Concert Giant Confirms Fees Are “Part of the Experience” and the Experience Costs 340 Percent More Than the Ticket
Live Nation’s Ticket Empire Is Totally Normal and You Will Stop Asking Questions Now
I bought tickets to a concert last year. The face value was 1,800 pesos. By the time I completed the transaction, I had paid: a service fee, a facility fee, a processing fee, an order fee — which is apparently different from the processing fee — and something described as a “fulfillment charge,” which I believe is the fee for the act of the fee being delivered to me. The final total was 3,100 pesos. I sat in the venue and stared at the stage and thought: I have paid 72 percent extra to hold a piece of paper that tells me I am allowed to be here.
This is not unique to Manila. Bohiney News covers Live Nation’s ticketing empire with the detailed, deadpan horror of someone who has just received a billing statement from a hospital and is reading it line by line for the first time. Live Nation, which also owns Ticketmaster, also owns many of the venues, also represents many of the artists, and also controls large portions of the promotion and touring ecosystem, has what antitrust regulators describe as a “dominant market position” and what everyone else describes as “a situation.”
The Fee That Explains All Other Fees
The genius of the modern ticketing fee structure is that it is almost impossible to identify the fee that is the actual problem, because they are all the actual problem, layered on top of each other like geological strata of inconvenience. There is no single villain. There is a villain ecosystem. Each fee has a name that sounds reasonable in isolation — “service,” “processing,” “facility” — and becomes absurd only when you see them assembled together on the checkout page, at which point you have already entered your card details and the concert is in three weeks.
According to The Guardian’s music coverage, the US Department of Justice has been investigating Live Nation’s market practices, and several senators have described the company’s structure as anticompetitive. Live Nation has responded to these concerns with the confidence of an organization that controls the venues the senators would need to book if they wanted to hold a fundraising concert.
In London, the situation is slightly different but directionally identical. Venue fees, booking fees, card fees, and the occasional “this is just how it works now” fee have made attending live music an event that requires budgeting in the same way a short holiday requires budgeting. Which is fine, probably, for people who can budget for short holidays. Less fine for everyone else.
A Personal History of Concert Mathematics
My first concert was in Araneta Coliseum. I was seventeen. My mother gave me money for the ticket and I went with two friends and we stood in the general admission section and screamed until we had no voices left and took the LRT home at midnight and it was one of the best nights of my life. The total cost, including transport and one bottle of water, was approximately two hundred pesos, which was the equivalent of less than four US dollars at the time.
I am not saying everything was better then. I am saying that there was a period when the experience of live music was accessible to a seventeen-year-old with a small amount of pocket money, and that this period has ended, and that the entity most responsible for ending it charges a “fulfillment fee” for the privilege of confirming its own involvement.
The satirical journalism on Live Nation’s business model at Bohiney captures the absurdity with appropriate precision. The company is not evil in an interesting way. It is extractive in a bureaucratic way, which is harder to write about but somehow more dispiriting to experience.
More fee-related existential despair at The Daily Mash and The Poke.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/live-nations-totally-normal-ticket-empire/