On Thursday, Live Nation and its ticket broker subsidiary Ticketmaster announced a bold pledge. The company would be transparent with its captive consumers about how much it will extract from them for live entertainment. Ticketmaster’s junk fees would be exactly the same, but buyers would learn about them before checkout, instead of after.

The White House took a victory lap.

…

“I like to compare [the all-in pricing pledge] to sticker shock at the start of the checkout process versus the end, with no actual difference in the overall experience,” said Krista Brown, senior policy analyst at the American Economic Liberties Project.

AELP along with the Break Up Ticketmaster coalition blasted the announcement for failing to address the core issue with the platform: its monopoly power. One benefit supporters of all-in pricing claim is the ability to comparison shop on an apples-to-apples basis. But transparency in fees alone won’t fix rampant price-gouging, if for most live music shows there’s only one platform to purchase tickets from. That eliminates the comparison-shopping advantage.

At the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this year, Live Nation’s CEO refused to say how many venues the platform holds under contract, but claimed that there was plenty of competition. A new report from AELP rebuts that, revealing the extent to which Live Nation has rolled up the live concert business into its orbit and crushed competitors. The report gathers data on ticket sales and other information from the top 300 concert amphitheaters and arenas, totaling around half of all concert revenues from 2022. The findings show that Ticketmaster dominates contracts for ticketing and other services for each venue category. Live Nation controls operations for 64 percent of the top-grossing U.S. amphitheaters, 77 percent of ticketing services, and nearly 80 percent of ticketing for arenas. No other competitor serves more than a small handful.

“This analysis leaves no room for doubt: Live Nation-Ticketmaster maintains monopoly control over concert venues,” said Brown in a press release.

###