From what I can tell, using Ticketmaster's dynamic pricing is a choice the artist can make (or the artist's company, or some business entity), and assuming the artist's contract is such that they get a percentage of ticket sales, the ticket price is the dynamically calculated price, so the artist does get more money for a dynamically priced seat.
If the artist chooses not to partner with ticketmaster, they will just buy the tickets at retail and scalp them. This is why you hear about so many shows selling out in the first five minutes. It's not real people buying them, it's ticketmaster bots.
0. The tickets not sold by TicketMaster dynamics pricing are resold on StubHub. (Aka TicketMaster)
TicketMaster can extort the performer for a bigger cut because if the performer takes no action, TicketMaster gets the resale, and the performer gets nothing. TicketMaster owns the data, so they can negotiate the dynamic royalty more efficiently and get a yield better than resale.
Ticket Master charged you to print out your own tickets and you think it's unlikely they are keeping more profits? I'm sure the artist is getting more this way through their standard percentage so they see it as win too either way
So what are performers saying? Assuming they're allowed to say anything. Live Nation Entertainment, Inc. (ticker symbol LYV) often acts as the artist's agent, as well as the venue's agent and the ticketing service. Performers are now contract employees of Live Nation. So they may not be allowed to criticize Live Nation.
The funny thing is, LYV, having achieved a near monopoly over ticketing, venues, and performers, loses money.
Why do artists sign with TM / Live Nation? Because they know Live Nation will make them the most money for the least hassle and risk. Artists may also lack a little creativity on what a fan experience looks like. more on that below.
I dislike Ticketmaster as much as the next person, but no one is holding a gun to Blink-182 to come out and perform in a nationwide tour with TM taking all the upside. I just can't fathom that negotiation taking place, unless TM was also guaranteeing revenue to the band, i.e. taking downside risk. Theres no point to that. Also, yes, LiveNation controls an impressive number of venues, but they dont control all the venues, not be a long shot. If the TM deal was such a raw deal for artists, nothing prevents artists from just hosting their own concerts in publicly owned venues, setting up longer term performance residences in interesting locations, or expanding the fan experience from the tired formula of "opener act, 2x 1-hour sets, and an encore" to something better like a collaborative fan experience over a whole weekend. Plenty of opportunity for creativity on the artist's part that would make the artist less money in a night but yield a potentially waaaay better lifestyle and creative process.
At the end of it, Live Nation is a publicly traded company, but not a very attractive one. Lots of debt, rapidly increasing labor costs on the event hosting side, household budgets getting a major squeeze which will impact entertainment spend.
You do understand that Ticketmaster has an effective monopoly and has a past history of sketchy business practices. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if they pocketed it themselves or a large majority of it. It would be completely congruent with their business practices.
Yeah I know TM is sketchy and monopolistic. That doesn't mean they have the leverage to take 90% of the money for themselves. The artists would raise the face value of their tickets to recapture it if it were as simple as that.
We don't know what the details are on how the money is divvied up, but I do know that artists must be getting upside on this dynamic pricing.
> That doesn't mean they have the leverage to take 90% of the money for themselves
Listen, that's exactly what they have. The music business mostly exists to screw artists out of money made from their work, probably more now than ever.
The artist signs a contract to pay for X dollars, that's what they get and they have no leverage whatsoever to go after that upside. Ticketmaster would have to share the data about the dynamic pricing in the first place and they are NOT doing that.
Depends how it works, just as an example (not what they are doing) if ticket master guarantees X seats for Y price. Then the band might be fine with ticket master doing what every they wish -- there's no risk to the band.
Granted the band probably negotiated minimums and a cut. Remember, you also have the venue, security, traffic, marketing, etc. There's a lot involved with these kind of events.
If an artist wants to play a big venue and make money by volume, then they need to grin and bear it.
Because TicketMaster/LiveNation own most of the large music venues in the country. And if you don't use them in a "vertical stack" you don't get to play those venues.
And even at $50/ticket, you make money a lot faster in a 25,000 seat arena than you do trying to play 15 nights at an "intimate" theater (hey, guess what, TM/LN own a huge swathe of those too).
We complain on HN about tech "monopolies" (or debate their existence, at least). TM/LN is a much larger effective monopoly that, to my knowledge, has not had any real investigation.
> Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen will tell you a similar story
Springsteen's team is defending dynamic pricing [1], with Ticketmaster claiming "promoters and artist representatives set pricing strategy and price range parameters on all tickets, including dynamic and fixed price points."