Live Nation CEO talks ticket sales and bots
Bloomberg held an event called Screentime. One of the guests was Thunder Bay-born Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino. He had some things to say about Ticketmaster, ticket sales, and bots.
He said that during the Oasis on-sale, Ticketmaster was hit by “multi-billions” of bots, which are part of a professional US$12 billion bot industry. And people wonder how the shows sold out so fast.
He empathized with fans. saying, “what really pisses them off is: why is there 10 pages of scalpers selling $4,000 tickets? The system must be broken… How did they get all these tickets? Where did they come from?”
He continued: “Ultimately you can explain supply and demand and the lineup. We can get better at the queue and transparency and where you sit in the queue. We can keep working on all those ways. But it doesn’t matter what we do because they really believe the system must be broken if all these scalpers are selling tickets.”
Rapino also came out in favour capping the price of resale tickets.
As for Live Nation/Ticketmaster being a monopoly, he said this: “We’re a 2% margin business, so we must be the dumbest monopoly alive. We give 90-plus percent of the door to the artist, unlike any other business. Are we vertical? Of course, we’re vertical. Every promoter from history has been vertical because that’s how you pay the bills when you’re 2% margin.”
Rapino also took time to slam the “falsehoods and unsubstantiated allegations” in a recent news report on Live Nation.
In related news, Ticketmaster has a new partnership with Apple.
