Obey Your Master, Ticketmaster!

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Speaker 2 And welcome back to WSHIT's continuing coverage of Spam Again in 2025. Tens upon tens of people have fallen victim to an email and telephone scammer, simply known as Spam.

Speaker 2 Crab Apple residents are reminded not to answer any phone calls from Spam, do not respond to Spam, and don't click on links in a message from Spam.

Speaker 2 Due to the ongoing emergency in CrabApple, the mayor has called for township-wide martial law.

Speaker 2 The emergency sirens have been going off non-stop for 47 hours, and in a bit of Schottenfreud, many Crabapplians are receiving spam text messages from emergency services.

Speaker 2 The mayor reminds everyone, these are not spam messages. And now an emergency broadcast communication from the Director of Information Technology and communication services, Deborah Duddles.

Speaker 3 I just wanted to update real quick on the scammer situation because there's more.

Speaker 3 Please remember, I don't talk to people in email, unless it's a business deal, and I haven't had any of those for a while. I don't talk to people in email.

Speaker 3 If they're circulating emails where they're telling you that it's me talking, they're fake. Please do not fall through these scams.

Speaker 3 There are now apparently phone calls going around that are supposed to be me. I don't don't talk on the phone either.

Speaker 2 I don't talk to anybody on the phone.

Speaker 3 I don't do phone calls. I actually hate phone calls.
I'm warning you all to stay safe. Do not let them scam you.
Do not give them money.

Speaker 3 And I'm here to protect you all and warn you that that's not me. Please be safe.

Speaker 2 Tried and true advice from your IT and communications director, Deborah Duddles. Do not use email, do not use phones.
Stay safe, Crab Apple. We'll be back after this commercial break.

Speaker 2 on this episode of the Commercial Break.

Speaker 2 When people are selling Taylor Swift sixth-row tickets for $15,000, $20,000, $25,000, and there's lots of people willing to pay it, why wouldn't you? It's basic economics, supply and demand.

Speaker 2 It really is. Now, so I want you to imagine yourself in a situation.

Speaker 2 I think I know the answer for this for me, but I want to ask you: you're lucky enough to get in quick and you get $350 seats front row or second row, third row, really close to the stage.

Speaker 2 And then someone falls sick a couple weeks ahead of time, and unfortunately, you're unable to go travel. The commercial break needs an extra episode, like we always do, whatever the situation is.

Speaker 2 And now you've, and now you've got these extraordinarily valuable tickets that you can't use.

Speaker 2 The next episode of the commercial break starts now.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, cows and kittens. Welcome back to the commercial break.
I'm Brian Green. This is the dear friend and co-host of the show, Chris Joyodley.
Best to you, Chris. Best to see you Brian.

Speaker 2 Best to you out there on the podcast universe. How the hell are you? Thanks for joining us.
I am watching reels from the recent Florida Gators win of the national

Speaker 2 NCAA March Madness Tournament, if you will, Chrissy. Who would have thunk it?

Speaker 2 The one year Brian decides not to do the brackets and pick all the number ones to go all the way to the Final Four is the one year that all the number ones go to the Final Four.

Speaker 2 I know I picked all four of the Final Fours. You did.
But then to actually go to the championship, my boss. Who'd you pick?

Speaker 2 Well, I had Duke winning it all. Okay.
Yeah. And I, but I had Duke playing

Speaker 2 Florida? No, Auburn. Auburn.
Okay. I would have.

Speaker 2 I also would have picked Duke to go all the way to the end if I had done a Final Four bracket, or I mean a March Madness bracket.

Speaker 2 But like I told you a couple weeks ago, I don't do that because all I do is pick the number ones and it never works out in my favor.

Speaker 2 There's always some Cinderella team that comes and wrecks it for me. And the one year that would have worked out in my favor.

Speaker 2 Unbelievable. But anyway, onward and upward, Masters Week.
I'm watching these reels.

Speaker 2 Masters Week. These kids, I mean, they really have nothing better to do with their time.
Jumping on light posts and one kid falls off the light post. At the Masters? No, this is at the

Speaker 2 down in Florida. Florida, yeah.
Yeah, down at the University of Florida. They went wild in Gainesville.
Wild.

Speaker 2 And one kid on the top of a street sign, like on a top of a traffic light,

Speaker 2 in Florida, the traffic lights have big poles because of the hurricanes. They have poles.
They don't have wires. They have poles and they hang out into the middle of the street.

Speaker 2 He's on top of it, bouncing like an idiot. I don't know what he's proving to anybody.
I don't know what you're doing. Why are people so excited about the guy on the traffic light?

Speaker 2 It's not like he won the national championship, but people are going crazy. Nothing better to do but be drunk.
I mean, listen, I was a kid once, too. I get it.

Speaker 2 He falls off into the street, and as the ambulance is carrying him away, thousands of people watching this, he raises his arm. I got a broken clavicle.
He raises his arm, and the crowd goes wild.

Speaker 2 He's okay. All right.
Cool.

Speaker 2 Are his parents okay after they get that $38,000 hospital bill? I don't know, but you know, congratulations to Florida. Game well played.

Speaker 2 I did watch all of the Final Four and the National Championship. That Houston-Duke game

Speaker 2 was intense. It was intense.
It was insane for

Speaker 2 99% of the game. Duke was clearly just going to walk away with it.
And then all of a sudden, the basketball gods had something else in mind with Houston, and it was well played on both teams.

Speaker 2 That is the way the ball, that's the way the balls bounce, Chrissy, as they say. But congratulations to the University of florida i was looking at

Speaker 2 a tip of the hat to the sec who had a couple teams they did there you go but i was looking at ticket prices the other day i like to do that when the big tournament games come and all the you know razzle dazzle everyone gets excited i like to see which teams are willing to pay which fans are willing to pay the most for the tickets and i did find some reasonably priced championship final four certainly like in the you know hundred dollar range

Speaker 2 or was did we have that no, we had the elite eight, yeah. Uh, and those you could find for fifty bucks, you could be in the nosebleeds for fifty bucks, what very reasonably priced.

Speaker 2 $100 for the Final Four, $150 for the championship game. Now, you're way up there, you're not, you know, you probably won't even be able to see what's going on.

Speaker 2 But those are with the big ticket brokers, StubHub, Vivid Seats, stuff like that.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it

Speaker 2 reminded me of a CBS this morning news

Speaker 2 piece that I had seen, which is probably the most detailed accounting of why concerts,

Speaker 2 sporting events, and any live entertainment right now is so fucking expensive to get into. I'm going to show it to you here.
We'll watch this. We'll listen to it here in a minute.

Speaker 2 And sorry, CBS News, but I think this is a really comprehensive piece, and I think as many people need to hear it as possible so that we all have a better understanding of exactly why you can't get tickets to see your favorite band or artist or sporting event and how the mechanics actually work and how Live Nation and Ticketmaster play into this.

Speaker 2 It has a lot to do with the venues themselves. It has a lot to do with a lot of things.

Speaker 2 Like everything in life, it's complicated.

Speaker 2 And while we all like to make Ticketmaster and Live Nation out to be the bad guy, and I think in a lot of ways they certainly are the heel in this situation,

Speaker 2 it's not just them. I know.

Speaker 2 It's every cog in the wheel that is taking their piece and making it more expensive, not being transparent, employing tactics that are shitty, that don't benefit the consumer.

Speaker 2 So this may not be the funniest episode of the commercial break ever, but we're so interested in music and live events here, given that we've canceled at least four ourselves.

Speaker 2 Somebody asked me about that the other day. They're like, did you reschedule your event in Florida? And I laughed.
Yeah. Yeah, we did.

Speaker 2 But we don't know what the date is yet. Yeah, we don't know what the date is yet.
It's rescheduled. We just don't know what the date is.

Speaker 2 But what surprised Chrissy and I, even about our short dip, our toe dip, our tasty teener into

Speaker 2 the live,

Speaker 2 yeah, our fingernail tip, and then pulled it back out. Just the tip.
We gave you just the tip.

Speaker 2 We told you there was going to be a live event. Some of you bought to get to the live event, and then we yanked it.
That was a rug poll. They call that a rug poll in the business.

Speaker 2 We,

Speaker 2 even in our small experience, we found that the ticket brokering sites were selling tickets for $800.

Speaker 2 Face value, $38.

Speaker 2 No, $58.

Speaker 2 But they were selling tickets for $800.

Speaker 2 Now, I am sure no one bought $800 tickets because if they did, they got royally fucked. And I'm really sorry.
But that's not exactly,

Speaker 2 that is the norm right now. It is not the exception.
It's the norm.

Speaker 2 Even the smallest of events, even the most useless entertainment you could ever see is getting super high ticket prices because all of these people are trying to dip their fingers in the pot, so to speak.

Speaker 2 And this is causing a lot of problems all across the board. Let me give you an example, one that you were sharing with me the other day, and I went and did some more research on it.

Speaker 2 Lincoln Park, the venerable

Speaker 2 alt-rock,

Speaker 2 you know, I don't even know what, I don't, what do you new rock, I guess would probably be the best, new spelled N-U rock,

Speaker 2 90s, 2000s

Speaker 2 band that had some hits, no doubt.

Speaker 2 Chester Benning Field. Just like No Doubt.
Just like No Doubt. That's right.
Just like No Doubt. They were like new Ska or something, Ska Rock or something like that.

Speaker 2 But Lincoln Park was one of the first on the scene with this brand of kind of hip-hop, hip-hop rock, heavy metal,

Speaker 2 you know, synthesized beats, rapping. if you could call it that and really in-your-face hard rock along with some other melodic kind of more i would call more grungy stuff.

Speaker 2 They kind of mixed it all together, this mishmash rock. And they hit on something like a cultural zeitgeist.
They had a moment where they were really popular.

Speaker 2 And Chester, the lead singer of the band, now they had, they had not been as popular for a number of years, but I think they were highly regarded with their fans. And Chester died.

Speaker 2 And I don't, I don't, what did he die of? An overdose? Did he die of an overdose? I think so.

Speaker 2 It was. Oh, suicide.
Yeah, maybe.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he unalived himself, as they like to say on the internet. He unalived himself.
I think

Speaker 2 I don't want to misspeak about that because I don't want to be disrespectful to Chester.

Speaker 2 Chester Bennington death.

Speaker 2 Let me see here. Death.

Speaker 2 Yes, unalived by hanging.

Speaker 2 And the details aren't important. What's important is that he unalived himself in a moment when Lincoln Park was not at their zenith.
They were not at their most powerful. They had seen their moment.

Speaker 2 Like oftentimes, this happens with every major musical act. They see their height.
They fall from grace in the public's eye.

Speaker 2 The public gets sick of hearing all about it, hearing the same song over and over again, whatever it is. And then they go away for a while.
And then everything old becomes new again.

Speaker 2 And they see a resurgence in popularity. We're seeing that all over the board, all over the map right now with 80s bands,

Speaker 2 80s bands of musical acts, 90s bands and musical acts. Some have stayed.
Frankie Valley. Frankie Valley 50s acts.

Speaker 2 That guy is dead. I'm still not convinced he's alive.

Speaker 2 I still go Google Frankie Valley and tell me, and Google Frankie Valley Live and look at any of the concert footage from the last three years and tell me you're not 100% convinced that's not a Boston Dynamics robot with Frankie Valley's actual skin pasted on it.

Speaker 2 it. It's amazing.

Speaker 2 But his mouth doesn't move. He's singing, but his mouth doesn't move.
Or they claim he's singing. And it's so hard to tell.
And I consider myself a master lip sync artist, like a detector.

Speaker 2 Anyway,

Speaker 2 so

Speaker 2 right now,

Speaker 2 The concert business, especially the concert business, is just insane.

Speaker 2 And we all know this because we are seeing one of the, we are alive at a time where we are seeing one of the artists who is truly at the zenith of popularity, Taylor Swift.

Speaker 2 She just went on her world tour

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 you couldn't get a ticket. And if you could get a ticket, you were paying thousands of dollars, even for the nosebleed seats.
or the standing on standing room only seats, thousands of dollars.

Speaker 2 And if you went to a Taylor Swift concert during that period of time, you will know that every ticket was standing room only. Everybody was standing, screaming and singing the songs.

Speaker 2 You could almost not hear her. It almost made it unenjoyable.
I went and saw her at her last concert in LA, the one that's on Disney Plus right now.

Speaker 2 And I,

Speaker 2 it was a gift to my wife, and it was the most expensive ticket I have ever paid for. And it was insane, but worth it to see her face, to see the enjoyment in her face.

Speaker 2 But it was just crazy to me that we were paying these kinds of ticket prices. And

Speaker 2 Lincoln Park is not at the zenith of their power. Chester passes away.

Speaker 2 Then years later, six, seven, eight, 10 years later, they decide they're going to put the band back together, but with a new lead singer. Some would say a PR problematic singer.

Speaker 2 She has some ties to the Church of Scientology and some other cultish type behavior. But some people really like her voice.
in place of Chester's, and some people don't appreciate it.

Speaker 2 But they announced a tour where they were playing stadiums, 50,000, 60,000, 70,000 seats.

Speaker 2 And you told me the other day that they were having problems selling those tickets and they were downsizing the venues.

Speaker 2 Opening acts like Queens of the Stone Age were pulling out, probably because they couldn't be paid the same amount of money with a different sized venue. I would imagine.

Speaker 2 You know, I don't think they were like, no, fuck Lincoln Park. They were probably thinking to themselves, well, this isn't a good payday for us.

Speaker 2 And they're downsizing

Speaker 2 because they cannot sell the tickets at the price they need to sell them to in order to make the money they expected to make or to pay the crew or to fit those kind of arenas.

Speaker 2 They are even discounting tickets from $59 down to $39, the cheapest of seats, which is today's day and age is a pretty reasonable ticket. And there are still lots of seats available to these tickets.

Speaker 2 We heard this with, um, who else are we? We've heard this about Katy Perry. We've heard this about who else just had to roll back her shows?

Speaker 2 Jennifer Lopez had to roll back, cancel her shows.

Speaker 2 Who are the two guys? The one that plays piano, not white stripes, but

Speaker 2 one plays piano, one plays bass. Do you know who I'm talking about?

Speaker 2 Black Keys.

Speaker 2 The Black Keys had to cancel all of their stadium dates and arena dates and go to smaller clubs. This is happening more frequently.

Speaker 2 The reason is because you and I have less money to spend on tickets right now because every ticket that we buy is exorbitantly expensive because you can't get them when they go on sale at the normal price.

Speaker 2 And even at the normal price, they're exorbitantly expensive. Comedy shows, entertainment, live show, all of it.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 there's a complicated hodgepodge of reasons why that is.

Speaker 2 But the artist can no longer afford to go to a place like, say, Dodgers Stadium, like Lincoln Park was scheduled to play, and only sell two-thirds of the seats.

Speaker 2 They need to sell 100% of the seats in order just to make the kind of money they need, probably to cover the costs and get a little bit of money themselves.

Speaker 2 And so, rather than take the chance that they won't, even six months ahead of time, and they can see it coming down the pike, they decide to go to an 18,000-seat venue rather than a 60,000-seat venue.

Speaker 2 So, they have a chance of breaking even and making money themselves. It used to not be like that.

Speaker 2 There were lots of concerts that I used to go to when I was a teenager and in my 20s, where it wasn't sold out. But now you won't go to a not sold out concert because

Speaker 2 same with planes because you cannot make money with a not sold out venue. The venue charges as much as possible to the band.
The crew does. The equipment's expensive.
The merch is expensive to make.

Speaker 2 And then you've got to deal with Ticketmaster, Live Nation, StubHub, Vivid Seats. It is a...
complicated thing that is going on. And it's not just one bad guy.

Speaker 2 There's many bad guys and then many people who are just trying to make a living doing this. I'm going to see a lot of concerts this summer, already got a lot of concerts lined up.

Speaker 2 And I'm thinking about divesting of some of those concert tickets because quite frankly, it's expensive to travel to go see them. Like I wanted to get Oasis tickets.
I got Oasis tickets in Chicago.

Speaker 2 But now I'm realizing that everybody along the way is going to charge me an arm and a leg to get there, to stay there, to be there. And the tickets were,

Speaker 2 I had to buy them through Ticketmaster because Oasis put a stop to StubHub and places like that selling them. Now I've noticed that StubHub does have the tickets and they're selling them.
Okay.

Speaker 2 I might know someone who wants to buy those for me. Okay, well, let me know.
It might be one of the concerts I just have to let go because it's so fucking expensive. How did we get here?

Speaker 2 Why can't we go see a show for $40, $50, $60

Speaker 2 even like we used to? And I'm talking about inflation-adjusted numbers.

Speaker 2 When I went to,

Speaker 2 I'll give you an example. When I went to a fish

Speaker 2 when I was 17 years old, 16, 17 years old, I paid $20 for the ticket. That included the fees, 20 bucks.
20 bucks. I would get in.
I would sit on the lawn. I'd be able to see the band.

Speaker 2 It probably wasn't 100% sold out. The experience was good.
If I wanted a fish shirt, I'd throw in an extra $7 or $10 and that would be it.

Speaker 2 Now, if I want to go see fish, I'm paying $150, if not $200 to sit anywhere in the building, and I'm going to pay an extra $70 for a fish shirt, $15 for a beer, $30 for a hot dog and some French fries or whatever it is.

Speaker 2 I mean, honestly, it's just kind of like they're going to rob you every bit of the way. It's not fish that's doing that.
It's because that's where we are in this kind of experience.

Speaker 2 And it's really, I don't know, upsetting to me as an entertainment lover that we've... we've gotten here.
How does Jeff deal?

Speaker 2 Do they sell out Menfo or do they typically have some tickets available at the door? They They have tickets available at the door.

Speaker 2 Okay, so they don't really deal too much with the pressures of like the stub hubs and the vivids. I mean, they're independent, too.
Yeah,

Speaker 2 they don't use.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, they do have to. I mean, you have to use a ticket broker.
So they use

Speaker 2 Access? It's somebody that's

Speaker 2 Ticketmaster adjacent. Okay.
Because there's, you know, Ticketmaster has all of these different other things. Yeah, they do.
Yeah, they do.

Speaker 2 But yeah, but they have a great deal with the venue that they have the show at. Right.
And then they charge a reasonable price. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I wish it could all be like because they're independent, though, I think. Yeah.
It can't be. They're the promoter, too.

Speaker 2 Because Ticketmaster owns the ticketing business, Live Nation owns the venue business, and Ticketmaster owns Live Nation. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So when they put together a concert or even a comedy tour, they come and they say,

Speaker 2 Don't worry about it, Mr. Musician or Mrs.
Musician. We're going to give you X amount of dollars per show.
You, X amount of dollars per show.

Speaker 2 Sometimes it works like this if you're a big enough artist. We're going to give you X amount of dollars per show.
We'll do the promoting. We'll sell the tickets.

Speaker 2 We'll manage everything else down the line. But the amount of money that they make is barely a living wage in a lot of cases, like these medium-sized clubs, these people are playing.

Speaker 2 It's really hard to be a musician, like a regionally successful musician. It's really hard to be one of those these days.
When I was in 33 Penis

Speaker 2 and Chopper Johnson, both my phallic-related bands,

Speaker 2 the music wasn't particularly good.

Speaker 2 But here's how it went: we would get booked at a club and we would be responsible for selling our own tickets, promoting our own show, and then the venue itself would do their own bit of promotion.

Speaker 2 They'd say, These bands are going to be there this night. They'd advertise in the local rags.
Maybe they'd put a radio spot on or two. Nothing dramatic.

Speaker 2 But, you know, we're also talking about 300 seat, 300 people standing in a room. And then they would say,

Speaker 2 if you get to anything over 100 people, we'll split the door with you, right? And that door was 10 bucks. And if we were lucky, we'll give you 5% of the bar, right?

Speaker 2 Where they really make their money, 5% of the bar.

Speaker 2 And it'll be the manager's responsibility to go figure all that stuff out, to keep an eye on the door, to click the button, to look at the bar tab at the end of the night of the bar roll or whatever it was.

Speaker 2 It doesn't work like that anymore. These people are getting paid peanuts by everybody along the line.
Spotify, Ticketmaster, Live Nation. Live Nation owns the venue.

Speaker 2 Ticketmaster is charging a bunch of ticket fees that then they give most back to the venue, which I don't think a lot of people know that.

Speaker 2 And the venue is in bed with them because that's how they make money. They make money on the fees.
It's not just Ticketmaster making money for themselves.

Speaker 2 It's Ticketmaster making money for the venue, but the venue then also charges the band for all of the services and just using the room or the musician or whoever it is.

Speaker 2 It's a terrible system that is set up for failure every single step of the way.

Speaker 2 And that's not even adding into the question about whether or not StubHub, Vivid Seats, and any number thousands of ticket brokers that are out there.

Speaker 2 And now the evil part about this is, and I say it's evil, I don't argue with anybody making their own money, but the evil part about this is, is that just like everything else in our life,

Speaker 2 It has become a coaching business.

Speaker 2 People are coaching other people how to be independent ticket brokers, to take those tickets that you so desperately want to the band, to see the band, the music, the comedy, whatever it is, teaching individuals like you or me how to use bots and multiple computers and IP addresses and masking systems and all this and selling them that software and subscription services to be your own ticket broker so that you can get the ticket for Taylor Swift that my daughter so desperately wants and resell it to me for thousands of dollars more.

Speaker 2 Yeah, crazy. The resale market's crazy.
Yes. This has become an MLM, essentially.
It's an MLM.

Speaker 2 And even though there's a real product involved, the independent ticket brokers can charge whatever they want, and they do. So some people say, free market, baby, free market.

Speaker 2 But are we getting to the point where you can only afford to go see one concert every two years because you're going to pay $3,000 to see even the shittiest of bands who normally you wouldn't even think twice about paying $50, let alone $1,000, but that's just the way it is now.

Speaker 2 Free market, I agree with, and so does my phone.

Speaker 2 Free market, I agree with, but sometimes I think it has its limitations. And so that's why the commercial break is now selling tickets.

Speaker 2 We've become a ticket broker. Welcome to the Commercial Break Brokers.

Speaker 2 TCBB. TCBB, get your favorite concert tickets here.

Speaker 2 Got to make money somehow on this stupid fucking show, or my wife's going to divorce me. So there you go.
There it is. All right.

Speaker 2 I want to listen to this CBS This Morning piece and talk about it because I think it's an interesting piece, interesting enough to carry us through an episode.

Speaker 2 And we're on vacation right now while you're listening to this, so it's low-hanging fruit, quite frankly. Yeah, I'm being a ticket broker right now.
I'm brokering off some bad content on your for you.

Speaker 2 All right, we'll be back.

Speaker 4 You make this rather snappy, won't you? I have somebody thinking to do before 10 o'clock.

Speaker 6 Hi, cats and kittens. Rachel here.
Do you ever get the urge to speak endlessly into the void? Like Brian? Well, I've got just the place for you to do that. 212-433-3TCB.
That's 212-433-3822.

Speaker 6 Feel free to call and yell all you want. Tell Brian I need a race.

Speaker 8 Compliment Chrissy's innate ability to put up with all his shenanigans.

Speaker 9 Or tell us a little story.

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Speaker 6 Also, give us a follow on your favorite socials at the Commercial Break on Insta, TCB Podcast on TikTok. And for those of you who like to watch, oh, that came out wrong.

Speaker 6 We put all the episodes out on video: youtube.com/slash thecommercial break and tcbpodcast.com for all the info on the show, your free sticker, or just to see how pretty we look. Okay, I gotta go now.

Speaker 6 I've got a date with my dog. No, seriously, Axel needs food.
Today is pork chop day.

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Speaker 10 This is Free Range with Von Miller, the podcast where I step outside the lines and I take you with me.

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Speaker 2 All right, back talking about the ticketing business when it comes to live entertainment and how it's just gotten out of hand, out of control.

Speaker 2 I don't have any solutions because I never do have have any solutions, but I thought that I would just bring it to the attention. This is a really good piece that is done by CBS News this morning.

Speaker 2 Just to be clear, we didn't do the journalism. No, there's no journalism here at the commercial break.
We're

Speaker 2 other hardworking journalists did this. So stop by the CBS News this morning website or YouTube channel or whatever to watch this in its entirety.

Speaker 2 But we're going to listen to it because I think it's important and I believe that it needs a little bit more attention than I think CBS News this morning can give it.

Speaker 2 So I don't know how many of our listeners are tuning into CBS News this morning, but here we go

Speaker 5 It was 1083 for two tickets the market is the market the prices are the prices going to a concert has become an accomplishment is one second you don't have any extra time tickets are more expensive than ever and seemingly harder to get I do know there's probably stuff out there that a retail fan has no shot at getting.

Speaker 2 This guy who's talking is basically talking in his garage. Yeah.
Right. And by the way, this is.

Speaker 2 Yeah, this is a Georgia ticket broker he's talking to. We'll get to that part, but.

Speaker 5 We've spent the last year trying to understand how this happened.

Speaker 12 Ticketmaster is kind of the fall guy in this.

Speaker 5 Talking to artists.

Speaker 13 Here's an example of a good deal memo.

Speaker 2 Scalpers.

Speaker 4 He made over 34,000 in one month.

Speaker 5 And executives is Ticketmaster a Monopoly that the company's controlling concert ticketing. Why does StubHub deserve the biggest share of that woman's purchase?

Speaker 5 This is the story of how the industry got here and how it might soon change.

Speaker 2 We can get those Sundays.

Speaker 4 Hold off on Saturdays still though, okay?

Speaker 5 On a Friday night in LA, the emo rock band Something Corporate is playing a reunion show at the Hollywood Palladium.

Speaker 5 Fans have been paying about $70 for tickets to the tour.

Speaker 2 When

Speaker 2 But where is... I've never heard of this band.
Have you ever heard of Something's Corporate? I have

Speaker 2 a frame, but yeah, not

Speaker 2 about the menu. Sorry,

Speaker 2 I'm not informed about this band.

Speaker 5 Exactly. Do those $70 go? Something corporate front man, Andrew McMahon, agreed to share those usually secret details for a show.

Speaker 13 Here's an example of a good deal memo.

Speaker 5 His team just blacked out exactly which show it was.

Speaker 2 What do we have here?

Speaker 2 I noticed the name of the agency on the top of that.

Speaker 5 Start, the band set a ticket price of $56.

Speaker 13 There's a gross potential of a couple hundred thousand dollars being made.

Speaker 5 But out of that 200 grand in ticket sales, half is deducted for venue-related show costs.

Speaker 13 37 grand in stage hand.

Speaker 2 Jesus, $104,000 to rent the palladium, where they probably seat 3,000 people, 4,000 people, maybe.

Speaker 5 Leaving the band with a $100,000 payday. But most of that goes to the band's own expenses.

Speaker 11 Commissions and fees and payroll.

Speaker 5 Their management takes a quarter. Travel and crew costs take another.

Speaker 2 Their management takes a quarter.

Speaker 2 They got to get a new management team. That's crazy.
Quarter.

Speaker 5 Meanwhile, that $56 ticket has had fees added, though artists don't get that money.

Speaker 5 So once you take away the venue show costs and the band's touring expenses, something corporate's actual profit from that $70 ticket is about $10.

Speaker 2 Okay, so let's do the math there. Three, four thousand people sit at the Hollywood Palladium.
I'm assuming, I'm just making an educated, non-educated guess. I'm making an educated, non-educated guess.

Speaker 2 So they're going to make $30 to $40,000. Looks like there's seven people in the band.

Speaker 2 So they're each going to walk away with $6 or $7,000 for a night's worth of work, but maybe they're only working 100 nights a year, 110 nights a year.

Speaker 2 If you're lucky, I mean, these guys look like they're a little bit older, right? So they're not,

Speaker 2 and I don't think they're fish. I don't think they're working 250 nights a year, or I don't even think fish does that anymore.
But

Speaker 2 so you're making $70,000, $80,000, $90,000 a year on touring. That's not...

Speaker 2 No, I'm sorry. That's $700,000.
Oh, yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, never mind.
That's pretty good money.

Speaker 11 That's good money.

Speaker 13 And then we split that five ways.

Speaker 5 Yeah. McMahon isn't complaining that's still seven grand each for a night's work.

Speaker 2 Oh, wow, my math was right.

Speaker 2 Look at me. I did that all in my head.

Speaker 2 Except I didn't add a zero.

Speaker 2 We love you, Los Angeles. Thank you for a beautiful night.

Speaker 5 But the point here is each dollar fans pay to enjoy the show is fought over by artists, venues, ticket companies, and scalpers.

Speaker 2 And time and again, the industry's solution to these fights has been to just charge fans a bit Yeah, see, I think that's really the issue is that at the end of the day, it comes down to how much is the consumer willing to pay.

Speaker 2 So the more that we feed the beast, the more that they continue to charge.

Speaker 2 When people are selling Taylor Swift sixth row tickets for $15,000, $20,000, $25,000, and there's lots of people willing to pay it, why wouldn't you? It's basic economics, supply and demand.

Speaker 2 It really is. Now, so I want you to imagine yourself in a situation.
I think I know the answer for this for me, but I want to ask you.

Speaker 2 You pop on Ticketmaster, wait in the line to get the Taylor Swift tickets for the show here in Atlanta, and you're lucky enough to get in quick and you get $350 seats front row or second row, third row, really close to the stage.

Speaker 2 And then someone falls sick a couple of weeks ahead of time, and unfortunately, you're unable to go travel. The commercial break needs an extra episode like we always do, whatever the situation is.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 now you've got these extraordinarily valuable tickets that you can't use. And you look on the marketplace, StubHub, and StubHub says you can probably get $25,000 a piece for these tickets.

Speaker 2 We're going to take a 10% commission, $2,500 a piece, or whatever the commission is. It's probably way more than that.
But we're going to do that.

Speaker 2 But you can sell them on our marketplace or you can go to the Ticketmaster website and sell them for $350

Speaker 2 like you bought them for. Yeah.
What would be your choice? Well, I mean,

Speaker 2 that's a big difference. Okay.
But normally I would say just as long as I can get my money back. Now, if somebody's going to pay $25,000.
$25,000. That's what those tickets were going for.

Speaker 2 Some of them were going for. Not all of them, but some of them, the best of seats and the best of shows in the more affluent areas, Miami, L.A., Shortshaws.

Speaker 2 Well, at that point, too, it's a lot of corporate stuff, you know, corporate people that are buying them or people that just have tons of money to buy them. People that have tons of money to buy them.

Speaker 2 And that's the problem is that just like Disney World has become a premium, only rich people kind of afford it experience, concerts are now becoming that way.

Speaker 2 A large amount of them are becoming that way. I'll tell you a little story.

Speaker 2 Before we move on here, i'll tell you a little story when i was a bartender at lustrada and i was giving myself chiante clásico under the under the bar while day old bread day old bread not only day old bread day old bread that had been on someone else's table i mean that's insane but anyway it's not open anymore so don't call me about it i don't want to hear about it um it's not it's not open anymore i wonder why

Speaker 2 i can only imagine um

Speaker 2 when i was working there i ended up meeting a guy at the end of the bar who would come in often, older gentleman, probably in his late 50s, early 60s. Not the Coke dealer.
No.

Speaker 2 But that guy was sitting at the end of the bar, too. Yeah.
Because he knew that every dime I made would go right into his pocket. It was like I was working for him.

Speaker 2 You do the work.

Speaker 2 You give it to me. How's that? He was his own brother.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So the guy and I became friendly over the course of a couple of months.

Speaker 2 And one day I asked him what he did because he always seemed to be, he was, you know, driving around a nice Mercedes, surrounded by by younger, beautiful women. He was very eccentric, right?

Speaker 2 And you could just tell he was. He drank the best wine, champagne, you know, get this girl whatever she wanted to get there.
Only the best.

Speaker 2 Only the best for you. That's why I'm at Lestrade

Speaker 2 eating soft shell crabs and three-day old bread.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 I learned at the time that he was buying tickets. He was was paying people to stand in line or doing it himself.
Stand in line. That used to be what you did.

Speaker 2 At the box office, buying the tickets and then reselling them on this black market that was very virgin ground at the time, very young.

Speaker 2 But he was making $200, $300,000, $400 sometimes on a ticket on the most in-demand of concerts. Most tickets he was making $50 or $60 or $100.

Speaker 2 But he was doing it in volume and he was building an organization. He had four or five people working for him.
He had an office down in Buckhead.

Speaker 2 He was doing it and he was well connected in the music industry. A lot of times, the bands would give him their tickets.
I've heard of that too. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And we'll get to this in the story, but the bands would give him their tickets.

Speaker 2 Let's say a guy like Ari Shafir comes into town. Ari Shafir comes into town.
And Ari has 20 tickets available per the contract to give away at his disposal.

Speaker 2 Not the best tickets, but good tickets, right?

Speaker 2 And he says yeah brian chrissy and any what other hangers on brian wants to ask me to send to the show and maybe a couple of other strain you know people that i know in atlanta but i got 10 of those tickets left not ari but a lot of times bands and musicians when they especially when the tickets are in demand they will give those over to someone that they know that will then resell them maybe not directly to the ticket broker but kind of directly to

Speaker 2 somebody who knows the ticket broker and then that's a way that the band would make a little bit of extra cash for the the night, especially the bands that were on a run.

Speaker 2 The hot band, Lincoln Park, not included in that. But you understand what I'm saying.
Jen Lopez, not selling her tickets to the ticket brokers.

Speaker 2 Wasn't Justin Bieber, wasn't there a thing about him doing that?

Speaker 2 He was doing it.

Speaker 2 I think that the boss, Bruce Springsteen, at one point, had, there was mumblings that he was doing it. There was...

Speaker 2 And I don't know any of this to be true or not. And I like Bruce Springsteen.
I don't see why he needed to do that if he did that, but maybe he didn't. Who knows?

Speaker 2 But it's not uncommon, and it's not uncommon for your favorite football player, basketball player, baseball player to sell their tickets on the black market either because they have the best seats in the house.

Speaker 2 And who's going to go to 162 home games for the brand? What family member, maybe your wife or your husband, or maybe, maybe your kids, but certainly not filling out 10 seats every single game.

Speaker 2 Why wouldn't you make a little extra cash?

Speaker 2 So, this guy introduced me to the business and taught me how it worked and on occasion i would go stand at a box office for him to get these tickets i didn't think much of it at the time this was before or after jamland production this was uh before jamland

Speaker 2 uh but during my

Speaker 2 13 year long uh bud light and cocaine induced aids

Speaker 2 Yes. I didn't think much of it at the time.
I really didn't because there were so few people who even knew about ticket brokers that it wasn't like a thing.

Speaker 2 And he did sell a lot of tickets to corporations, to people, you know, people who could afford them, put them on the corporate card, whatever.

Speaker 2 And at that time, when you saw, when there was a $20 ticket and you sold it for $65,

Speaker 2 to me, even back then, it was like, hey, you know, whatever.

Speaker 2 It's an in-demand ticket. This has been going on for time immemorial.
This is nothing new that these ticket brokers do this.

Speaker 2 But what they do is they suck up available tickets for fans who are really diehard, who are standing out there in the cold and the wet and the rain. Not anymore,

Speaker 2 who are sitting at home in their pajamas, clicking on

Speaker 2 clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking. Yes.

Speaker 2 Refresh, refresh, refresh.

Speaker 15 Tickets go for so high now.

Speaker 5 Consider the history of the infamous ticket fee. In the 80s, as artists demanded a bigger cut of the box office, venues scrambled for new revenue.

Speaker 5 Ticket fees, which cut out the artist, were the answer, says New York Times music writer Ben Cesario.

Speaker 14 There was a guy named Fred Rosen who became the CEO of Ticketmaster, and he's the person who really created the modern ticketing business as we know it.

Speaker 11 You know, it was field of dreams.

Speaker 4 If you build it, they will come. And they did.

Speaker 5 What Rosen built was a network of ticket outlets and phone centers that made it easy for fans to buy. That was new.

Speaker 2 18 to 20.

Speaker 5 But for that convenience,

Speaker 5 they were charged higher and higher fees.

Speaker 2 Handling charge? I mean, just to touch it, they charge you $3 for it. Fans.

Speaker 2 $3.

Speaker 2 Those were the days. $3.

Speaker 5 Cleaned, but venues signed on because, and this was the key part, Ticketmaster let those venues keep most of the fee.

Speaker 12 Yeah, Ticketmaster is kind of the fall guy in this. It's set up for that purpose.

Speaker 2 Fred Rosen. That's a very interesting point.
that I think is important to hear. Ticketmaster gives most of those fees back to the the venue.

Speaker 2 It's how Ticketmaster gets the business of the venue is they bribe them essentially. They say, we'll do all the hard work as far as the ticketing is concerned.
Or they just buy the venue.

Speaker 2 Yeah, or they just buy the venue through Live Nation. That's right.
Or they manage it or whatever it is.

Speaker 2 But Ticketmaster becomes the fall guy because they're set up to be the fall guy and they're okay with that because it's such a lucrative business.

Speaker 12 He used to say that his client is not the consumer.

Speaker 2 It's the venue. Yeah.

Speaker 12 He's there to take the heat for that venue.

Speaker 5 in exchange for taking that heat ticketmaster won control the exclusive right to sell all the tickets in the 90s pearl jam tried to escape this system even taking their case to congress the issue at hand here is whether ticketmaster is a monopoly but that failed and venues and other man a for effort pearl jam i know a for effort yes of them to try they saw it coming and they knew what was going on and they

Speaker 2 all of them valiantly fought that effort. It's so much so that for one whole tour, like one year, two years.
I remember that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they would only sell tickets through their own fan club or whatever it was. But they were losing money at a huge clip when they were the biggest band in rock and roll.
They were losing money.

Speaker 2 They weren't able to play the venues they wanted to. And it became, you can't set up your own Ticketmaster.
And when you're Pearl Jam, how do you do that? It's a billion-dollar corporation.

Speaker 5 Artists stuck with Ticketmaster.

Speaker 12 In the UK and in Europe, they have a different ticketing system. And it's usually not these exclusive contracts.

Speaker 12 The cost of a ticket and the cost of a fee overseas tends to be a lot lower than in the U.S.

Speaker 2 But artists like touring in the U.S. because they make more money here.

Speaker 2 These people are really going to pay it. Yeah, that's right.
Because we're the dum-dums who are willing to pay the fee.

Speaker 5 The concert scene is shaped by the combined power of Ticketmaster and Live Nation.

Speaker 2 Or buy it and pay later. on your

Speaker 2 craziest shit.

Speaker 2 I was seeing the New Orleans, not the Jazz Fest, but there's another major music festival that happens down in New Orleans. Do you know what I'm talking about? I can't remember the name of it.

Speaker 2 It's like

Speaker 2 under the

Speaker 2 under the Derby delay. I don't even remember what it was, but there are huge bands that are playing four days.
It was like a lineup that I've never seen before, rivaling Jazz Fest.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 they have tickets that go up into the $2,500 for super VIP experience and all this other stuff. You know, heated bathrooms and people that wipe your ass and all this other shit, all this premium shit.

Speaker 2 Put it on layaway.

Speaker 2 You can, yeah, pay, put $500 down now, pay us $50 a month forever and ever and 15% interest. It's crazy.
Yeah, well, and plus, you too, you get caught up like, oh my God, I really want to be there.

Speaker 2 I really want to see the experience. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And so the fact that you were able to actually buy tickets, like say for a Taylor Swift or like Prince's last shows, I remember this, us doing this, just like the fact that we could even just get them, just put them on the credit card quick, you know, and then, yeah, people get caught up with that.

Speaker 5 They merged in 2010, and now some venues say Ticketmaster isn't helping them out, but specifically supporting Live Nation, which owns their own venues and promotes their own artists.

Speaker 12 We can't compete.

Speaker 5 Steven Parker, executive director of the National Independent Venue Association, says Live Nation uses its power across the industry to strangle competition.

Speaker 11 Basically making it so that artists have to play every single date at Live Nation venues or Live Nation-operated venues or Live Nation partner venues.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's the problem is that the artists, if they want to be in the big leagues and make that, you know, make a living doing this, they have to get in bed with Ticketmaster and Live Nation.

Speaker 2 Pearl Jam learned that lesson the hard way, but

Speaker 2 it's the way that the system has been. It's by design.

Speaker 5 Last May, the Department of Justice made a similar claim.

Speaker 2 It is time to break it up.

Speaker 5 Saying Live Nation and Ticketmaster illegally use their power to push down competition and push up ticket prices. Is Ticketmaster a monopoly?

Speaker 17 Well, obviously, there's a claim that we are.

Speaker 5 Dan Wall is the antitrust lawyer who helped get the Ticketmaster.

Speaker 2 He's the antitrust lawyer who's making a billion dollars a year defending Ticketmaster.

Speaker 2 Live Nation merger approved in the first place he calls the doj's case a performance look at that guy's office look at that guy's office

Speaker 5 it's amazing unbelievable to be that guy for one day active lawsuit that would have no impact on ticket prices the justice department is trying to break you up you have senators on both sides of the aisle saying you're a monopoly there was a poll that said 60 of americans think the two companies should be broken up Why are they all wrong about this?

Speaker 17 We are obviously the leading company in this industry. There's no doubt about that.

Speaker 2 And I think that's an interesting way of putting it. It creates a certain yeah.
What do you think this guy's going to say? We are the leading podcast on my street

Speaker 17 of jealousy. I think it creates a certain amount of rivalry, certain amount of fear.

Speaker 17 But we stand by what we do. It is the one-ticketing company.

Speaker 2 Well, of course you do. You have to.
You're being paid by them to say that. I mean, take a look at it from the consumer point of view or the musician's point of view.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 is there a better way?

Speaker 2 I don't know. I don't have the answer to that.
Is the better way buying tickets by mailing Eddie Vetter?

Speaker 2 Please send me two tickets to your concert. Here's a check for $50.

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 17 In this country, that is 100% on the side of the artist and the fan, not run for the benefit of ticket brokers and ticket scalpers and big resale prices and big resale fees.

Speaker 2 It is complicated too because these venues, you know, as a fan, you want to go to a venue that's a good venue.

Speaker 2 Of course, you want to be nice offers things that you would like to purchase there that has good lighting, has good stuff. And so these venues have to pay, you have to pay for it.
Exactly.

Speaker 2 Do you want to go see Brian fall off a stage in Tuscaloosa, Alabama? Or do you want to go to,

Speaker 2 I don't know, wherever it is, to the Coca-Cola Rocks, it's brand spanking new, beautiful, well-run, you know, merch is in pretty places.

Speaker 2 I mean, even the Variety Playhouse now, that used to be a dive bar that was really big. Now it's a clean, sparkly, shiny place in the middle of little fucking five points.

Speaker 2 It lost a little bit of its luster because now it's got a lot of bluster, so to speak. I mean, I hate to use the rhyme, but I do it all the time.

Speaker 2 And it is a complicated question about whether or not this is the right way or the wrong way to do it, because it is the system we have, like it or not. It is the system we have.

Speaker 2 And whether you like it or not, I bet you like sitting in your pajamas, pressing refresh, trying to get those tickets rather than standing out in the rain, going to the box office, calling somebody up and trying to have them walk you through getting tickets, or better yet, again, sending an envelope to your favorite band and hoping that you get tickets in some silly lottery that doesn't make sense.

Speaker 2 This is a complicated system. Now, he said we are on the side of the musician and the consumer, not the big resale companies charging high prices.
You're also charging high prices. It starts with you.

Speaker 2 You're charging $50 ticket fees on $70 tickets. That is insanity.
How can you charge a $50 ticket fee? I agree what you do is valuable. I agree the service you offer is convenient.
$50 convenient?

Speaker 2 I don't even make $7 an hour working here at the Commercial Break.

Speaker 2 And I think we can all agree that the Commercial Break has built something quite amazing.

Speaker 2 We're independent. It rivals Life Nation and Ticketmaster.
We are independent. Yes, thank you.
No big corporations here. No big podcast here.

Speaker 2 All right, let's take a break. We'll get back to it.

Speaker 2 Let me do something Brian has never done. Be brief.

Speaker 6 Follow us on Instagram at thecommercial break. Text or call us 212-433-3TCB.
That's 212-433-3822. Visit our website, tcbpodcast.com, for all the audio, video, and your free sticker.

Speaker 6 Then watch all the videos at youtube.com slash thecommercial break. And finally, share the show.
It's the best gift you could give a few aging podcasters. See, Brian?

Speaker 2 That really wasn't that difficult now, was it?

Speaker 6 You're welcome.

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Speaker 2 Okay, let's get back to the CBS Saturday morning report here.

Speaker 4 Want to have a good cue?

Speaker 5 The real problem with ticketing, Wall says we can get those Sundays.

Speaker 4 Hold off on Saturdays, still low, okay?

Speaker 5 Is caused by scalpers.

Speaker 4 I mean, I do know there's probably stuff out there that a retail fan has no shot at getting.

Speaker 2 Well, thank you. Thank you for that.

Speaker 2 Thank you for that, Mr. Independent Ticket Broker.

Speaker 5 All Things Go is a two-day music festival at the Meriwether Post Pavilion in Maryland.

Speaker 26 So it's just concert tickets. What do you think?

Speaker 10 Very hard to get.

Speaker 5 Last summer, Leve, Renee Rapp, and Hosier topped the bill.

Speaker 15 It sold out so fast.

Speaker 5 Like so many on sales these days.

Speaker 2 It's one second. You don't have any extra time.

Speaker 5 Buying tickets was a kind of competition.

Speaker 2 I was clicking on the websites and it was all sold out. So then I started Googling like, you know, resale tickets for All Things Go.

Speaker 5 The All Things Go ticket sale that froze out Melissa Santos had happened five months before.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so all things.

Speaker 5 On an April morning, we spent with Aaron Farah in a Georgia office park as he tried to get those very same tickets.

Speaker 4 It's like, you know, the festival.

Speaker 2 It's in Maryland.

Speaker 5 Farah used to be a teacher, but has been buying and selling tickets.

Speaker 2 He used to do good in the world, and now he's screwing you over for the all things go festival, which I've never heard of, but there's lots of festivals I've never heard of.

Speaker 5 Since 2008, when a poker buddy is a pretty big hustler, suggested scooping up seeds.

Speaker 2 He's a pretty big shithead, so I decided to go the way of

Speaker 5 to a Jonas Brothers show.

Speaker 4 I think I made like three or four hundred bucks, and it was that thing came running on my phone. I was

Speaker 2 I like how Dwight Schroot, yeah, there's a picture of Dwight Schroed behind it. That's true.
It's classic. That's classic.
He's hooked.

Speaker 5 His operation remained tiny. He was still teaching.
Scraping by. Until desperate for enough cash to score super lucrative tickets.

Speaker 4 It was Van Morrison in Clearwater, Florida.

Speaker 5 He reached out to an acquaintance with Deeper Pockets.

Speaker 4 So I called Kevin up. I was like, I need $2,000 to get these.
And he didn't even blink. He's like, sure.

Speaker 2 And I was like, who was it?

Speaker 27 He said, Van Morrison.

Speaker 2 I was like, never heard of him. What?

Speaker 2 What? Who's never heard of him? Oh, Van Morrison. Guys, this is the guy who's helping the guy defeat you on the ticket line.
Oh my God. Is the guy who doesn't even know who fucking Van Morrison is?

Speaker 2 and he's too old not to know who Van Morrison is laughed he's like yes you have what Kevin McCurley lacked in musical knowledge he made up for in business ambition $9,500 in profit not just starting their own ticket company called $9,500 in profit sounds great who's Miko Jackson

Speaker 5 elite hey it's Kevin with smart scalpers but packaging their ticket techniques and franchising them to new brokers usher we sold 105 tickets.

Speaker 2 Like this. Oh my God.

Speaker 2 The world is being taken over by a bunch of guys in their mom's basement.

Speaker 4 Broker, just last month, he made over 34,000 in one month.

Speaker 2 Made like. Oh, get me signed up.
Oh, I know.

Speaker 2 Welcome to Brian's Scalpers Club Elite 100.

Speaker 2 The commercial break brought to you by Scalpers.

Speaker 2 I like TCBB. Yeah, TCBB

Speaker 2 screwing you every step of the way.

Speaker 4 Profit. Profit.
Yeah. I've learned a lot of stuff about the ticket business.

Speaker 2 Sean Van Gelder. I never learned a lot of stuff from ranking ticket business.
I've also learned

Speaker 2 how to wear gray shoes with black shorts and dark blue shirts. Gelder, a full-time firefighter, started working with a leader

Speaker 5 part-time three years ago.

Speaker 4 My biggest wins, probably Taylor Swift. You got Taylor.

Speaker 4 How many do you get? I had four.

Speaker 5 Those seventh row floor seats to Swift's Miami show netted Van Gelder $10,000. Woo!

Speaker 2 Woo-hoo-hoo! Four tickets.

Speaker 2 How are they getting like the really good seats?

Speaker 2 They're so good. They have all the pre-sale codes.
They're so good with the bots.

Speaker 2 This is what they do for a living. You and I do this every couple of months.
They do this every morning. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Very upset because they weren't going.

Speaker 4 So unfortunately, I chose money over daughters.

Speaker 2 My daughters will never forgive me. Therapy, but at least I got a brand new fix box.

Speaker 4 The market is the market. The prices are the prices.

Speaker 5 But the right to sell at those prices goes only to those who manage to snag tickets. Every day, ordinary fans like Melissa Santos are pitted against pros like Elite.

Speaker 4 You have those Sundays and we'll get those Sundays.

Speaker 5 Some of what Elite does is useful for any ticket buyer to copy. There you go.

Speaker 4 There's a code.

Speaker 5 Do your best to access a pre-sale through your credit card or a fan club sign-up. The public on sale, often on Friday, is often too late.
Do you bother buying on Friday?

Speaker 4 Very rarely.

Speaker 4 I mean, we won't even waste our time.

Speaker 2 If the on-sale starts. Wow.
Well, they're trying to make a profit. So for them, it might be

Speaker 2 the time they put in might not be worth it for the results that they get. But for most of us, that's how we get our tickets Friday morning.

Speaker 5 Starts at 10, get logged in well before.

Speaker 2 I like to log in Saturday at about 3.15 p.m. Right.
Oh, yeah, that's on sale. Oh, go to stubhub.com.
Let me hop on. And don't just click the first Google search result for a show.

Speaker 5 That usually takes you to expensive resale tickets, even if tickets aren't.

Speaker 2 I didn't even think of buying something on those before.

Speaker 2 Oh, I bought on StubHub? No, just like Googling the artist and then the first thing that pops up. Yeah.
I was thinking it was, that was the site.

Speaker 2 Well, that's what was going on with TCB tickets, too, is the first 12 results were for ticket brokers. And it wasn't until you got almost to the second page did you actually see the venues website?

Speaker 5 Yeah. Instead, go to the band or venues official website and from there find the link to the primary on sale.

Speaker 4 Anna, let's just get those.

Speaker 5 But yes, brokers are also using techniques not available to the general public.

Speaker 4 Sunday, yeah. Get those, Anna, please.

Speaker 5 Once the sale started, we saw Eric

Speaker 2 get those tickets. He's talking about...
One of those techniques? Oh, wow.

Speaker 2 He shows you a few. Okay, okay.
But some of these you don't have access to even if you wanted to have access to them.

Speaker 5 Click a web plug-in that showed how many seats were still available in each section.

Speaker 4 500 tickets left.

Speaker 2 Oh. Okay.

Speaker 2 How does the plug-in get into the system, have an open API, what they call an open API or an open call that allows them to constantly monitor how many tickets are being sold and which ones are available?

Speaker 2 That can only be done if, first of all there's a back door somewhere on the website of Ticketmaster

Speaker 2 or to the venue or someone is feeding them that information on purpose.

Speaker 4 That's nifty. You can see the see the count.

Speaker 5 Yep.

Speaker 2 Based on that number. Yep.
Yeah, that's nifty. Yep.
I'm screwing you.

Speaker 2 Yep. I'm screwing you.
I sure am.

Speaker 5 He decided whether to buy.

Speaker 4 Let's pass on Saturdays, okay? Because so many were still remaining.

Speaker 4 Yeah, just not worth it.

Speaker 5 And while Farah and McCurley told us that...

Speaker 2 This is the most

Speaker 2 the fact that CBS is there. Also, they're literally set up in a garage.
There's a vacuum, a water heater there. There's four

Speaker 2 air ducks. Yeah, there's four mismatched desks.
Yeah. What doesn't make it sound like a very attractive business to be in.

Speaker 5 Don't use bots to buy tickets. The definition of a bot is a squishy thing.
We had noticed one of their YouTube videos.

Speaker 2 Now all these tools are out there.

Speaker 5 Touted stub tools and primo primo browser.

Speaker 26 So that is a multi-session browser.

Speaker 5 Which help brokers mask their IP address and log into many ticket master accounts, letting them avoid caps on how many tickets they can buy.

Speaker 26 Really, the sky is the limited number of tickets you can buy.

Speaker 5 The services cost $250 a month and are only available to ticket brokers.

Speaker 2 That's the problem. Yeah.
Yeah. Is that even though they're saying they're democratizing the

Speaker 2 purchase and sale of tickets,

Speaker 2 there's still a hurdle to get in that door to really democratize it. If everybody had these tools available to them, then I would see how you could make that claim.

Speaker 2 But when you are essentially gating those tools that make it very easy for you to get the best tickets and not for me to get the best tickets, then you're not democratizing it.

Speaker 2 What you're doing is you're essentially

Speaker 2 making a hierarchy where you sit on top collecting the most amount of money.

Speaker 5 Use something like stub tools that allows you to have so many sessions. Do you think the average fan a fair shot to get these tickets?

Speaker 27 I think so because they're again, they're just trying to buy two or four tickets.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but you, but that's harder to get when I'm gonna let him talk.

Speaker 2 He makes the point for me. I'm sorry, I'm getting ahead of him.

Speaker 5 Someone else just bought 24.

Speaker 27 Not necessarily.

Speaker 2 If so, well, how's that?

Speaker 5 If someone buys 24, that's 24 fewer than other people can get.

Speaker 27 Yeah, but if they want to buy four tickets, they can get their

Speaker 27 spouse, their kid, their parents, so they can also have the same amount of

Speaker 2 opportunity as we do. That guy is as dumb as he looks.
He really is as dumb as he looks.

Speaker 2 This is the guy who's funding the independent broker in Georgia, by the way, who started this like MLM for ticket brokers where you can buy a course and become a broker.

Speaker 2 It doesn't make any, what you said is the dumbest thing in the world.

Speaker 2 It doesn't hurt the consumer that you're taking 380 tickets out of the pool available to the real fan or to the the person that just wants to go to the concert.

Speaker 2 And you're telling us that we have to get like a whole like battalion of human people, of people, which is what we have been doing, by the way.

Speaker 2 We have been getting as many people as we can to all get on at the same time so that one of us hopefully can hit on it and buy as many tickets as possible.

Speaker 5 Okay. So people should assemble a team as possible.

Speaker 2 959.

Speaker 2 Sure.

Speaker 5 Okay. So you think it's fair?

Speaker 17 You think the current landscape is fair?

Speaker 27 I'm not saying it's fair, but I'm not saying it's unfair.

Speaker 2 Okay, what are you saying?

Speaker 2 You are such a moron.

Speaker 2 Oh, what a moron.

Speaker 5 Whether it's legal has also been a bit vague. The 2016 BOTS Act makes it illegal to circumvent a security measure used by the ticket issuer to enforce posted event ticket purchasing limits.

Speaker 5 But the Federal Trade Commission has enforced the act just once, even as brokers seem to violate it daily.

Speaker 2 So this is an executive order.

Speaker 5 President Trump has now called on the FTC to rigorously enforce the BOTS Act, giving them six months to make a plan.

Speaker 2 There was that guy next to him.

Speaker 2 Kid Rock. Okay.

Speaker 2 Kid Rock was in the Oval Office with Trump. And by the way, why does Trump have to sign everything with

Speaker 2 a signature that's one page big? Like a whole page. Yeah, he does a lot of sharp.
With the government. I know.
He only signs with Sharpies.

Speaker 5 Struggling to carry out the law, stopping brokers has been the job of ticket companies.

Speaker 17 We get to help people get to these magical moments.

Speaker 5 Mostly Ticketmaster. Is it your goal to get tickets in the hands of people who intend to go to the show rather than people who just are buying the ticket to resell it?

Speaker 17 Oh, 100%.

Speaker 5 Dan Wall is a longtime top lawyer for Ticketmaster. And what kind of grade would you give yourself on how that's going at the moment?

Speaker 17 Well, we're tough graders. You can get it 99.9% right, and you give yourself an F.

Speaker 5 But do you think you're able to get it?

Speaker 2 We grade ourselves awful tough. Yeah.
You can get it right 5.5% a half percent of the time, and we're still going to give ourselves an F, Dave. Wow, are you getting it even that much?

Speaker 5 Anywhere near 99.9% when millions and millions of tickets are being sold by scalpers.

Speaker 17 In a large on-sale, we regularly knock down and defeat millions of bots. We're in an arms race with

Speaker 17 the people who are trying to figure out. how to intercept these tickets.

Speaker 11 We've met people doing this.

Speaker 17 I'm sure you have.

Speaker 5 And they buy tickets and then they resell them and then they buy some more tickets and they resell them. But their ticketmaster account doesn't get closed.

Speaker 2 Why aren't you able to spot the folks doing this and close those accounts?

Speaker 5 We spot a lot of them.

Speaker 2 That's bullshit.

Speaker 17 And honestly, we don't spot them all.

Speaker 5 But you feel like you're doing an okay job of this.

Speaker 17 This isn't going to be abated until we get to the root cause of this. which is the extraordinary profitability of the resale market.

Speaker 5 The biggest resale platform.

Speaker 2 Well, you get to the root of that by not making the tickets so expensive in the first place and making them more accessible.

Speaker 2 Feel me out on this one. If I don't have to pay $180

Speaker 2 face value for every ticket that I go see, I will go see more concerts, making more tickets available because more musicians will be able to make a living on the road, making more tickets generally out there in the open public.

Speaker 2 The cheaper that it it is, the more people that get in on it, the more people that get in on it, the more people can make a living doing it.

Speaker 2 The more people that make a living doing it, the more these events take place all around the world. We also,

Speaker 2 at the same time that we're hearing about tour cancellations and all this stuff, we're also hearing about festival closures all over the place, festivals that can't do this anymore because they're getting charged an arm and a leg all along the way.

Speaker 2 They can't find profitability, be profitability, and people can't buy the tickets, so they can't sustain the model. Period.

Speaker 5 Form is StubHub, which sold 40 million tickets last year.

Speaker 2 Four, like five years ago, what would that have been?

Speaker 14 Millions, and now we're in the tens of millions.

Speaker 5 We spoke to Chris Miller before he stepped down as StubHub's chief business officer.

Speaker 2 When you look at what before this came out,

Speaker 14 the secondary market has done is sort of democratized access.

Speaker 5 Brokers aren't villains, he says, but part of a free market that sites like StubHub have made more efficient, giving everyone an equal chance to buy or sell at transparent prices.

Speaker 5 When demand is low, fans can get great deals.

Speaker 4 All right, this is StubHub.

Speaker 5 But yes, StubHub builds that market by partnering with brokers like Elite. StubHub charges brokers lower fees to sell on the site than ordinary fans pay when they sell.

Speaker 5 And what happens to a ticket when a broker scoops it up? Well, remember Melissa Santos at All Things Go? When she was shut out of face value tickets, she went to StubHub just a couple hours later.

Speaker 2 It was $1,083 for two tickets.

Speaker 5 And paid more than $540 each.

Speaker 2 $1,000

Speaker 2 to see Hoser.

Speaker 2 I mean, come on. That's crazy.

Speaker 5 I met a woman sitting on the lawn at All Things Go, paid $540 on StubHub.

Speaker 2 But the fact is, she paid it. She did.
That is the thing. She did pay it.
So she likes that music. That's all I got to say.
$100.

Speaker 2 As long as people are willing to pay it, this is going to be

Speaker 2 a problem.

Speaker 5 So once all the fees and expenses and costs of the show come out of the wash, the artists made about $100, the promoter in the venue made about $70, the broker made $110, and StubHub made $180.

Speaker 5 Why does StubHub deserve? the biggest share of that woman's purchase.

Speaker 14 Well, I would first start with saying that All Things Go Go should be working directly with StubHub to participate in the market dynamics.

Speaker 14 There's a way to collaborate here that everyone can participate in.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's what he's suggesting is that they give a portion of the tickets to StubHub so that they can allow their free market willy-nilly, however much you want to pay, you get to pay.

Speaker 2 Essentially supply and demand way of looking at the marketplace dynamics.

Speaker 11 That the promoters get more of the price.

Speaker 2 The promoter can take a particular.

Speaker 2 That's what everyone has been up in arms about with Ticketmaster this last year and a half, two years, is this surge pricing, demand pricing, just like airline tickets.

Speaker 2 The less that are available, the more that you will pay. I don't disagree with supply and demand, but I'm not sure this is the right way to look at it.

Speaker 14 Participation, the artist can take a participation. We do this in sports all the time.

Speaker 2 What Miller was suggesting.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's a nice way of saying a huge fee.

Speaker 5 Is nothing less than the fork in the road ticketing now stands at.

Speaker 5 StubHub is offering to share their profits from resold tickets with musicians like Andrew McMahon if StubHub is also allowed to handle the original on sale, the part Ticketmaster now does exclusively.

Speaker 5 If artists accept scalping,

Speaker 5 they can get in on the action.

Speaker 13 I don't want anything to do with it. I would turn down every check that got sent to me by a StubHub or Vivid Seats or any of these guys because I think what they're doing is...

Speaker 13 I mean, I think it's disgusting.

Speaker 5 McMahon wants to take the other side.

Speaker 2 I want to go see this band now. Yeah, because something corporate is not so corporate.

Speaker 5 Work in the road and end scalping, which might finally be possible since tickets are digital. McMahon now only allows resale on Ticketmaster's face value exchange.

Speaker 5 Billie Eilish, Foo Fighters, and Pearl Jam do that too.

Speaker 13 We want to make it easy if you decide you need to get rid of your ticket to get rid of it, but you're going to sell it back for the same price you bought it for.

Speaker 14 I think it's misguided.

Speaker 2 Miller called me.

Speaker 2 I'm so shocked. He saw that.
I think I'm making so much money.

Speaker 2 I really want to get at those pearl jam tickets. I think it's misguided.
I think it's misguided. I think you're misguided.

Speaker 5 Face value exchange, a power grab that can trap fans with high-priced tickets they aren't allowed to sell for less.

Speaker 14 We don't believe the artists can control the pricing in the aftermarket.

Speaker 17 No, it's their show. It's not the scalper show.

Speaker 2 Ticketmaster, even though they have their own resale site, told us they support laws to cap resale prices.

Speaker 17 There's nothing socially beneficial about scalping. It's just a rip-off and it's taking that money from the fans.

Speaker 2 Yeah, okay.

Speaker 2 I understand what this guy, what he's saying, but that's not how Ticketmaster acts because they are in fact surge pricing now themselves and adding exorbitant fees onto what is a pretty simple piece of the puzzle.

Speaker 2 Find the right ticket, make sure that seat is available, and hand that to the customer willing to pay it.

Speaker 2 I think that should be a cap at like a 5% fee of the ticket value or something along those lines.

Speaker 2 And that starts the conversation about the band or the musician or the agent or whoever's putting the deal memo together to look at the actual costs, give the band a fair cut of the ticket, and then price it out based on how close or how far you are from seeing the actual musician, and then also how much you're willing to pay the fair market value for that particular musical act.

Speaker 2 StubHub shouldn't, no one should get in bed with StubHub. That's a ridiculous idea.

Speaker 2 And if we could, we shouldn't get in bed with Ticketmaster or Live Nation either, although I think that door has already been closed.

Speaker 2 But there is a better way to look at this somehow, some way, some shape, some form. And I'm telling you, if the ticket prices were lower, more people, more musicians would be on the road.

Speaker 2 More people will go see more shows solving some of this problem. And there will always be the Taylor Swifts of the world.
There'll always be the cultural zeitgeist where everybody has to go.

Speaker 2 And they're willing to be able to look at Cabbage Patch Kids. Those things were selling for $3,000 in 1985.
Beanie babies. Beanie babies.
$3,000 in 1985. And now they're back at $3,000.

Speaker 2 And I threw them away.

Speaker 2 Where's the Dick Tracy nostalgia when you need it? From what, the Dick Tracy market? Yes, where's the Dick Tracy market? I would have made a killing on that.

Speaker 2 All right, well, there you go. Very interesting look at the ticketing business in general and the reason why we're all paying so much money to go see these live shows.

Speaker 2 Sporting events, comedy, and all things in between.

Speaker 2 You know, I don't have any of the great answers. I just have some ideas.

Speaker 2 But one of those ideas was to start the commercial break. So don't trust me on anything.
Okay? I'm not here for answers. I'm just here to ask more questions.

Speaker 2 I'm here to muddy the waters, not clear them up.

Speaker 2 What do you want from me? I'm just a guy, just a guy doing a podcast. But I will tell you what, that's informed.

Speaker 2 The guy who's funding the Georgia ticket brokers and making the MLM out of it, he's a pretty dumb human being. Yeah, yeah, he's pretty dumb.
I hope I see him at the Kroger.

Speaker 2 What was that name of that company, Elite? Elite Ticket, Elite, so original. That's Elite.

Speaker 2 Elite.

Speaker 2 Okay, don't use elite, okay? But they're probably wrapped into StubHub anyway. You wouldn't even know it.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay, May 31st, the 12 hours of TCB. Speaking of lowering ticket prices, yeah,

Speaker 2 speaking of doing more shows, 12 hours of TCB, May 31st, all to raise awareness about mental health awareness and your mental health and my mental health.

Speaker 2 And so we're all going to be out of mental health by the end of the day. And celebrating five years of the commercial break.

Speaker 2 in coordination with our partners at Odyssey, CTB New York, Covert, Creative, and We Plash.

Speaker 2 We're super excited. It's going to be a great time.

Speaker 2 I think. Are we super excited? I don't know.
Talk to me on the morning of the 31st.

Speaker 2 It's going to be exciting. It's going to be fun.
It'll be fun. We're doing it.

Speaker 2 We'll be recording earlier than we ever have.

Speaker 2 Just be happy about it. Yeah, just be happy about it, okay? Stop texting me.
Yes, we're doing it. It's going to happen.
Will we make it through all 12? I don't know. That's another question.

Speaker 2 That's the experiment. Yeah, that's the experiment.
That's right.

Speaker 2 tcbpodcast.com your free swag audio and video at the commercial break on instagram 212-433-3tcb and youtube.com slash the commercial break for all the episodes same day they are here on the audio okay chrissy That's all I can do for today.

Speaker 2 I think so. I'll tell you that I love you.
I love you. Best to you.
And best to you out there in the podcast universe. Until next time, Chrissy and I will say.
We do say. And we must say.
Goodbye.

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