testified at a congressional hearing about Ticketmaster’s business practices and Ted Nugent weighed in afterward.
“Live Nation/Ticketmaster is lobbying for bullsh– SOCIALIST price controls because THEY can survive a [price] cap,” tweeted Nugent after the hearing, adding, “Ticketmaster’s competitors CANNOT survive this.”
“FULL CONTROL for Ticketmaster = BAD for artists & fans,” he continued.
Nugent is right. Allow me to explain exactly what’s going on below.
Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, has been trying to impose price controls on ticket sales to line its own pockets — and thankfully Congress and one of conservatives’ favorite rock legends have finally called them out.
Let’s zoom out for a moment. Prices for concert tickets in North America have been surging in recent years, with the average ticket costing $136 in 2024, up from $96 in 2019. Tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour ran customers a whopping $1,088 on average.
Ticketmaster accounts for 70 to 80 percent of the concert tickets sold in North America, according to its own internal numbers. Yet Ticketmaster also seems to think it’s just as much a victim of these soaring prices as the music fans getting gouged.
The real culprit in the ticket market, according to Live Nation, is “the massive escalation in ‘ticket harvesting’ technologies used by industrial-scale brokers.” By this, Live Nation primarily means online bots that rapidly gobble up tickets once they go on sale, allowing other parties to resell those tickets at marked-up prices.
There’s no question that Ticketmaster has a bot problem. But that doesn’t mean Ticketmaster is a trustworthy voice on public policy. The company’s solution to its problem has been to demand a cap of 20 percent on all ticket resale prices.
Which brings us back to Nugent’s tweet. The fact is that Ticketmaster is calling for price controls because they know it will be bad for their competitors and good for their bottom line.
Although Ticketmaster sells tickets, the lion’s share of its earnings actually comes from other sources. According to financial economist Danielle Zanzalari, writing in Barron’s, “Some 85% of its revenue comes from concerts, sponsorships, venue operations, and other lines of business.”
So while everyone who resells tickets will take a hit from a 20 percent price cap, Ticketmaster has a variety of other revenue flows to make up for the losses. Its competitors, which tend to be smaller and more ticket-centric, won’t be so fortunate.
What’s marginally damaging to Ticketmaster in the short term will likely bring a boom in the long term. With its competitors flailing or even going out of business, more and more of their customers will have no choice but to flock to Ticketmaster.
It’s a truism of economics: whenever the government imposes price controls, competition and ultimately consumer choice declines. We learned this in the 1970s; we may yet learn it again today if Ticketmaster gets its way.
Thankfully, at the hearing, Congress demonstrated its awareness that Ticketmaster is no friend to the free marketplace or consumers.
Remember those online bots Ticketmaster is so concerned about? Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn brandished an internal email in which a Ticketmaster executive said they “turn a blind eye as a matter of policy” to bot purchases of tickets.
Live Nation executive Dan Wall claimed that the email was “taken very much out of context,” but Blackburn noted this wasn’t true and later observed, “I think that Mr. Wall did not do Ticketmaster/Live Nation any favors yesterday.”
More comes from the Federal Trade Commission, which is suing Ticketmaster and reports that “in private, Ticketmaster acknowledged that its business model and bottom line benefit from brokers preventing ordinary Americans from purchasing tickets to the shows they want to see at the prices artists set.”
So while Ticketmaster is right that bots are distorting the ticket market, if one is to believe the FTC, the company is colluding with those same bots to drive up prices—and then leveraging those higher prices to demand price controls that would kneecap their competition.
It’s a classic corporate scheme.
The fact that Live Nation has endorsed price controls should interest Kid Rock. While he endorsed the public policy idea, he is no friend to the company, having spent his entire five-minute congressional testimony lambasting it for being exploitative. I’m sure that if he knew price controls were the monopoly’s hand-picked “solution” to the ticketing problem and that they would benefit Ticketmaster’s bottom line, he would quickly rescind his support.
The good news is that many members of Congress have already wised up to Ticketmaster’s deck-rigging. Hopefully, they ultimately say no to price controls and make sure Ticketmaster gets held accountable.
That would without question be the right chord to strike.
Tron Simpson is the Morning Host on Legends Radio 95.3 FM & 810 AM in Denver. He is also the founder and lead singer of TRON THE BAND.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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