Live Nation’s CEO thinks concert tickets are “underpriced”

Some people think CEOs are too tall

Some think they breathe too much oxygen

Of course he does, it's Capitalism, which will always incentivize firms to get as many people as possible, to pay as much as possible, for as little as possible.

I'm so glad I feel no need to actually go to concerts.

I've been to 2 since 2017 or 2018. Rammstein for the show they put on (was a lot of fun and this was before the allegations; wouldn't go see them now) and then there's an Estonian hip hop band that got back together for a reunion tour, a decade after they were last active. So I went to see them, as their shit was actually good.
Now that I got those done, I doubt I'll be going to another concert or festival anytime soon. There's only a few artists I'd want to go see live and the biggest one is notorious for NOT doing world tours and another one already did my country this summer when I couldn't attend.
Key part is I only want to see artists live whose shows are special, or childhood favorites that are still active.
Me too. I haven't been to a show in 10-ish years. Don't miss it at all.

If y'all keep paying them, they'll assume you can pay more. Every big business takes a such as possible from you.

I go to a lot of live music shows but I haven’t purchased a TicketMaster or Live Nation ticket in forever. I don’t see huge bands because they are prohibitively expensive but I get to see a lot of really fun shows and experience a far more engaged crowd.
- You're doing it right. The way to deal with overpriced concerts and scalpers is to vote with your wallet. Don't buy overpriced tickets. Don't buy from scalpers. Nobody needs to go see a particular artist at a particular concert, I don't care how much you "love" them, or that you might never see them on tour again, you don't NEED that. Let it go. Let go of the FOMO. Step one of defeating scalpers is to remove their market. If they cannot make money, they will not exist.
- Honestly smaller local shows are so much better anyway. I’d go see some local band at the dive down the street over a stadium show any day.
Ah, yes, the ole "it's the customers fault they're getting screwed."
Why do I have to think about market forces and corporate politics just to buy a fucking concert ticket? Can't we just have a well regulated market that doesn't constantly treat customers like a resource to be mined?
- No, we can't. Both are captured by cruel and selfish people who will keep taking until something breaks and they got to where they are because people kept voting for them on the ballot and in the store instead of supporting the people who aren't trying to economically rape us into the grave.
- Why do I have to think about market forces and corporate politics just to buy a fucking concert ticket? Can’t we just have a well regulated market that doesn’t constantly treat customers like a resource to be mined?
  Because the democrats keep voting against progressives, leaving us with republicans.
  In short, it's the culture we want because most us support the miners.
- Can’t we just have a well regulated market that doesn’t constantly treat customers like a resource to be mined?
  Of course we can in theory, but the capitalists will call it socialism. And then people will say we don't want that. So we go right back to free market capitalism.
- I get this argument for something people actually need but going to a Taylor Swift concert is the very definition of a luxury.
- Not with Democrats or Republicans in power

This timeline is weird

Thieves are just there out on the open bragging how they steal, and then just taunt people with saying that they'll come back and steal some more

Yet he doesn't get jailed?

I appreciate what you're saying, but nobody is forcing anyone to buy tickets.
Stop going to arena shows! That's it! It's not even that hard, support small(er) local venues. If you have to miss massive band/artist, que sera. If the band doesn't give a shit, then it's not worth it anyway.
- Do you live outside of the United States or something? Or just not go to concerts? Live Nation owns almost all of the small venues too. They've bought nearly everything out, and the few remaining independent venues are on life support. And if you're a local band, good luck. 20 years ago, venues would pay you to play. But now you have to pay them like $200 just for the privilege of playing at a small venue with a 350 person capacity. In my city less than 20 years ago, I remember being able to walk downtown in the music district on any day of the week, and there would be over a dozen venues right next to each other all playing something different. It could be a Tuesday night. Music was everywhere, and tickets were $6-20. But there was also tons of free stuff. But after the venues all got bought out, that all stopped. There's not enough big money in music 7 days every week. A lot of venues now only have shows as little as twice a month. And then they'll want to charge $70+.
  Why shouldn't we be outraged? Music culture is being destroyed. Your "stop going to shows" solution isn't a solution. Nobody is going to concerts several times in a week anymore. What there once was has been destroyed. Live Nation needs to die.
- Right, but don't blame the victims. Consumer choice cannot bust monopolies. It does not work that way.
- Fuck that attitude, its wrong, they're a bunch of greedy fucks that are extortioning fans
  This goes for grand arena concerts but also for concerts in smaller venues. Seeing your favorite band, any band, big or small, is already unaffordable for me, and I'm considered fucking upper middle class. Going to a concert of a small band that is even remotely known in a small theater costs 100-200 dollars minimum through any of these fucksites like ticket master which is just insane.

Ffs man, the prices are out of control for concerts. Live Nation needs to have their monopoly broken up.

This for sure. Once they consolidated everything, they raised the ticket fees and the venue fees for artists. They charge more and most artists makes less. Live Nation is a textbook example of a monopoly fucking over the consumer.

Too many concerts are not about the music anymore, too many events are becoming overinflated. And thus overpriced.

I watched parts of a Katy Perry show on TV lately: with every song came different costumes, lights, fire and explosion effects, acrobats, lasers, smoke, vehicles, waterfalls, bubbles, confetti, inflatables, whatnot onto the stage... It was a total mess and utterly exaggerated.

Are people really all so numb that they need these extreme overstimulations to feel something?

Meanwhile the local band is performing for 50 bucks and a couple of free drinks
Depends on the band. Popular trendy groups are going to have a lot of gee-whiz effects. I’ve probably been to a dozen shows over the last few years and seen zero fireworks, and the only costume change was a singer taking off a jacket after getting too hot on stage.
With pop music, maybe. They arent written to be appealing in and of themselves. Pop music is a pretty strict style and structure with the same bass line and same few chords. Then they are played on the radio ad nauseum, so that when it's first released you become familiar with the song enough to like it. As a batch of pop songs start to become old, another batch is released with similar style and structure. There's hardly anything new.
In order to keep people excited about a pop song that went through that life cycle 10+ years ago, there needs to be more. Don't forget that there are quite a few pop performers who rely on auto tune because they can't sing in tune, so they are just lip-syncing on stage. I'm sure some of the spectacle is also to keep the performers going and energetic during performances of the same pop crap they've toured with for more than a decade.
- This uh, is untrue.
  There are pop acts that have very complicated music, and there are ones that don't.
  Just like with rock music or even rap music.
- Auto tune is not a magical bullet that fixes being unable to sing. It can only correct tune.
- Every music genre today has representatives who are subject to the maximization of capitalist exploitation. Not just pop music, even if this may be the pinnacle. Even so-called subversive music styles like punk or black metal are not left out in this development.
  Of course you can still always find concerts in small venues and subcultures. My point is: when executives in the music industry claim that many events are far too cheap, it just means that their offers are already far too inflated and they still can't get enough.

Aren’t Live Nation the Astroworld guys? Yeaaahh not gonna give those guys any credence whatsoever

Not just Astroworld, they do most concerts in the US and a bunch outside of it.
Live Nation has been linked to at least 200 deaths and 750 injuries at its events in seven countries since 2006. From 2016 to 2019, they had also been cited for at least ten OSHA violations, fined for several more serious incidents, and sued civilly at least once for a concert incident.

So, I think we, as a seaciety, need to start waluigiing ceos.
If to Luigi someone is to kill them, then to waluigi someone must mean that we create someone. As life is the opposite of death, so too is waluigi the opposite of Luigi.
Therefore, it is time we start impregnating the wives of CEOs.

I mean from an economics standpoint if people are willing to pay higher prices on tickets being resold then they are underpriced. The price people are willing to pay is the "true" value of the thing. Personally I think concerts are too expensive even at list prices but artists are consistently selling out venues at these prices and even higher because people are paying more for tickets on secondary markets. Obviously there are people for whom seeing Taylor Swift is actually worth over a thousand dollars, and to be honest, if that's how much it is worth to them there's not much you can do to stop them from going, and I'm not sure I even want to. I might go see Taylor Swift for $40 a ticket just for the experience but is that really worth denying it to some super fan willing to pay 10x that? I won't get nearly as much from the experience as they will, and it's obviously not worth it to me.

Your economics argument assumes competition where there is none. Alas, it is unsound.
- I am not assuming competition. The fact of the matter is that people are paying these prices for tickets regardless of who is selling them. Nobody needs to go see Taylor Swift to live (in spite of how some people feel) and yet they are still shelling out for these absurd markups on resale tickets. That's what I am saying here. People are willing to pay what these tickets are being sold for, so that is their value.

It's 2025 and people can't boycott a company that over sells tickets, saying "I can't miss Taylor Swift".

Underpriced for who? 😑

Personally I rarely go to concerts any more, part of that is life circumstances part of it is I just can't justify the prices.
The thing is he's probably right, people are buying the tickets, people are scalping tickets and making a profit, therefore there are people willing to pay more than face for the tickets, on that basis he's right.
Doesn't make it fair, doesn't make it morally right, doesn't make it healthy for the industry.

Well I think he's stealing too much of our oxygen & should be stopped.

Well I think live nations CEO could use a bullet in a non non vital area to make him rethink his position

Millionaire willing to pay higher prices for luxuries because they aren’t worried about money. How shocking.

The CEOs pay requires that belief of them, and so they are not free. They are in fact, yet another entrapped enemy of humanity, enmeshed as gears in a system.

When they stop making bread and games available, the jig is almost up.

I agree.

Charge concertgoers as much as they're willing to pay.

From a purely economics standpoint, when scalpers are able to sell at a higher price, yes they are underpriced.

But doing so limits access to cultural events to only those that can afford them.

"Cultural" like the bacterial culture between my toes, maybe.
Not true. Economic models typically assume competition exists. This is a monopoly, so the models don't actually work here.

This, of course, does not factor in the problem of scalpers and the hugely increased fees charged on the secondary market.

Well, if tickets for a given band are being scalped, then it's a good sign that they're probably initially selling below market rate.

No, it's a sign of an improperly regulated market.
- People won't scalp what won't sell.
  You're right that scalping is an issue that could be addressed. But if people are going to pay the high prices, then most bands/venues will charge those prices.
- tbh how do you regulate the ticket market to demotivate scalpers?
- If the tickets were auctioned, they would basically be sold at market value. You submit the highest price you are willing to pay for the section you want, and the system eliminates the lowest bids until you get to the set of people that bid higher that match the number of seats. Those people get the seats at $1 higher than the highest bid eliminated.
I think that would depend on how you define both the words market and rate.
Simply because some people are buying tickets that were scalped and sold at higher prices, doesn't mean that the scalp price is the true rate.
When you raise prices you actually change your market demographic. The more affluent you require your demographic to be, the less available customers you will have.
If tickets are bought even entirely by scalpers, then live nation is still selling every ticket they have and should therefore be able to profit. If they raise prices, there will still be scalpers but now they have more risk that there's less buyers.
Honestly though, everyone is probably better off saving money and watching local performances and giving money directly to the venue and bands.
The last time I went to a large event that was well priced, it was an insane amount of sweaty people rubbing against me for about 6 hours, most of that was spent waiting, and I got the flu afterwards. It really turned me off to large venues.
Always have been. We had a system where bands didn't make as much as they humanly could because it was generally accepted that the art of live music wasn't made just for the enjoyment of the highest bidders in society. And this is still largely true from most artists' perspective. But they aren't the one setting the prices anymore and profit maximizing, when playing in most medium-to-large venues in NA.