Ticketmaster and Live Nation have destroyed the concert experience. But it didn’t use to be this way. Today, Oasis and Taylor Swift tickets might go for thousands of dollars, but back in 1955, you could see Elvis Presley in concert for less than the modern-day equivalent of $20.

  • @Oxymoron
    -21•9 days ago

    From what I understand though, this is actually more about people not purchasing albums anymore, so now artists have to basically make the bulk of their money from concerts.

    Ticketmaster doesn’t force dynamic pricing for instance; that’s a choice the artist has made in order to maximise their profit from the ticket sales.

    I don’t know if the tickets need to be quite as expensive as they are, for artists to make a profit - likely not. But they certainly are making a lot less money from the likes of Spotify than they used to make from albums sales, so it has to be a big part of the problem.

    People like Oasis take the piss to be honest, because I doubt they’ve actually run out of money (according to this YouTube channel that was talking about them, they seem to think the brothers both still have plenty of 90s money, I dunno how you check this stuff… but yeah. Makes sense that they shouldn’t have spent it all unless they were really fucking stupid with their investments or lack thereof). So they really don’t need to be making this much money from the ticket sales, but for newer bands the Spotify thing should apply.

    • @[email protected]
      20•9 days ago

      I thought that most artists never made much from record sales, it was always live performances. The label gets record sales.

      • @NotMyOldRedditName
        4•9 days ago

        AFAIK merch is often bigger than concerts for the non big names. Local bars etc

      • @Oxymoron
        1•9 days ago

        Well they definitely made significantly more than they do from Spotify cos Spotify is so cheap for the end user that they can’t possibly be paying the bands much of anything at all.

        Of course the record companies would take a negotiated slice which I should imagine would be larger for the first album but probably the band can negotiate better terms for the second album if the first is popular. They wouldn’t agree to a contract for a stupidly low amount at least not for consecutive albums when they gain popularity and therefore bargaining power.

        But even 100% of Spotify proceeds is shitty. 100% of fuck all is still fuck all as they say. Physical albums always made a much larger “pie” to start with. So everyone’s share is much more generous.

        I’m talking like the I know the music industry and shit lol but I’m just making most of this up or repeating it from other people’s comments I’ve seen before about how it works but I’m pretty sure this is more or less accurate.

    • @ForgotAboutDre
      5•9 days ago

      They charge as much as they can and have for a long time. They would still do it if they made lots of money from albums and streams.

      What’s changed is the secondary market is controlled by the primary ticket sellers and they have better awareness of how much they can charge. People expectation of ticket prices has slowly changed and the prices always push at that.

      Dynamic pricing exists now because it’s easier to implement. Not because the artists don’t have enough money.