In a huge shift in the company’s position, Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino has said he would now support a price cap on ticket resale in the US, telling the Bloomberg Screentime conference in LA, “we would love for resale to be regulated in some sense, cap it at 20%”.
Rapino’s comments - which come in the face of a wide ranging US government antitrust investigation into Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary - represent a significant shift in the live giant’s position on ticket touting, or scalping.
That shift is likely motivated, at least in part, by ongoing controversies around ticket pricing, including in relation to the Oasis reunion tour, and the pending antitrust lawsuit. Live Nation is increasingly taking the position that the various issues that have been raised around ticketing for concerts and other live shows all begin with the touts, and not Live Nation’s business practices.
“We think you should be able to resell”, Rapino stated, but more regulation is needed to deal with the professional touts that use bots to hoover up tickets from the primary sites.
“We got hit by multi-billions of bots on the Oasis on-sale”, he then revealed. The bot users are “a professional $12 billion business trying to capture all those seats. It’s an arms race with us trying to stop them, not let them in the door and let them hold the tickets”.
Battling the professional bot-using touts is a major technical challenge which can result in Ticketmaster’s platform going down when tickets for major in-demand shows go on sale. As happened in 2022 with Taylor Swift tickets, an incident which, Rapino believes, prompted his company’s current legal wrangling with the US government’s Department Of Justice.
However, touted tickets appearing at a massive mark-up also adds to the frustration of fans who missed out on tickets for in-demand shows at on-sale, frustration which is then often taken out on Ticketmaster.
If you have ten million people trying to buy a million tickets, you’re always going to have a lot of unhappy fans, Rapino said. “But what really pisses them off is the ten pages of scalpers selling $4000 tickets”. They see that, he added, and think “the system must be broken. You made me sign up. I'm a fan. I'm willing to pay. You tell me it’s sold out. But then how did they get all these tickets - where did they come from?”
“If you don't have that, you can deal with the first part”, Rapino mused. “Ultimately, you can explain supply and demand. We can get better at the queuing, and transparency with where you sit in the queue, we can keep working on all those things. But it doesn't matter what we do, because they really believe the system must be broken if all these scalpers are selling tickets”.
Live Nation’s shifting position on resale
Live Nation’s position on secondary ticketing has shifted quite a lot over the years. In the early days of online touting, Ticketmaster got very involved in for-profit resale, setting up and acquiring resale platforms. However, as criticism of online resale grew among artists and fans, in 2018 it bailed on its for-profit resale business in Europe. But not in the US, where opposition to touting was, in the main, more muted.
Nevertheless, in more recent years, even in the US, Live Nation has supported some restrictions on resale, increasingly arguing that artists should be able to set the rules on the resale of their tickets. Which artists can do in the US when tickets are resold within the Ticketmaster ecosystem.
The change in position was partly a response to yet more criticism from fans and artists. Although, cynics would note, restricting resale arguably helps some of the newer tools Ticketmaster has developed on its main platform, including dynamic pricing. Plus, Live Nation would definitely prefer American law-makers regulate secondary ticketing than primary ticketing.
After the Taylor Swift ticketing debacle put the ticketing business back on the agenda of US Congress, as well as the DoJ, Live Nation came out in support of some new ticketing regulations, including all-in pricing on all platforms, and a ban on speculative selling on secondary ticketing sites.
Speculative selling, where touts advertise tickets they are yet to secure, caused a bit of controversy around ticket sales for the Oasis North American shows last week. Thousands of tickets for those shows were listed on the resale sites before the official pre-sale on Ticketmaster had even begun, something both Oasis and Rapino criticised on social media.
It was suggested touts may have got access to tickets via an advance pre-sale to season ticket holders at some of the stadiums hosting the shows, but Ticketmaster has denied that. Rapino also took that position. The pre-sale to season ticket holders accounts for “a very, very small percentage” of tickets, he said. “Speculative selling is a huge problem. We try our damnedest with all the regulators to try to stop it”.
But that’s not the only regulation Rapino supports. “Outside of America, there’s really good scalper regulations”, he said, before later adding, “we would love it regulated in some sense, cap it at 20%”. Such a price cap would mean a reseller could only sell a ticket at 20% more than face value.
That way “some people can make a little money”, he added, but the bot-using professional sellers that cause all the problems would be greatly hindered.
Evolving touting regulations in the UK and US
Regulation of secondary ticketing varies greatly from country to country, from outright bans of ticket touting, to price caps on resale, to rules around how touted tickets are listed on the resale sites.
In the UK, there is some regulation around listings, but not an outright ban or price cap. However, prior to the General Election, the Labour Party came out in support of a 10% price cap, a policy which will be developed further in an upcoming government consultation on ticketing.
The secondary ticketing companies will lobby hard against that proposal but, presumably, Live Nation will now be a big supporter of it. Whether a 20% price cap can be added to the various proposed ticketing regulations currently working their way through US Congress remains to be seen.
Some of those proposals are very much focused on regulating resale, while others seek to address wider concerns with the ticketing business - and, in some cases, specifically with the Ticketmaster business.
Obviously, Live Nation would oppose any proposed new laws that interfere too much with its primary ticketing operations. Though, in the short term, the DoJ’s antitrust lawsuit is the bigger concern. On that, Rapino told the Bloomberg conference “we think ultimately we’ll prevail”.
“We service the artist at the end of the day”, he added, “and there are no artist claims in this lawsuit. It’s all competitor claims, which makes sense, and secondary claims. So yeah, we think that when they call balls and strikes, through the process, we will prevail”.