Paula Mejia on the Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly ruling, and on how ticketing platforms affect seeing star acts like Oasis, Taylor Swift, or Justin Bieber.
Emotional whiplash is a feature, not a bug, of the modern ticket-buying experience. In recent years, purchasing concert, theatre, and sporting-event tickets has morphed into a byzantine humiliation ritual, with opaque fees—“service,” “order processing”—often tacking on up to twenty per cent more to base ticket prices.
As the cost of living and inflation have surged, these types of live events have increasingly become playgrounds for élite V.I.P. experiences, with ordinary people shelling out the equivalent of a rent payment to catch a glimpse of their favorite artist. Exasperated fans have long directed their ire at the ticketing platforms themselves, particularly Ticketmaster and Live Nation, two live-entertainment-industry behemoths that merged in 2010, when Live Nation, a concert promoter, artist manager, and venue owner bought the ticket-sales site Ticketmaster. The corporation’s management arm represents hundreds of artists, including some of the biggest stars on earth, and offers musicians incentives which include performing at the venues it owns. Reports indicate that it also commands exclusive contracts at fifty-three out of sixty-eight of the largest arenas in the U.S., which, in 2022, raked in eighty-three per cent of gross revenue across all arenas in the country . Every road, it seems, leads back to Live Nation-Ticketmaster. Last Wednesday, the jury in a federal antitrust case found that Live Nation and Ticketmaster had operated as a monopoly, a decision that vindicated long-suffering ticket buyers. “I can’t wait for the judge to get hit with a $45 ‘Verdict Convenience Fee,’ a $30 ‘Gavel Processing Fee,’ and an $80 ‘Digital Print-at-Home Ruling Surcharge,” a Reddit user cracked. But the verdict also confirmed something that fans were already intimately acquainted with: dysfunctional ticketing systems exploiting their passion. Therein lies the paradox: these maddeningly bureaucratic platforms have tapped into a business so lucrative—the creation of high-profile communal rites—that it literally has no bottom. Surprisingly, even as consumers are made to jump through more and more hoops by ticketing platforms, they appear willing to further open up their wallets. The sadism of this dynamic surfaced during a shocking moment in trial proceedings last month, when attorneys presented exchanges between Live Nation employees: ticketing workers boasted about how live-entertainment fans were “so stupid” to pay the astronomical fees that the corporation had set for events. “Robbing them blind baby,” one wrote in an internal Slack message. “That’s how we do.” Last year, Live Nation raked in $25.2 billion in total revenue—as much as a nine-per-cent jump from 2024. In 2010, during one of the heavyweight speeches that the SXSW music conference, in Austin, Texas, often presents as part of the festival, Christine A. Varney, the former Assistant Attorney General for the D.O.J.’s antitrust division, stressed that the government had rigorously investigated the Ticketmaster-Live Nation deal before green-lighting it. “I understand that people view Ticketmaster’s charges, and perhaps all ticketing fees in general, as unfair, too high, inescapable, and confusing,” she said. “I also understand that consolidation has been going on in the industry for some time, and the resultant economic pressures facing local management companies and promoters. Those are meaningful concerns, but many of them are not antitrust concerns. If they come from a lack of effective competition, then we hope to treat them as symptoms as we seek to cure the underlying disease.” Gallagher’s profane monologue went viral on account of its absurdity—four people on payroll to brew a single cup of tea? But the rocker’s screed contained a truth, one that has substantially shaped the contemporary ticket-buying panopticon. After listeners drifted away from buying physical releases such as CDs and vinyl, starting in the two-thousands, touring has become a critical means for artists to earn their incomes. A sobering Citi report noted that in 2017, the same year that Gallagher raged about his tea, the music industry generated forty-three billion dollars in revenue, of which artists saw only twelve per cent, mostly from touring. Citing a Billboard report, Business Insider noted that U2, the most handsomely paid group that year, saw about ninety-five per cent of their income come from touring in 2017. Present-day streaming giants such as Spotify pay cents per stream—a pro-rata system that overwhelmingly benefits the artists raking in the highest number of total listens. The rise of streaming has compounded the importance of touring for artists—if groups can afford to tour at all. The iridescent glare of social media has further turbocharged the concert industry’s dominance. In general, fans posting online, in 2026, has become a smorgasbord of aspirational boasting, in a turn away from a more modest form of life-style exhibitionism once derided as “humblebragging.” And the ubiquity of posts that take viewers on experiential journeys—such as “come with me” videos popularized by influencers on TikTok—has accelerated the feeling that one doesn’t exist in the world, digitally speaking, if one isn’t physically present at Justin Bieber’s Coachella set and documenting it on one’s phone. We are living in a post-COVID culture, and since the world began reopening for mass gatherings in 2021, fans’ desire to partake in experience-driven travel has fuelled the demand for live events. In turn, the live-music industry has rocketed to revenues greater than anyone had imagined. Suddenly, Ticketmaster prompted me to enter my credit-card information. I had less than five minutes to choose the Oasis gig in Cardiff or Edinburgh. Considering the Gallagher brothers’ infamous history of holding grudges, I wasn’t entirely optimistic that the band would be able to stay together through Edinburgh, but they could probably keep it together for the début. Cardiff it was. Five hundred and thirty-four dollars later, four tickets for the inaugural show at Principality Stadium landed in my inbox. I dashed off a text to my brother, a fellow Oasis head, that I’d secured us and our partners four tickets to see them in a year’s time: “We’re going to the first gig lads!!!!!!” I had bested truly dubious statistics: fourteen million people worldwide had tried to snag tickets for this tour. This outsized interest in Oasis had prompted Ticketmaster to employ “dynamic pricing,” which increases fees commensurate to real-time demand. I was struck by a variable response to gouging: dynamic pricing had sparked a far bigger outcry abroad than in the U.S. If anything, other Americans I spoke with seemed pleasantly surprised with the cost of Oasis tickets across the pond versus what they’d pay closer to home, not unlike Swifties travelling for the European leg of the Eras Tour for a fraction of the price. Navigating extortionate ticketing systems in the name of experience has, apparently, become routine. Other artists, including Bruce Springsteen, have tussled with the concert leviathan. In 2010, Ticketmaster settled a Federal Trade Commission complaint alleging that the platform had used “deceptive bait-and-switch tactics” to drive Springsteen fans away from Ticketmaster’s face-value offerings and instead to its resale site, TicketsNow, which sold tickets at up to four times the original price. In 2022, several Swifties filed lawsuits against Live Nation, including one alleging that the company had allowed bots to crowd the general ticket sale for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, thus prohibiting fans from buying face-value tickets. The U.S. government then opened an investigation into the Swift ticket disaster, efforts which, in part, set the stage for the present-day antitrust trial. Thirty-nine states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government joined a lawsuit claiming that Live Nation had elbowed out practically all its competitors and stuck consumers with higher fees, going on to command eighty-six per cent of the total market for live entertainment. Live Nation disputed these charges, but conditionally settled with the D.O.J. in March, agreeing to pull back on service fees and pay a fine of two hundred and eighty million dollars. But the states decided to move forward with the trial, thus resulting in last week’s verdict. Music-industry advocates and the public reacted with elation. “This is incredible legitimacy added to what I think a lot of people have thought are just a bunch of hippies and hipsters shouting about the corporation for the past year,” Scott Mohler, the executive director of the Maine Music Alliance, said in an interview with NPR. What comes next is murkier. Assuming the verdict stands, the parent company will likely have to pay damages, and perhaps divest from exclusive ticketing contracts at various venues. Yet the states’ ultimate goal—to dissolve Live Nation and Ticketmaster altogether—feels like a steep ask in a regulatory climate that’s historically friendly to such giants. The company has said that it intends to contest the decision. The pending March settlement, which would also involve the company divesting from up to thirteen U.S. amphitheatres, was described by Stephen Parker, the executive director of the National Independent Venue Association, in an interview with Rolling Stone, as not “even significant enough to call it a slap on the wrist.” Moreover, it seems doubtful that the resolution will meaningfully bring down ticket prices, at least in the short term. Nothing about touring is becoming less expensive, and numerous past victories have not led to long-standing structural reform. In late March, the Guardian reported that, after a December, 2024, crackdown from the Federal Trade Commission stipulating more transparency behind unexpected “junk fees,” tacked onto hotel and live-event ticket charges—like Live Nation’s processing fees—Live Nation instead adjusted other fees to “offset the revenue loss,” according to a 2025 e-mail that Ticketmaster sent to an arena in Arizona. Yet scores of working- and middle-class people, perhaps spreading out payments across various credit cards and “buy now, pay later” services, continue to buy tickets. For my part, I saved for nearly a year to travel abroad for the Oasis show. The more responsible move would have been to go down to the record store and pick up, say, Oasis’s LP “ Morning Glory,” going for a small percentage of what I paid for a ticket. Then again, I wasn’t thinking of that in Wales, my voice cracking as I howled along with thousands of other fans to the rapturous anthem “Supersonic”: “I’m feeling supersonic, give me gin-and-tonic / You can have it all, but how much do you want it?” ♦
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