September 3, 2024 • 45 mins
Ticketmaster was founded in 1976, and since that time it's grown to be one of the most powerful forces in the industry -- whether you've gone to symphonies, concerts or plays, odds are you've run into Ticketmaster while trying to get your seats for the show. Yet numerous people allege that this company wields enormous, dangerous influence over artist, venues and fans alike. Tune in to learn more about the rise of Ticketmaster.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome, conspiracy realist. We are talking about something that has
become a bit of a hobby horse for us at
this point. Not too long ago, Nol and Matt Ny
were going to get tickets to go see a concert
together and we ran into the fees. Oh god, the fees.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
The fees.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Yeah, this isn't an aldly bit of goody.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
That is painfully relevant still to this day.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
I mean it's we're approaching an absolute monopoly with Live
Nation and Ticketmasters.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
They are kind of like the people selling the tickets
being the same people that on the venues. It's not great.
Let's jump right in and see how much more expensive
it's gotten since even May twenty nineteen.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Greetings, Welcome back to the show.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
My name is Matt and our pal Noel is on
some adventures, but we'll return in the future. They called
me Ben. We are joined as always with our super
producer Paul Mission Control decad. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here that makes this stuff. They don't want
you to know. Welcome to the show. You did not
have to buy tickets.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
That's right. You did have to buy a phone or
a computer or something that has a microphone and a
processor and at least headphone outputs or some kind of speaker.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Let's call those associated fees. Yeah, so the show is free.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
It takes some doing to get it in you.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
To get it in your ear, right, Yeah. All the
other paraphernalia is not include. I mean, sure, this is
a show. This is a recorded show, right, we do
a call in line. We've taken the show on the
road and probably will do again and then near to
mid future. But nothing, nothing quite beats the experience right off.
(02:17):
You're in your favorite music or your favorite performance whatever
it is live right, Like, what are some of the
memorable concerts you've been to?
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Man, I haven't really been to many, but Dave Matthews
back in the day, oh boy, and some of that
DMB baby, Oh it was the best. And you know
what tickets were always like, Okay, they were not insane
(02:46):
back in the early two thousands doing some old DMB though,
you know, you get to you know, that's a fairly
large act right. Then you get to newer shows nowadays,
and you're going to a much smaller venue with a
much smaller band, And I'm paying more now to see
those bands than I did to pay a big ticket
(03:07):
band when I was, you know, coming out of high
school in college.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
So like you would go see Dave Matthews band in
a stadium or something, yeah, something that large, and you
would get maybe some reasonable tickets on the lawn or whatever.
Thirty bucks okay, max thirty bucks with everything.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Yeah, just to get into Lakewood Amphitheater, which not called
that anymore, but who cares. And also, you know, inflation.
Obviously everyone is saying inflation, matt but inflation, but that's
not all.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Let's call it feflation. Okay, maybe okay, asides from sounding
very doctor Susian, that that is a word that could
work for today's episode, because you know what bothers me
about buying tickets probably the same thing that bothers everyone
they buy tickets nowadays. When you buy its ticket for something,
you're overwhelmingly going to do it online or else. You're
(04:05):
going to show up at a show the day of,
you know.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
And it's probably sold out if it's worth anything.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Perhaps, Yeah, yeah, And it's really it's relatively rare for
someone to be walking down the street see tickets for
a show like next week or that weekend, and then
say I'm going to walk in and buy those now
in person. People don't do that near as often, so
most of the time we buy tickets online. And here
(04:33):
in the United States, there's been one game in town
for quite a while, and this game continues in other
countries as well. A master, if you will, of tickets. Oh,
some sort of ticket master. Yes, Wowly, it took a
while to get to that one, but it's true. Right,
(04:54):
since about the late nineteen seventies, it's become increasingly difficult
to get tickets to live events Broadway plays, Symphonies, the DMB.
It's difficult to get these tickets without running somehow into
ticket Master, even if you don't know that you're running
into Ticketmaster. So what exactly is this thing? It's been
(05:17):
here for the three of us, for you, mission control
of myself, for our entire lives.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Yeah, and beyond and before. Yeah. So let's go back
to Phoenix, Arizona, nineteen seventy six. A couple of gentlemen
we got Albert Leffler, Peter Godwa, and another man, a
businessman named Gordon Gunn. What a great name. Yeah, seriously,
Gordon Gunn. So Leffler. He comes up with this name,
(05:45):
this idea for a thing, and he calls it ticket Master,
And it's this new company that's just going to control
tickets and for these guys when they founded in nineteen
seventy six, really all they're trying to do in the
beginning is sells tickets to an Electric Light Orchestra concert
at the University of New Mexico. That's the first big thing.
(06:07):
And electric Light Orchestra is something that my dad told
me about, actually that he really enjoyed. Look it up,
Google it. If you don't know it, Spotify it. I'm
sure you can find it.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Mister Blue Sky is a great song.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
It really is. It really is. But anyway, so this
one little thing in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
I'm so sorry to interrupt that to say, yeah, Turned
to Stone is also a great song. Oh, in my mind,
it's one that I've had stuck in my head. Awesome
a Blue Sky Turned to Stone. It's the seventies, it's Albuquerque.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Out of college. Awesome, good times rolling right, let the
good times roll. And so then they figure out, hey,
this is working. We're just you know, control a hub.
We're controlling the tickets to one thing. We're good at this,
Let's keep doing it. So they keep doing it for
a few years. Then by nineteen seventy eight they have
(07:02):
their first international clients coming in from Norway, Oslo, Norway,
and that same year they signed their first major venue,
this place called the Louisiana super Dome, along with their
first Major League team, the New Orleans Jazz, which is
now the Utah Jazz, but in the city of New
Orleans it was the Jazz. So they actually have the
(07:22):
NBA as one of their major clients, one team on
the NBA. But still, that's huge for just a couple
of guys starting with a startup, right.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Yeah, And it happens so quickly. It's just a few years.
When Leffler and Godwa originally thought of the company, they
were going to be licensing software for tickets, really, and
they've gone from that to being the ticket provider for stadiums,
(07:53):
which sounds kind of like maybe a boring business, right,
it's not, as you know, endlessly fascinating as being a
professional skydiver or maybe a podcast or something like that,
you know, an underwater tattoo artist. But still, what we
(08:15):
have to realize is they get a cut of every
ticket sold, and when you get to something as large
as a superdome, that's a lot of money in like
in one night, yeap. Other people knew about the game.
There were other things that existed at this time before
ticket Master. There was a business called ticket Tron, like
(08:38):
ticket and then the movie Tron.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
And that's nineteen sixties. So it's difficult to It's hard
for me to imagine computerized ticket sales being organized enough
with software, with computers that are powerful enough to like
do it in any large scale. But it was happening.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Yeah, yeah, it wasn't. It wasn't necessarily happening on the
customer end, but you would make a phone call to
ticket Tron and they would have this database.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
Right, So can I selly fun fact about ticket Tron? Yeah?
They were purchased by a thing called the Lovecraft Investment
Group in nineteen ninety.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
What's the Lovecraft Investment Group?
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Man? All I know is is Lovecraft. There's a Lovecraft involved,
That's all I know.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Oh boy, let's see it's true.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
The Hewlett Packard Lovecraft.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
I don't know what the I don't know what the
Lovecraft investment. This may be fodder for another podcast. Here's
the thing. As you said, there were other there were
other similar creatures around in this market, right, other places
that wanted to be the ticket provider, in the middleman
(09:53):
for that. But like a hungry invading species, Ticketmaster consumed
and digested the these competitors. In nineteen eighty one, it
opened its first overseas operation. In nineteen eighty two, they
got a new CEO, a guy named Fred Rosen. Rosen
told the La Times back in eighty five that his
(10:14):
competitors were asleep at the switch. He said, he was
an aggressive businessman. I'm proud of it, got this American
psycho vibe going on, right. He was so good at
dominating the ticket industry that it became the only game
in town. And other people, other artists, primarily not just
(10:34):
wound up consumers. Other artists started to take issue with it.
Pearl Jam launched a campaign in nineteen ninety four that
they called a strong language for some people ticket bastard,
because you see, pearl Jam was hearing from their fans
that they literally couldn't afford tickets to a show, or
that they were getting saddled with these egregious hidden fees,
(10:59):
and so they said, well, look man, we want to
make a living, but we want our fans to see
our music. We don't want to milk them for every
penny they're worth, Like what are we kiss? You know
what I mean. They don't want to do that. They
want to be human, they want to stay human. So
they wanted to offer summer tour tickets to fans for
under twenty bucks. And they asked ticket Master, you know, hey, guys,
(11:24):
can you just not charge another twenty bucks and fees?
Can you actually like keep the fees around two dollars
or whatever that your cost of doing businesses? And they
said no, no, you're Pearl.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Jam and we are ticket Master. Yeah. So yeah, but
it's crazy to think about because they really did say no,
and Pearl Jam just in nineteen ninety four decided, well
it's not worth it. We're not even going to go
on tour. We're canceling everything. We're not gonna like go
and play a bunch of empty stadiums where nobody can
(12:01):
show up for these exorbitant prices. They ended up going
to Congress and guess what, Pearl Jam one and everything
was okay and everyone was happy, and ticket sales went
down to twenty dollars for the rest of our lives.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Thanks so much for tuning in, folks, We hope you
enjoyed this episode.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Oh wait, nope, nope, that's not what happened. What happened
Ticketmaster won.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
Right, And there's one more sordid detail for this story.
The band. The members of the band Pearl Jam maintained
and say to this day. You can ask them today
and they'll confirm this. That private investigators were sent to
snoop around in their lives, sent by Ticketmaster and having
(12:43):
a PI sicked on you by a company very common occurrence. Unfortunately,
what they were probably trying to do. What the allegation
implies is that Ticketmaster was attempted to find something discrediting
to members of Pearl Jam, not something that had anything
(13:07):
to do with their crusade to get better ticket prices.
They wanted to be able to say, well, this person
is doing heroin and we'll put it in the news
if you guys don't straighten up intil the corporate line,
but you know again, that's a terrible example, because this
is the nineties in Seattle grunge, right, So doing Heroin
(13:30):
may unfortunately not have been the huge scandal that they
would want, but they wanted something to hold over their heads,
and eventually, probably more so, through just the sheer, ungodly
amount of money Ticketmaster has, they were able to. They
were able to, as you say, prevail. So that brings
(13:52):
us to the modern day. Nineteen ninety seven, a company
called Interactive Corp, oddly enough, not a video game company,
perch is the majority stake and Ticketmaster, and then it
bought the rest of the company. In nineteen ninety eight,
the name changed to Ticketmaster Online. Dash City search doesn't
exactly roll off the tongue, right, No, So they didn't
(14:15):
care that it didn't roll off the tongue. The company expanded, diversified,
it kept evolving its business model, increasingly, going from phones
to online sales, and this constant evolution, the way of
many businesses right unfortunately, did not go in the direction
that critics wanted it to. They didn't see cheaper tickets,
(14:37):
they didn't feel like things were more transparent. These moves
did not quell all of the critics. And today Ticketmaster
controls an estimated eighty percent of the little more than
eighty percent of the ticketing market in North America. So
they're doing something right. But let's get back to the critics.
(15:01):
What are these critics saying.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Well, they're saying that we need to take a quick
break to hear from our sponsor and then we'll find
out what Ticketmaster may or may not have been getting into.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
So it turns out that in addition to be massively successful,
Ticketmaster has been accused of numerous abuses, breaches of law,
and shady business practices. There's genuine stuff they don't want
you to know here. It's probably not gonna stop, no
compellingnimpotus to stop it. And yes, Ticketmaster has been sued
(15:42):
for conspiracy.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Oh snap, the big c All right, let's take another
time traveling trip here to two thousand and nine. Bruce Springsteen.
Oh everybody knows Old Bruce the boss. Yeah, he is
the boss. He's your boss and my boss. He publicly
calls out ticket Master in two thousand and nine for
(16:03):
a little let's say misdirection, redirection if you will, from
a website. So as fans were going and trying to
buy tickets through Ticketmaster to the Springsteen concert. They were
getting sent to this other place called ticket now dot com,
completely separate site. It looks very different. There's no you know,
(16:26):
when you're on that site, you don't understand what's happening.
You feel like a pop up maybe has occurred, or
you've gotten redirected through an ad maybe.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Or this is your last chance to get some kind
of ticket to see the Boss live.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Well, yeah, there's a certain desperation that's happening when you
are being redirected to this ticketnow dot com because guess what,
the tickets are marked up by hundreds, sometimes thousands of
dollars at ticket now versus Ticketmaster. So then all these
fan complaints are coming through because of this weird steering
(16:59):
to the place called tickets Now. A New Jersey congressman
gets a call and basically this guy says, Hey, we
need a federal anti trust investigation into whatever the heck
is going on between Ticketmaster and ticket now. What is this?
Let's figure this out.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Yeah, so here's what they find. They find that ticket Now,
in addition to having a very similar name to Ticketmaster,
is owned by Ticketmaster, and when Bruce Springsteen's fans were
going to a website to buy tickets to his show,
they were automatically redirected to ticket now, which, as he said,
(17:41):
Matt sells tickets for much higher than their face value,
and it prais on that desperation, right, that's psychological fear
that someone else will get the thing I want. So,
you know, I may not necessarily think this is a
good financial decision, but I will be gosh darned and
gollie ged if I allow somebody else to get that ticket.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
You know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
It's an artificial scarcity essentially. Bruce Springsteen found out about it,
and he was righteously indignant. He wrote a public statement
about this, because what you found out was that this
sort of second chance or reselling site ticket now was
(18:26):
something that Ticketmaster was sending the audience to when there
were still regular tickets available. So they could have gotten
that you know, thirty or forty whatever dollar ticket to
sit on the lawn in the back, yeah, and have
a great time. But instead they were going directly to
this place where it was you know, this huge markup,
(18:46):
and that markup goes to Ticketmaster man. So Ticketmaster gets
a fifteen percent cut from tickets Now, which it owns.
That's in addition to the fees that already gets as Ticketmaster,
so that that money has already spent and baked into
(19:08):
the price. So a lawsuit comes about, and essentially what
they're doing is making money off the same ticket two times. Clever,
you know, brilliant, very clever, evil, lawful evil, and so
probably because Egenstein himself took such a strong stance against it,
(19:31):
Ticketmaster issued an apology to the fans and said, we
will refund you the price difference between the face value
of the tickets and those you got from ticket Now,
which is a lot of you know, it's a lot
of scratch. But that's also that's also like being caught stealing,
you know, being caught stealing a car and then saying, ah,
(19:51):
I'm you know, I'm gonna drive it back to your house. Yeah,
and then what like, I feel bad, you.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Know, some gas money here just a little bit.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
No, they didn't, they didn't, but it's strange, right, And
this is just one of the allegations against ticket Master.
We've got that Pearl Jam example. But let's talk about
those fees, because that's where a lot of this comes
back in, right, Have you ever bought a twenty dollars
ticket only to find that it becomes more than forty
(20:24):
dollars by the time you get to the actual place
your order?
Speaker 2 (20:28):
No? Never, oh never, This is never Tabernacle.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
That's a that's a local venue here at Atlanta Tabernacle.
What kind of fees have you run.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Into literally twice as much? I mean it, Yeah, I've
seen I have seen tickets double when I buy them
for just a local venue here because of ticket Master's
weird fees to get me my ticket somehow that I
can print out already.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Yeah, there's like a two to five dollars fee for
getting a PDF. Essentially you can.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
Print somebody I'm paying some salary who's just on a
floor somewhere making calls like I need three Pearl Jam
but like, no, no, I got four radio Head.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
No.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
It's like it has to be that to justify twenty
or thirty dollars fees on top of everything else. Otherwise
I do not understand.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Yeah, you're absolutely right. There's a there's a service charge,
and that will be ticket Masters charging you for the
privilege of it giving you a ticket. Yeah, and then
there's the facility charge, which is a charge added by
the venue. So ticket Master takes its cut, and then
the Tabernacle, for example, takes its cut. And then there
(21:38):
are shipping, convenience and processing charges. So that's a charge
for you know, using your visa American Express, that's a
charge for having the tickets delivered to you via post
wow or using your own printer.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Yeah, but then who who pays Cardi B? Then is
what I'm trying to figure out, Like who what's her cut?
Everybody else has taken their cut. Who's where's Cardib's money?
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Unless you're a huge name artist, which I guess Cardi
B is. Now, the amount of money you get per
ticket can be surprisingly alarmingly small because the label will
take some money, you know what I mean, your road
crew will take some money, and all this other stuff.
Craft services eat that cheese because it's coming out of
(22:26):
your cut. Other profits. Right, But all this adds up
to an unpleasant experience for people when we're buying these tickets.
The problem is there's not really any transparency with this.
Fees between events vary even at the same venue, and
(22:46):
preferences of the artist as well. Some people will try
to buck like Radiohead or Pearl Jam. And the problem
with it is that none of this, none of this
ultimately goes into a situation where in ticket prices are lower.
None of this is meant to nor will it.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Ever create It cannot.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Yes, yes, none of this is meant to create a
situation where artists get paid more and the audience pays less.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
No, absolutely not.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
If anything, It's kind of like, you know, nobody talks
about this, but it's pretty weird that you you know,
historically can't buy a car directly from the people who
make cars.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
That is weird.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
It's weird. It's a weird thing. It's normalized. Yeah, and
you know, I'm not choosing sides on it, but that
that is something we think about. You know, you can
buy almost you can buy so many other things directly
from the people who make them direct sales.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
Vertical integration is scary though, and it can be It
can be highly it can be highly problematic.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Yeah, and it can also be dangerous for the bottom line. Right. So,
the allegation here is that Ticketmaster is sort of a
rent seeker and it's now a middle It's maybe it
needed to be in the process before everybody had a
brilliant computer on their phone. But now maybe it doesn't
(24:17):
have to be right. Maybe that kind of software is
easier to handle. We don't really know. We just know
that they are the largest game in town, and we
know that the entire operation is exceedingly opaque. We're going
to take a break for a brief word from our sponsor,
(24:39):
and then we'll come back with an investigation in Canada
that makes this even weirder.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
All right, here's where it gets crazier. This is hard
for me to understand that this is real. Okay, what
we're going to talk about from now, mostly through the
rest of this episode, we got from a CBC News
investigation that was carried out and specifically there's a journalist
(25:14):
named Dave Seglins who actually physically went undercover as a
scalper at a ticket industry convention out there in Las Vegas.
And you can watch a video of this online right now.
If you want to take a break, you can you
can search us up CBC ticket Master.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
New Yes segment l I N S.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
That's good, you'll find it. Check it out. It's pretty crazy.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Could we set some just some axiomatic beginnings here.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
Oh yeah, sure.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Okay, So so imagine your ticketmaster. You make money selling tickets. Okay,
you want people to buy tickets from you, definitely.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
Sure doesn't matter who that person is buying a ticket
from you, as long as somebody's buying a ticket from you, right.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
Right, as long as the transaction occurs. But you want
to be on the side of the people and the artists,
and you probably say hey, at least in public, you
say hey, I think scalpers are the worst and they
take advantage of people.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Yeah, because we want you to have low prices and
see all the stuff you want to see. Don't be
mad at us.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Right, So it's established then in the public mind, the
axiom is that ticket distributors, or these middle segments between
the artists and the event and the customer, that they
should not be down with scalpers Like you guys are
making it weird. You're making it worse. I don't want
(26:49):
to be in a situation where, for instance, there are oh,
what's a great what's a great event that people would
go to today, like a band or a perform it's
alien con sure, alien con. They're only yeah, it's a
one night only four hundred four hundred seat event and
it's called Alien con who knows what it is. Maybe
(27:11):
it's a mariachi band, and they Ticketmaster, one would assume,
does not care for a situation when one person goes
in and buys all four hundred or whatever of those
tickets in one block and then turns around and sells
them for fifty percent more on you know eBay.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
Yeah. We basically Ticketmaster is not down with opt right
other people's tickets. They don't. They're like, look, these these
are the people's tickets.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
Right, right, right, So what that's what we assumed, right, yeah,
And it turns say right, and it turns out that
we were very wrong, no, like cartoonishly.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
So they're they're quite all right with anyone buying their
share of the tickets as long as those tickets get sold,
and especially if Ticketmaster can sell the tickets twice. What
what are we talking about? Okay, let's go back to
Las Vegas at that convention. So ticket Master, he's recording
(28:15):
Ticketmaster at least some representatives from Ticketmaster. Maybe that's the
best way to say it. Sure are these representatives are
pitching scalpers on their Ticketmaster's trademarked professional reseller program that
they have established. Okay, Now, according to the investigation that
you'll follow Dave Seglins through with the CBC News investigation,
(28:39):
Ticketmaster was not only just deciding that if scalping is happening,
we're just going to put blinders on and pretend that
it's not happening. They're also literally recruiting people, professional people
who've been scalping for a long time or maybe are
very good at scalping to cheat the ticket master uster
(29:00):
system itself, to expand their Ticketmaster's resale business and again
to take more money from the people that are just
trying to go out and see a concert or an
event or something. So, just to recap, it's Ticketmaster teaching
scalpers to scalp Ticketmaster for their own profit, for Ticketmaster's profit.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
Yes, yeah, so.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
They have.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
They've done more than turn a blind eye. They've they've
gotten too a win win situation with scalpers and Ticketmaster. Right,
So this is before the average concert goer. This is
this is the part of the movie where the bad
guys team up and one sales rep is on camera saying,
(29:48):
I have brokers that have literally a couple of hundred
accounts it's not something that we look at or report
because they wanted these scalpers to feel that they were
that they were safe in this Ticketmaster, for its part,
denied the accusations. And once again, you can always go
back to the idea that actions by a few people
(30:10):
in an organization do not automatically mean the entire organization
condone it right tale as old as time. That's what
any intelligence agency will say when it's undeniably caught doing
something terrible.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Yeah, I'll be like.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Well, that guy decided to topple that country on his own,
and we always knew that, We always knew that Jeremy
was a little bit off.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Yeah, and this is all compartmentalized anyway. Only a very few,
small number of people knew anything about that.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
Yeah, Like, I'm weirded out hearing about it today, Congresswoman.
This was the first first I've heard of it, and
I've got to tell you, frankly, I am outraged.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Well you know what I am too, And I hope
you get to the bottom of it. And congratulations on
all your work.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
Thank you, thank you. I'll be speaking at Georgetown this
coming Friday. It's one one night only you can oh, yeah,
you can get tickets through a Ticketmaster or if those
are sold out, go ahead to Yeah it is sold out, well,
go to ticket now, Okay, tickets now, so and scene.
(31:14):
So Ticketmaster developed a toolkit for these scalpers. It is
a professional. They don't call them scalpers, they call them resellers.
A professional reseller program that they launched.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
Called used Tickets pre Owned tickets.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Called it Certified pre Owned, called Trade Desk. Trade Desk
is a quote web based inventory management system for scalpers.
The company calls it the most powerful ticket sales tool ever.
So here's what it allows you to do. You can
buy a block of tickets from Ticketmaster through one of
(31:57):
its many faces, and then you can upload those tickets
to this trade Desk thing, and then you can just
list them again for resale. This means you can hike
or drop prices on tons and tons of tickets based
on what you think fans are looking for. So it
(32:18):
turns it into almost a stock market kind of thing.
Neither Trade Desk nor the professional reseller program are mentioned
anywhere on Ticketmaster's website. You can go check we looked,
it's not there. It's also not listed on any of
its corporate reports. If you want to find the Trade
Desk website, you first have to send in a registration request.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
So let's go ahead and take a look at what happens.
If you do get through that registration process, you do
have one of these things like an account there, and
you are reselling things. Let's see what Ticketmaster actually gets
out of this whole process. So, just as an example,
let's say Ticketmaster is gonna sell a ticket for a
(33:02):
little over two hundred dollars. Two hundred nine dollars and
fifty cents. Okay, that's just the price of the ticket.
Ticket Master itself is gonna collect twenty five dollars and
seventy five cents just on that initial sale. Now when
the owner, now if because we're saying this is through
Trade Desk, the owner who's just purchased it through Trade Desk,
(33:23):
then puts it back up for resale for roughly twice
as much as it's the original cost, let's say four
hundred dollars the company. Then ticket Master stands to collect
an additional seventy six dollars on that same ticket. So
so again you're looking at over one hundred dollars that
you're gonna make out of six hundred dollars in total
(33:46):
of sales.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
And at this point that's legal too. Yeah, it's not
against the law.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Yeah. And it's just a way to make sure that
tickets get sold at least if you're looking at from
the company's perspective trade desk, basically that every ticket is
going to get sold in some way from that initial sale.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
The idea being that, you know, if you want that,
the idea being that the lever moves us and down
so you could lower prices. Maybe day of ticket sales
aren't where you want them to be. So someone says,
all right, now this is no longer two hundred dollars.
It's one hundred and fifty dollars.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
Let's see what happens, right, Yeah, And there are strategies
that kind of line up with that. At the like
towards the end of a concert or something, or towards
the end of a big game, people there will still
be scalpers outside of a well, okay, there will be
resellers outside of a venue selling tickets for you know,
(34:43):
pennies on the dollar if this show is almost over
or something to get people in just to finally make
a tiny bit of money on that thing and that
that exists throughout these markets.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
Yeah. Absolutely, we do want to say that while while
we did mention that ticket Master denied the allegations brought
by this investigative report, maybe it'll be helpful for us
to give the actual language that they used in denying
this allegation. What do you think?
Speaker 2 (35:14):
Absolutely?
Speaker 1 (35:15):
All right, So, after the story was published there in
CBC News, Ticketmaster issued a statement that went out to
CBC's News, but then also went out to other places
that are reported on the stories, such as The Rolling Stone,
saying it was quote categorically untrue the Ticketmaster has any
program in place to enable resellers to acquire large volumes
(35:36):
of tickets. It also said it had already begun an
internal review of professional reseller accounts and employee practices before
the CBC News story came out. So they said, look,
we've already been investigating this internally and we would never
try to game the system in the way that you're describing. Again,
(35:59):
a represent from Ticketmaster is on camera completely completely doing
what they say, what they're denying.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
Yeah, the biggest, the biggest thing that Ticketmaster had a
problem with was that that representative acknowledged of acknowledged the
knowledge that one person essentially would have two hundred accounts, right,
or if one entity or one group would have two
hundred trade desk accounts. That's that's where the big problem
(36:28):
comes in.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
Yeah, so it is a situation where the money got
too good. Is a situation where where finally maybe as
the public or the uninitiated scene into a previously murky.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
World, that's very possible. I would go ahead and just
say it makes me think of something we discussed at
the very beginning of a competitive marketplace, essentially and having
to always evolve, like consistently evolving to make sure that
you are making more profit so that you can increase
(37:05):
your margins year every year, or you know, you increase
your percentage overall of gross income year every year, like
having to find new creative ways as a giant company
like Ticketmaster and it's you know, parent companies and all that.
These kinds of reselling, it's another way to increase those
margins that isn't necessarily illegal if you take out the
(37:30):
some of the things from this, you know, some of
the things were illegal, but not many. Right, The reselling market,
as terrible as it sounds, and as bad as it
is for consumers such as us, it's just another one
of those ways to grab more money.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
Allegedly illegal, well, definitely illegal, but that the allegedly did.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Yes, yes, apologies because.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
It hasn't been an I don't think it's necessary. This
is just we're just being as fair as we can. Yes, yes,
so as you can tell by the use of the
phrase allegedly and the fact that we're being fairly careful
about how we discussed this. Ticketmaster has been in and
out of court. In twenty eighteen, they suffered a data breach,
(38:17):
and in twenty nineteen a British law firm launched legal
action against them for affecting up to forty thousand UK customers.
And also in twenty eighteen, the US Department of Justice
launched an investigation following complaints that Live Nation, an event promoter,
had engaged in anti competitive practices following their merger with Ticketmaster.
(38:39):
There's an organization called Enschutz Entertainment Group, and they said
Live Nation pressured them into using Ticketmaster as a vendor,
and had they refused, they would have lost out on business.
The allegations of anti trust violations resulted in a re
examination of the merger between Ticketmaster and Live Nation. However,
(39:00):
this case is probably going into well many of these
cases are going into arbitration, private settlements. No need to
have a shameful day in court. And at this point
Ticketmaster is very little in the way of real competition.
(39:21):
There are other things in the market, sure, but they're
gnats to Ticketmaster's beheamoth right. And the question then is,
I mean, clearly there's some stuff they don't want you
to know that's inarguable it's not necessarily criminal. Like for instance, okay,
think of airline tickets depending on which way you go
(39:43):
through an airline, or think of privatized insurance. People don't
want you to know the lowest price you can get.
They want you to get confused and bored and desperate
enough to just take the easiest thing. That's a that
is a very clear, an unfortunately disturbing explanation of how
all three of those industries.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
Work, and really most industries, everyone's just trying to get
you to take the easiest option for you, and it
depends on where you are in life times ticket but
here's the easiest one for your social strata.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
Yeah, right, You're not looking for mister right price. You're
looking for mister right now, price right.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
Start applying that to social interactions, and now it's just, oh,
we've gone down a rabbit hole.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
I should have I should have quit while we were
ahead with the with the insurance airplane ticket thing. But yeah,
it's it's true, and there's probably not going to be
any anything that really stops this practice. There will be
things that mitigate it. The problem is that the established
system has caught up to technological breakthroughs only in the
(40:56):
ways that can improve its profit while maintaining its position.
The technology that we have now to organize, distribute, and
track these sorts of things is amazing. If you were
from the nineteen seventies and you've looked at it, you
would think was mind blowing, you know what I mean,
unless you already worked for DARPA or something, you would
(41:17):
be like, how did that get out here? But the
problem is that even though we're we have the potential
to democratize the access to these tickets in a way
that would benefit the creators and benefit the customers, we're
not seeing that. When will that happen? When will there
(41:38):
be some sort of market disruption?
Speaker 2 (41:40):
No?
Speaker 1 (41:41):
No, and at this point, has ticket Master done anything
thoroughly illegal. No, they haven't been convicted. None of the
CEOs have ever gone to jail. The creators certainly never
got in trouble.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
Yeah, in two thousand and nine, that whole conspiracy suit
was out there, didn't really go anywhere.
Speaker 1 (42:02):
Right, right. So the question then goes to us, fellow
conspiracy realists, is this just how this business should be run?
And what what are other businesses that you have seen
that your that your fellow listeners may not be aware of,
Like we've we've seen some We've seen some strange things
(42:24):
going on in the funeral service industry. We've seen some
strange things going on of course here in the event
and ticketing industry. But where else, I wonder where else
is everything just crazy, crooked appearing to be crooked. I
have to say so that we don't get superbl to that.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
End, to that end, I want to I want to
pick your brain, Ben about the mechanic big mechanic industry
with some of these bigger companies out there that that
offer repairs to vehicles and automobiles.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
Sou mean like not just straight up garages, but box
automotive stores that are also garages or service centers.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
Okay, yeah, the big ones that are nationwide. I'd like
to talk about some of those. See if there are
any conspiracies out there. So maybe maybe if you're listening
and you know, have you heard of anything, let us
know what you've heard.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
I will that's that's great, I will say on that.
On that note, there is one thing that sounds a
bit curmudgelingally for me to say, but I think it's
a good point. It's one thing that bugs me about
modern car repairs. Over the past few years, cars have
increasingly become something that the person who owns it cannot
work on. Have you noticed that? Yeah, there are more
(43:41):
and more black boxes proliferating under the hood.
Speaker 2 (43:45):
Sure, absolutely, and just lack of experience, lack of knowledge.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
I just feel like, call me old fashioned, but I
feel like if you if you buy a car, it
should be something that you own that it shouldn't have
to be a service, you know what I mean. We're
moving increasingly into a service economy. It is going to
scare your children listening now, when when you say, yeah,
people used to like buy things and then have them,
(44:11):
I'm like, what for how much a month? Yeah, like no, no,
like you would just you would just buy one sandwich
and you would eat it.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
Yeah. Well it goes back to that superpower thing of
money and time and I don't have time to work
on this vehicle. I'll give it to you and you
fix it. Here's some of my superpower.
Speaker 1 (44:30):
Or signing an agreement for instance, it says you are
not allowed to have anybody else work kind of thing, right,
like Apple has done this very well. Yeah, anyhow, story
for another day. Thank you so much for you, and
we want to hear also your most egregious concert ticket
or event ticket fee story. Did you really go into
(44:51):
some website thinking you were gonna pay eighteen bucks and
then come out like thirty bucks later, bewildered and confused?
Speaker 2 (44:59):
Yeah, did you try get into a Foo fighter's concert
and then you realized, wait, it's four hundred dollars and
then you just said.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
Bye, oh man, Yeah, tell us your stories. Uh, And
that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't wait
to hear your thoughts. We try to be easy to
find online. Find this at the handle Conspiracy Stuff, where
we exist on Facebook X and YouTube, on Instagram and TikTok.
We're conspiracy stuff show.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
Call our number. It's one eight three three std WYTK,
leave a voicemail.
Speaker 1 (45:29):
And if you have more to say, we can't wait
to hear from you at our good old fashioned email
address where we are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (45:37):
Stuff they Don't Want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome, conspiracy realist. We are talking about something that has
become a bit of a hobby horse for us at
this point. Not too long ago, Nol and Matt Ny
were going to get tickets to go see a concert
together and we ran into the fees. Oh god, the fees.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
The fees.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Yeah, this isn't an aldly bit of goody.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
That is painfully relevant still to this day.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
I mean it's we're approaching an absolute monopoly with Live
Nation and Ticketmasters.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
They are kind of like the people selling the tickets
being the same people that on the venues. It's not great.
Let's jump right in and see how much more expensive
it's gotten since even May twenty nineteen.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Greetings, Welcome back to the show.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
My name is Matt and our pal Noel is on
some adventures, but we'll return in the future. They called
me Ben. We are joined as always with our super
producer Paul Mission Control decad. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here that makes this stuff. They don't want
you to know. Welcome to the show. You did not
have to buy tickets.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
That's right. You did have to buy a phone or
a computer or something that has a microphone and a
processor and at least headphone outputs or some kind of speaker.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Let's call those associated fees. Yeah, so the show is free.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
It takes some doing to get it in you.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
To get it in your ear, right, Yeah. All the
other paraphernalia is not include. I mean, sure, this is
a show. This is a recorded show, right, we do
a call in line. We've taken the show on the
road and probably will do again and then near to
mid future. But nothing, nothing quite beats the experience right off.
(02:17):
You're in your favorite music or your favorite performance whatever
it is live right, Like, what are some of the
memorable concerts you've been to?
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Man, I haven't really been to many, but Dave Matthews
back in the day, oh boy, and some of that
DMB baby, Oh it was the best. And you know
what tickets were always like, Okay, they were not insane
(02:46):
back in the early two thousands doing some old DMB though,
you know, you get to you know, that's a fairly
large act right. Then you get to newer shows nowadays,
and you're going to a much smaller venue with a
much smaller band, And I'm paying more now to see
those bands than I did to pay a big ticket
(03:07):
band when I was, you know, coming out of high
school in college.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
So like you would go see Dave Matthews band in
a stadium or something, yeah, something that large, and you
would get maybe some reasonable tickets on the lawn or whatever.
Thirty bucks okay, max thirty bucks with everything.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Yeah, just to get into Lakewood Amphitheater, which not called
that anymore, but who cares. And also, you know, inflation.
Obviously everyone is saying inflation, matt but inflation, but that's
not all.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Let's call it feflation. Okay, maybe okay, asides from sounding
very doctor Susian, that that is a word that could
work for today's episode, because you know what bothers me
about buying tickets probably the same thing that bothers everyone
they buy tickets nowadays. When you buy its ticket for something,
you're overwhelmingly going to do it online or else. You're
(04:05):
going to show up at a show the day of,
you know.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
And it's probably sold out if it's worth anything.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Perhaps, Yeah, yeah, And it's really it's relatively rare for
someone to be walking down the street see tickets for
a show like next week or that weekend, and then
say I'm going to walk in and buy those now
in person. People don't do that near as often, so
most of the time we buy tickets online. And here
(04:33):
in the United States, there's been one game in town
for quite a while, and this game continues in other
countries as well. A master, if you will, of tickets. Oh,
some sort of ticket master. Yes, Wowly, it took a
while to get to that one, but it's true. Right,
(04:54):
since about the late nineteen seventies, it's become increasingly difficult
to get tickets to live events Broadway plays, Symphonies, the DMB.
It's difficult to get these tickets without running somehow into
ticket Master, even if you don't know that you're running
into Ticketmaster. So what exactly is this thing? It's been
(05:17):
here for the three of us, for you, mission control
of myself, for our entire lives.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Yeah, and beyond and before. Yeah. So let's go back
to Phoenix, Arizona, nineteen seventy six. A couple of gentlemen
we got Albert Leffler, Peter Godwa, and another man, a
businessman named Gordon Gunn. What a great name. Yeah, seriously,
Gordon Gunn. So Leffler. He comes up with this name,
(05:45):
this idea for a thing, and he calls it ticket Master,
And it's this new company that's just going to control
tickets and for these guys when they founded in nineteen
seventy six, really all they're trying to do in the
beginning is sells tickets to an Electric Light Orchestra concert
at the University of New Mexico. That's the first big thing.
(06:07):
And electric Light Orchestra is something that my dad told
me about, actually that he really enjoyed. Look it up,
Google it. If you don't know it, Spotify it. I'm
sure you can find it.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Mister Blue Sky is a great song.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
It really is. It really is. But anyway, so this
one little thing in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
I'm so sorry to interrupt that to say, yeah, Turned
to Stone is also a great song. Oh, in my mind,
it's one that I've had stuck in my head. Awesome
a Blue Sky Turned to Stone. It's the seventies, it's Albuquerque.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Out of college. Awesome, good times rolling right, let the
good times roll. And so then they figure out, hey,
this is working. We're just you know, control a hub.
We're controlling the tickets to one thing. We're good at this,
Let's keep doing it. So they keep doing it for
a few years. Then by nineteen seventy eight they have
(07:02):
their first international clients coming in from Norway, Oslo, Norway,
and that same year they signed their first major venue,
this place called the Louisiana super Dome, along with their
first Major League team, the New Orleans Jazz, which is
now the Utah Jazz, but in the city of New
Orleans it was the Jazz. So they actually have the
(07:22):
NBA as one of their major clients, one team on
the NBA. But still, that's huge for just a couple
of guys starting with a startup, right.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Yeah, And it happens so quickly. It's just a few years.
When Leffler and Godwa originally thought of the company, they
were going to be licensing software for tickets, really, and
they've gone from that to being the ticket provider for stadiums,
(07:53):
which sounds kind of like maybe a boring business, right,
it's not, as you know, endlessly fascinating as being a
professional skydiver or maybe a podcast or something like that,
you know, an underwater tattoo artist. But still, what we
(08:15):
have to realize is they get a cut of every
ticket sold, and when you get to something as large
as a superdome, that's a lot of money in like
in one night, yeap. Other people knew about the game.
There were other things that existed at this time before
ticket Master. There was a business called ticket Tron, like
(08:38):
ticket and then the movie Tron.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
And that's nineteen sixties. So it's difficult to It's hard
for me to imagine computerized ticket sales being organized enough
with software, with computers that are powerful enough to like
do it in any large scale. But it was happening.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Yeah, yeah, it wasn't. It wasn't necessarily happening on the
customer end, but you would make a phone call to
ticket Tron and they would have this database.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
Right, So can I selly fun fact about ticket Tron? Yeah?
They were purchased by a thing called the Lovecraft Investment
Group in nineteen ninety.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
What's the Lovecraft Investment Group?
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Man? All I know is is Lovecraft. There's a Lovecraft involved,
That's all I know.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
Oh boy, let's see it's true.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
The Hewlett Packard Lovecraft.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
I don't know what the I don't know what the
Lovecraft investment. This may be fodder for another podcast. Here's
the thing. As you said, there were other there were
other similar creatures around in this market, right, other places
that wanted to be the ticket provider, in the middleman
(09:53):
for that. But like a hungry invading species, Ticketmaster consumed
and digested the these competitors. In nineteen eighty one, it
opened its first overseas operation. In nineteen eighty two, they
got a new CEO, a guy named Fred Rosen. Rosen
told the La Times back in eighty five that his
(10:14):
competitors were asleep at the switch. He said, he was
an aggressive businessman. I'm proud of it, got this American
psycho vibe going on, right. He was so good at
dominating the ticket industry that it became the only game
in town. And other people, other artists, primarily not just
(10:34):
wound up consumers. Other artists started to take issue with it.
Pearl Jam launched a campaign in nineteen ninety four that
they called a strong language for some people ticket bastard,
because you see, pearl Jam was hearing from their fans
that they literally couldn't afford tickets to a show, or
that they were getting saddled with these egregious hidden fees,
(10:59):
and so they said, well, look man, we want to
make a living, but we want our fans to see
our music. We don't want to milk them for every
penny they're worth, Like what are we kiss? You know
what I mean. They don't want to do that. They
want to be human, they want to stay human. So
they wanted to offer summer tour tickets to fans for
under twenty bucks. And they asked ticket Master, you know, hey, guys,
(11:24):
can you just not charge another twenty bucks and fees?
Can you actually like keep the fees around two dollars
or whatever that your cost of doing businesses? And they
said no, no, you're Pearl.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Jam and we are ticket Master. Yeah. So yeah, but
it's crazy to think about because they really did say no,
and Pearl Jam just in nineteen ninety four decided, well
it's not worth it. We're not even going to go
on tour. We're canceling everything. We're not gonna like go
and play a bunch of empty stadiums where nobody can
(12:01):
show up for these exorbitant prices. They ended up going
to Congress and guess what, Pearl Jam one and everything
was okay and everyone was happy, and ticket sales went
down to twenty dollars for the rest of our lives.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Thanks so much for tuning in, folks, We hope you
enjoyed this episode.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Oh wait, nope, nope, that's not what happened. What happened
Ticketmaster won.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
Right, And there's one more sordid detail for this story.
The band. The members of the band Pearl Jam maintained
and say to this day. You can ask them today
and they'll confirm this. That private investigators were sent to
snoop around in their lives, sent by Ticketmaster and having
(12:43):
a PI sicked on you by a company very common occurrence. Unfortunately,
what they were probably trying to do. What the allegation
implies is that Ticketmaster was attempted to find something discrediting
to members of Pearl Jam, not something that had anything
(13:07):
to do with their crusade to get better ticket prices.
They wanted to be able to say, well, this person
is doing heroin and we'll put it in the news
if you guys don't straighten up intil the corporate line,
but you know again, that's a terrible example, because this
is the nineties in Seattle grunge, right, So doing Heroin
(13:30):
may unfortunately not have been the huge scandal that they
would want, but they wanted something to hold over their heads,
and eventually, probably more so, through just the sheer, ungodly
amount of money Ticketmaster has, they were able to. They
were able to, as you say, prevail. So that brings
(13:52):
us to the modern day. Nineteen ninety seven, a company
called Interactive Corp, oddly enough, not a video game company,
perch is the majority stake and Ticketmaster, and then it
bought the rest of the company. In nineteen ninety eight,
the name changed to Ticketmaster Online. Dash City search doesn't
exactly roll off the tongue, right, No, So they didn't
(14:15):
care that it didn't roll off the tongue. The company expanded, diversified,
it kept evolving its business model, increasingly, going from phones
to online sales, and this constant evolution, the way of
many businesses right unfortunately, did not go in the direction
that critics wanted it to. They didn't see cheaper tickets,
(14:37):
they didn't feel like things were more transparent. These moves
did not quell all of the critics. And today Ticketmaster
controls an estimated eighty percent of the little more than
eighty percent of the ticketing market in North America. So
they're doing something right. But let's get back to the critics.
(15:01):
What are these critics saying.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Well, they're saying that we need to take a quick
break to hear from our sponsor and then we'll find
out what Ticketmaster may or may not have been getting into.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
So it turns out that in addition to be massively successful,
Ticketmaster has been accused of numerous abuses, breaches of law,
and shady business practices. There's genuine stuff they don't want
you to know here. It's probably not gonna stop, no
compellingnimpotus to stop it. And yes, Ticketmaster has been sued
(15:42):
for conspiracy.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Oh snap, the big c All right, let's take another
time traveling trip here to two thousand and nine. Bruce Springsteen.
Oh everybody knows Old Bruce the boss. Yeah, he is
the boss. He's your boss and my boss. He publicly
calls out ticket Master in two thousand and nine for
(16:03):
a little let's say misdirection, redirection if you will, from
a website. So as fans were going and trying to
buy tickets through Ticketmaster to the Springsteen concert. They were
getting sent to this other place called ticket now dot com,
completely separate site. It looks very different. There's no you know,
(16:26):
when you're on that site, you don't understand what's happening.
You feel like a pop up maybe has occurred, or
you've gotten redirected through an ad maybe.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Or this is your last chance to get some kind
of ticket to see the Boss live.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Well, yeah, there's a certain desperation that's happening when you
are being redirected to this ticketnow dot com because guess what,
the tickets are marked up by hundreds, sometimes thousands of
dollars at ticket now versus Ticketmaster. So then all these
fan complaints are coming through because of this weird steering
(16:59):
to the place called tickets Now. A New Jersey congressman
gets a call and basically this guy says, Hey, we
need a federal anti trust investigation into whatever the heck
is going on between Ticketmaster and ticket now. What is this?
Let's figure this out.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Yeah, so here's what they find. They find that ticket Now,
in addition to having a very similar name to Ticketmaster,
is owned by Ticketmaster, and when Bruce Springsteen's fans were
going to a website to buy tickets to his show,
they were automatically redirected to ticket now, which, as he said,
(17:41):
Matt sells tickets for much higher than their face value,
and it prais on that desperation, right, that's psychological fear
that someone else will get the thing I want. So,
you know, I may not necessarily think this is a
good financial decision, but I will be gosh darned and
gollie ged if I allow somebody else to get that ticket.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
You know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
It's an artificial scarcity essentially. Bruce Springsteen found out about it,
and he was righteously indignant. He wrote a public statement
about this, because what you found out was that this
sort of second chance or reselling site ticket now was
(18:26):
something that Ticketmaster was sending the audience to when there
were still regular tickets available. So they could have gotten
that you know, thirty or forty whatever dollar ticket to
sit on the lawn in the back, yeah, and have
a great time. But instead they were going directly to
this place where it was you know, this huge markup,
(18:46):
and that markup goes to Ticketmaster man. So Ticketmaster gets
a fifteen percent cut from tickets Now, which it owns.
That's in addition to the fees that already gets as Ticketmaster,
so that that money has already spent and baked into
(19:08):
the price. So a lawsuit comes about, and essentially what
they're doing is making money off the same ticket two times. Clever,
you know, brilliant, very clever, evil, lawful evil, and so
probably because Egenstein himself took such a strong stance against it,
(19:31):
Ticketmaster issued an apology to the fans and said, we
will refund you the price difference between the face value
of the tickets and those you got from ticket Now,
which is a lot of you know, it's a lot
of scratch. But that's also that's also like being caught stealing,
you know, being caught stealing a car and then saying, ah,
(19:51):
I'm you know, I'm gonna drive it back to your house. Yeah,
and then what like, I feel bad, you.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Know, some gas money here just a little bit.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
No, they didn't, they didn't, but it's strange, right, And
this is just one of the allegations against ticket Master.
We've got that Pearl Jam example. But let's talk about
those fees, because that's where a lot of this comes
back in, right, Have you ever bought a twenty dollars
ticket only to find that it becomes more than forty
(20:24):
dollars by the time you get to the actual place
your order?
Speaker 2 (20:28):
No? Never, oh never, This is never Tabernacle.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
That's a that's a local venue here at Atlanta Tabernacle.
What kind of fees have you run.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Into literally twice as much? I mean it, Yeah, I've
seen I have seen tickets double when I buy them
for just a local venue here because of ticket Master's
weird fees to get me my ticket somehow that I
can print out already.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Yeah, there's like a two to five dollars fee for
getting a PDF. Essentially you can.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
Print somebody I'm paying some salary who's just on a
floor somewhere making calls like I need three Pearl Jam
but like, no, no, I got four radio Head.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
No.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
It's like it has to be that to justify twenty
or thirty dollars fees on top of everything else. Otherwise
I do not understand.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Yeah, you're absolutely right. There's a there's a service charge,
and that will be ticket Masters charging you for the
privilege of it giving you a ticket. Yeah, and then
there's the facility charge, which is a charge added by
the venue. So ticket Master takes its cut, and then
the Tabernacle, for example, takes its cut. And then there
(21:38):
are shipping, convenience and processing charges. So that's a charge
for you know, using your visa American Express, that's a
charge for having the tickets delivered to you via post
wow or using your own printer.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Yeah, but then who who pays Cardi B? Then is
what I'm trying to figure out, Like who what's her cut?
Everybody else has taken their cut. Who's where's Cardib's money?
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Unless you're a huge name artist, which I guess Cardi
B is. Now, the amount of money you get per
ticket can be surprisingly alarmingly small because the label will
take some money, you know what I mean, your road
crew will take some money, and all this other stuff.
Craft services eat that cheese because it's coming out of
(22:26):
your cut. Other profits. Right, But all this adds up
to an unpleasant experience for people when we're buying these tickets.
The problem is there's not really any transparency with this.
Fees between events vary even at the same venue, and
(22:46):
preferences of the artist as well. Some people will try
to buck like Radiohead or Pearl Jam. And the problem
with it is that none of this, none of this
ultimately goes into a situation where in ticket prices are lower.
None of this is meant to nor will it.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Ever create It cannot.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Yes, yes, none of this is meant to create a
situation where artists get paid more and the audience pays less.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
No, absolutely not.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
If anything, It's kind of like, you know, nobody talks
about this, but it's pretty weird that you you know,
historically can't buy a car directly from the people who
make cars.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
That is weird.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
It's weird. It's a weird thing. It's normalized. Yeah, and
you know, I'm not choosing sides on it, but that
that is something we think about. You know, you can
buy almost you can buy so many other things directly
from the people who make them direct sales.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
Vertical integration is scary though, and it can be It
can be highly it can be highly problematic.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Yeah, and it can also be dangerous for the bottom line. Right. So,
the allegation here is that Ticketmaster is sort of a
rent seeker and it's now a middle It's maybe it
needed to be in the process before everybody had a
brilliant computer on their phone. But now maybe it doesn't
(24:17):
have to be right. Maybe that kind of software is
easier to handle. We don't really know. We just know
that they are the largest game in town, and we
know that the entire operation is exceedingly opaque. We're going
to take a break for a brief word from our sponsor,
(24:39):
and then we'll come back with an investigation in Canada
that makes this even weirder.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
All right, here's where it gets crazier. This is hard
for me to understand that this is real. Okay, what
we're going to talk about from now, mostly through the
rest of this episode, we got from a CBC News
investigation that was carried out and specifically there's a journalist
(25:14):
named Dave Seglins who actually physically went undercover as a
scalper at a ticket industry convention out there in Las Vegas.
And you can watch a video of this online right now.
If you want to take a break, you can you
can search us up CBC ticket Master.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
New Yes segment l I N S.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
That's good, you'll find it. Check it out. It's pretty crazy.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Could we set some just some axiomatic beginnings here.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
Oh yeah, sure.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Okay, So so imagine your ticketmaster. You make money selling tickets. Okay,
you want people to buy tickets from you, definitely.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
Sure doesn't matter who that person is buying a ticket
from you, as long as somebody's buying a ticket from you, right.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
Right, as long as the transaction occurs. But you want
to be on the side of the people and the artists,
and you probably say hey, at least in public, you
say hey, I think scalpers are the worst and they
take advantage of people.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Yeah, because we want you to have low prices and
see all the stuff you want to see. Don't be
mad at us.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Right, So it's established then in the public mind, the
axiom is that ticket distributors, or these middle segments between
the artists and the event and the customer, that they
should not be down with scalpers Like you guys are
making it weird. You're making it worse. I don't want
(26:49):
to be in a situation where, for instance, there are oh,
what's a great what's a great event that people would
go to today, like a band or a perform it's
alien con sure, alien con. They're only yeah, it's a
one night only four hundred four hundred seat event and
it's called Alien con who knows what it is. Maybe
(27:11):
it's a mariachi band, and they Ticketmaster, one would assume,
does not care for a situation when one person goes
in and buys all four hundred or whatever of those
tickets in one block and then turns around and sells
them for fifty percent more on you know eBay.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
Yeah. We basically Ticketmaster is not down with opt right
other people's tickets. They don't. They're like, look, these these
are the people's tickets.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
Right, right, right, So what that's what we assumed, right, yeah,
And it turns say right, and it turns out that
we were very wrong, no, like cartoonishly.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
So they're they're quite all right with anyone buying their
share of the tickets as long as those tickets get sold,
and especially if Ticketmaster can sell the tickets twice. What
what are we talking about? Okay, let's go back to
Las Vegas at that convention. So ticket Master, he's recording
(28:15):
Ticketmaster at least some representatives from Ticketmaster. Maybe that's the
best way to say it. Sure are these representatives are
pitching scalpers on their Ticketmaster's trademarked professional reseller program that
they have established. Okay, Now, according to the investigation that
you'll follow Dave Seglins through with the CBC News investigation,
(28:39):
Ticketmaster was not only just deciding that if scalping is happening,
we're just going to put blinders on and pretend that
it's not happening. They're also literally recruiting people, professional people
who've been scalping for a long time or maybe are
very good at scalping to cheat the ticket master uster
(29:00):
system itself, to expand their Ticketmaster's resale business and again
to take more money from the people that are just
trying to go out and see a concert or an
event or something. So, just to recap, it's Ticketmaster teaching
scalpers to scalp Ticketmaster for their own profit, for Ticketmaster's profit.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
Yes, yeah, so.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
They have.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
They've done more than turn a blind eye. They've they've
gotten too a win win situation with scalpers and Ticketmaster. Right,
So this is before the average concert goer. This is
this is the part of the movie where the bad
guys team up and one sales rep is on camera saying,
(29:48):
I have brokers that have literally a couple of hundred
accounts it's not something that we look at or report
because they wanted these scalpers to feel that they were
that they were safe in this Ticketmaster, for its part,
denied the accusations. And once again, you can always go
back to the idea that actions by a few people
(30:10):
in an organization do not automatically mean the entire organization
condone it right tale as old as time. That's what
any intelligence agency will say when it's undeniably caught doing
something terrible.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Yeah, I'll be like.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Well, that guy decided to topple that country on his own,
and we always knew that, We always knew that Jeremy
was a little bit off.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Yeah, and this is all compartmentalized anyway. Only a very few,
small number of people knew anything about that.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
Yeah, Like, I'm weirded out hearing about it today, Congresswoman.
This was the first first I've heard of it, and
I've got to tell you, frankly, I am outraged.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
Well you know what I am too, And I hope
you get to the bottom of it. And congratulations on
all your work.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
Thank you, thank you. I'll be speaking at Georgetown this
coming Friday. It's one one night only you can oh, yeah,
you can get tickets through a Ticketmaster or if those
are sold out, go ahead to Yeah it is sold out, well,
go to ticket now, Okay, tickets now, so and scene.
(31:14):
So Ticketmaster developed a toolkit for these scalpers. It is
a professional. They don't call them scalpers, they call them resellers.
A professional reseller program that they launched.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
Called used Tickets pre Owned tickets.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Called it Certified pre Owned, called Trade Desk. Trade Desk
is a quote web based inventory management system for scalpers.
The company calls it the most powerful ticket sales tool ever.
So here's what it allows you to do. You can
buy a block of tickets from Ticketmaster through one of
(31:57):
its many faces, and then you can upload those tickets
to this trade Desk thing, and then you can just
list them again for resale. This means you can hike
or drop prices on tons and tons of tickets based
on what you think fans are looking for. So it
(32:18):
turns it into almost a stock market kind of thing.
Neither Trade Desk nor the professional reseller program are mentioned
anywhere on Ticketmaster's website. You can go check we looked,
it's not there. It's also not listed on any of
its corporate reports. If you want to find the Trade
Desk website, you first have to send in a registration request.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
So let's go ahead and take a look at what happens.
If you do get through that registration process, you do
have one of these things like an account there, and
you are reselling things. Let's see what Ticketmaster actually gets
out of this whole process. So, just as an example,
let's say Ticketmaster is gonna sell a ticket for a
(33:02):
little over two hundred dollars. Two hundred nine dollars and
fifty cents. Okay, that's just the price of the ticket.
Ticket Master itself is gonna collect twenty five dollars and
seventy five cents just on that initial sale. Now when
the owner, now if because we're saying this is through
Trade Desk, the owner who's just purchased it through Trade Desk,
(33:23):
then puts it back up for resale for roughly twice
as much as it's the original cost, let's say four
hundred dollars the company. Then ticket Master stands to collect
an additional seventy six dollars on that same ticket. So
so again you're looking at over one hundred dollars that
you're gonna make out of six hundred dollars in total
(33:46):
of sales.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
And at this point that's legal too. Yeah, it's not
against the law.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Yeah. And it's just a way to make sure that
tickets get sold at least if you're looking at from
the company's perspective trade desk, basically that every ticket is
going to get sold in some way from that initial sale.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
The idea being that, you know, if you want that,
the idea being that the lever moves us and down
so you could lower prices. Maybe day of ticket sales
aren't where you want them to be. So someone says,
all right, now this is no longer two hundred dollars.
It's one hundred and fifty dollars.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
Let's see what happens, right, Yeah, And there are strategies
that kind of line up with that. At the like
towards the end of a concert or something, or towards
the end of a big game, people there will still
be scalpers outside of a well, okay, there will be
resellers outside of a venue selling tickets for you know,
(34:43):
pennies on the dollar if this show is almost over
or something to get people in just to finally make
a tiny bit of money on that thing and that
that exists throughout these markets.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
Yeah. Absolutely, we do want to say that while while
we did mention that ticket Master denied the allegations brought
by this investigative report, maybe it'll be helpful for us
to give the actual language that they used in denying
this allegation. What do you think?
Speaker 2 (35:14):
Absolutely?
Speaker 1 (35:15):
All right, So, after the story was published there in
CBC News, Ticketmaster issued a statement that went out to
CBC's News, but then also went out to other places
that are reported on the stories, such as The Rolling Stone,
saying it was quote categorically untrue the Ticketmaster has any
program in place to enable resellers to acquire large volumes
(35:36):
of tickets. It also said it had already begun an
internal review of professional reseller accounts and employee practices before
the CBC News story came out. So they said, look,
we've already been investigating this internally and we would never
try to game the system in the way that you're describing. Again,
(35:59):
a represent from Ticketmaster is on camera completely completely doing
what they say, what they're denying.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
Yeah, the biggest, the biggest thing that Ticketmaster had a
problem with was that that representative acknowledged of acknowledged the
knowledge that one person essentially would have two hundred accounts, right,
or if one entity or one group would have two
hundred trade desk accounts. That's that's where the big problem
(36:28):
comes in.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
Yeah, so it is a situation where the money got
too good. Is a situation where where finally maybe as
the public or the uninitiated scene into a previously murky.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
World, that's very possible. I would go ahead and just
say it makes me think of something we discussed at
the very beginning of a competitive marketplace, essentially and having
to always evolve, like consistently evolving to make sure that
you are making more profit so that you can increase
(37:05):
your margins year every year, or you know, you increase
your percentage overall of gross income year every year, like
having to find new creative ways as a giant company
like Ticketmaster and it's you know, parent companies and all that.
These kinds of reselling, it's another way to increase those
margins that isn't necessarily illegal if you take out the
(37:30):
some of the things from this, you know, some of
the things were illegal, but not many. Right, The reselling market,
as terrible as it sounds, and as bad as it
is for consumers such as us, it's just another one
of those ways to grab more money.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
Allegedly illegal, well, definitely illegal, but that the allegedly did.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Yes, yes, apologies because.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
It hasn't been an I don't think it's necessary. This
is just we're just being as fair as we can. Yes, yes,
so as you can tell by the use of the
phrase allegedly and the fact that we're being fairly careful
about how we discussed this. Ticketmaster has been in and
out of court. In twenty eighteen, they suffered a data breach,
(38:17):
and in twenty nineteen a British law firm launched legal
action against them for affecting up to forty thousand UK customers.
And also in twenty eighteen, the US Department of Justice
launched an investigation following complaints that Live Nation, an event promoter,
had engaged in anti competitive practices following their merger with Ticketmaster.
(38:39):
There's an organization called Enschutz Entertainment Group, and they said
Live Nation pressured them into using Ticketmaster as a vendor,
and had they refused, they would have lost out on business.
The allegations of anti trust violations resulted in a re
examination of the merger between Ticketmaster and Live Nation. However,
(39:00):
this case is probably going into well many of these
cases are going into arbitration, private settlements. No need to
have a shameful day in court. And at this point
Ticketmaster is very little in the way of real competition.
(39:21):
There are other things in the market, sure, but they're
gnats to Ticketmaster's beheamoth right. And the question then is,
I mean, clearly there's some stuff they don't want you
to know that's inarguable it's not necessarily criminal. Like for instance, okay,
think of airline tickets depending on which way you go
(39:43):
through an airline, or think of privatized insurance. People don't
want you to know the lowest price you can get.
They want you to get confused and bored and desperate
enough to just take the easiest thing. That's a that
is a very clear, an unfortunately disturbing explanation of how
all three of those industries.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
Work, and really most industries, everyone's just trying to get
you to take the easiest option for you, and it
depends on where you are in life times ticket but
here's the easiest one for your social strata.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
Yeah, right, You're not looking for mister right price. You're
looking for mister right now, price right.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
Start applying that to social interactions, and now it's just, oh,
we've gone down a rabbit hole.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
I should have I should have quit while we were
ahead with the with the insurance airplane ticket thing. But yeah,
it's it's true, and there's probably not going to be
any anything that really stops this practice. There will be
things that mitigate it. The problem is that the established
system has caught up to technological breakthroughs only in the
(40:56):
ways that can improve its profit while maintaining its position.
The technology that we have now to organize, distribute, and
track these sorts of things is amazing. If you were
from the nineteen seventies and you've looked at it, you
would think was mind blowing, you know what I mean,
unless you already worked for DARPA or something, you would
(41:17):
be like, how did that get out here? But the
problem is that even though we're we have the potential
to democratize the access to these tickets in a way
that would benefit the creators and benefit the customers, we're
not seeing that. When will that happen? When will there
(41:38):
be some sort of market disruption?
Speaker 2 (41:40):
No?
Speaker 1 (41:41):
No, and at this point, has ticket Master done anything
thoroughly illegal. No, they haven't been convicted. None of the
CEOs have ever gone to jail. The creators certainly never
got in trouble.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
Yeah, in two thousand and nine, that whole conspiracy suit
was out there, didn't really go anywhere.
Speaker 1 (42:02):
Right, right. So the question then goes to us, fellow
conspiracy realists, is this just how this business should be run?
And what what are other businesses that you have seen
that your that your fellow listeners may not be aware of,
Like we've we've seen some We've seen some strange things
(42:24):
going on in the funeral service industry. We've seen some
strange things going on of course here in the event
and ticketing industry. But where else, I wonder where else
is everything just crazy, crooked appearing to be crooked. I
have to say so that we don't get superbl to that.
Speaker 2 (42:44):
End, to that end, I want to I want to
pick your brain, Ben about the mechanic big mechanic industry
with some of these bigger companies out there that that
offer repairs to vehicles and automobiles.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
Sou mean like not just straight up garages, but box
automotive stores that are also garages or service centers.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
Okay, yeah, the big ones that are nationwide. I'd like
to talk about some of those. See if there are
any conspiracies out there. So maybe maybe if you're listening
and you know, have you heard of anything, let us
know what you've heard.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
I will that's that's great, I will say on that.
On that note, there is one thing that sounds a
bit curmudgelingally for me to say, but I think it's
a good point. It's one thing that bugs me about
modern car repairs. Over the past few years, cars have
increasingly become something that the person who owns it cannot
work on. Have you noticed that? Yeah, there are more
(43:41):
and more black boxes proliferating under the hood.
Speaker 2 (43:45):
Sure, absolutely, and just lack of experience, lack of knowledge.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
I just feel like, call me old fashioned, but I
feel like if you if you buy a car, it
should be something that you own that it shouldn't have
to be a service, you know what I mean. We're
moving increasingly into a service economy. It is going to
scare your children listening now, when when you say, yeah,
people used to like buy things and then have them,
(44:11):
I'm like, what for how much a month? Yeah, like no, no,
like you would just you would just buy one sandwich
and you would eat it.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
Yeah. Well it goes back to that superpower thing of
money and time and I don't have time to work
on this vehicle. I'll give it to you and you
fix it. Here's some of my superpower.
Speaker 1 (44:30):
Or signing an agreement for instance, it says you are
not allowed to have anybody else work kind of thing, right,
like Apple has done this very well. Yeah, anyhow, story
for another day. Thank you so much for you, and
we want to hear also your most egregious concert ticket
or event ticket fee story. Did you really go into
(44:51):
some website thinking you were gonna pay eighteen bucks and
then come out like thirty bucks later, bewildered and confused?
Speaker 2 (44:59):
Yeah, did you try get into a Foo fighter's concert
and then you realized, wait, it's four hundred dollars and
then you just said.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
Bye, oh man, Yeah, tell us your stories. Uh, And
that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't wait
to hear your thoughts. We try to be easy to
find online. Find this at the handle Conspiracy Stuff, where
we exist on Facebook X and YouTube, on Instagram and TikTok.
We're conspiracy stuff show.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
Call our number. It's one eight three three std WYTK,
leave a voicemail.
Speaker 1 (45:29):
And if you have more to say, we can't wait
to hear from you at our good old fashioned email
address where we are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (45:37):
Stuff they Don't Want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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