with Brooklyn’s Barclays Center — said that the arena told SeatGeek it wanted to use Ticketmaster for concerts but still keep his company for basketball games due to a drop in the number of Live Nation concerts at Barclays since SeatGeek took over. Such a deal wouldn’t work economically, so the two amicably parted ways, Groetzinger said.
When asked about venues’ concerns about breaking from Live Nation, Mickelson echoed Groetzinger’s sentiments. “When speaking with people that either own or manage venues, their biggest fear is if they leave Ticketmaster, they will lose content. Whether it’s said or not, it’s implied that if I don’t use Ticketmaster, I am not going to get all the shows that I would like to have.”
Berchtold said that the venues, not the company, set the fee rates and that Live Nation’s own venues have fee rates in line with the rest of the industry. He advocated for, passed in 2016 and designed to stop scalpers from using bots to buy mass amounts of tickets. He also vied for solutions regarding transparency in the industry such as government-mandated all-in ticket pricing to require all ticket companies to show fees upfront rather than hide them at the end of a purchase.
Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn asked Berchtold why other industries have been able to get a better handle on bots while Ticketmaster hasn’t. “Banking services, credit card processors, health care companies, they get bot attacks every single day by the thousands and they have figured it out but you guys haven’t,” Blackburn said. “This is unbelievable.
As a decades long concert goer I call complete and utter BS on this.