ADMISSION CONTROL

From grassroots gigs to stadium shows, there's no escaping Ticketmaster, the industry giant that has made billions from pushing up prices and whacking on fees). Whois really to blame for the great rock'n'roll ripoff? By Dorian Lynskey

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It will take more than an executive order to resolve the ticketing industry's most intractable problems. Scalpers, anyway, are an easy target with few friends. The fact is that, with or without them, top-flight concert tickets have never been harder to acquire or afford. As customer experiences go, it's the pits.

You may know the drill. You get online at 10am, several months before the show, and receive a place in the virtual queue. Perhaps you notice with dismay that your number is larger than the capacity of the venue. Perhaps you then lose your place because you've been misidentified as a bot, or the site crashes altogether. If you make it to the front, you may well wonder why £100 ($133), plus about £20 in opaque surcharges, now qualifies as a cheap seat. And that's if there are any cheap seats left, not just inflated VIP packages.

And you may ask yourself why it has to be like this.

When you don't get what you want, you tend to look for someone to blame. That someone is usually Ticketmaster. The company, which merged with concert promoters Live Nation in 2010 to form Live Nation Entertainment, sells about 70% of all concert tickets worldwide, and an even greater proportion of the arena and stadium market. In 2024, Live Nation generated a record $23.2bn in revenue, with Ticketmaster selling 637m tickets. Rivals such as See Tickets (owned by Germany's CTS Eventim) and AXS (the ticketing arm of promoters AEG Presents) aren't exactly minnows but Ticketmaster has become a synonym for ticketing: a lightning rod and a punchbag.