Concerts suck. They don't have to.

Ok, first of all, A quick author’s note: you might see that I have a new name now. I decided to move on from simply being called Aarav’s Substack. So this publication is now known as There is no editor, there is only chaos. Nothing else is changing, but we have a new name! And I will continue to put out the sporadic work that you expect, ranging from 20 Posts in a week to one a year, from topics ranging from the movie I just watched to the most recent school shooting. There is no editor here, but there is chaos.

With that out of the way, onto today’s chaos.

By now, I’m sure you are familiar with the Live Nation/Ticketmaster Monopoly. If you aren’t, I suggest you watch this video from the excellent More Perfect Union

The Ticketmaster problem is insane. Buying tickets to a concert is nearly impossible, and outragouesly expensive, but that is IF you even get past the queu without being accused of being a bot, or just not let in at all because there is so much demand, but not enough seats (this is another problem, where artists are intentionally scheduled into venues smaller than where they should be in order to help the artists sell out venues.) Live Nation and Ticketmaster have absolute power here; they could stop this, but in a world where they exist purely to drive profits, why on earth would you?

There are four key means by which this monopoly fucks over consumers and makes concertgoing a luxury.

1. Monopoly/walled garden: If you want to go to, or host a concert in the united states, chances are you will have to work with ticketmaster. They own or have contracts with almost every single venue, and they also have contracts with essentially every label. There is a chance you end up using AXS, but even so, AXS has no interest in lowering its profits, so it will never truly compete with ticketmaster on being good for consumers. Unless the government intervenes—More on this later— this will continue.
2. Dynamic pricing: Ticketmaster uses what they call “Platinum Pricing” to charge more for seats during things like presales, based on current demand for tickets, and these can reach exorbitant prices. This is worsened by the fact that prices are already insanely high and should be lowered, not raised.
3. Resale markets, over which Ticketmaster has a large amount of control, running their own in-house resale system, and it is alleged that Ticketmaster has special sales for certain resellers— I was not able to independently verify this— but it is also alleged in court cases and independent investigations that TM is courting large resellers and colluding with them
4. The incessantly rising prices of tickets. Tickets should not range from 80-700 dollars; that’s 1) an insane range and 2) insanely overpriced. Concert tickets should not go above a maximum of 500 dollars, and even that is insanely high. Nosebleed seats for some shows, such as Olivia Rodrigo next winter, are almost 120 a person; that’s blasphemous.
5. Speculative tickets, this is not so much an issue with ticketmaster as a larger issue, but this is where people resell tickets they do not yet have, opening up avenues for scams. This practice should be illegal. full stop.

There is also one more problem: the artists don’t get paid enough by streaming services. You may wonder how this is linked to ticket prices. The main source of profit for the artists themselves is the tour, and even still, they are only receiving marginal profits compared to the corporations and labels behind them. This system needs fundamental change, but I do not have a large enough understanding of that system to propose solutions right now.

But I do have solutions to ticketing. five solutions for five problems

1. Break up ticketmaster and live nation, and force them to sell most of their venues or spin them off into completely independent ventures. This may already be in process, as courts have ruled that Live Nation is a monopoly,
2. Ban dynamic— and while were at it surveillance— pricing, nationwide, for everything. No one should be able to change prices based on how much you need or want something; it’s a scammy and harmful tactic to incessantly increase profits on fixed-cost items, such as concert tickets (this means that the company is not paying extra to make the product, but is charging extra to increase its profit)
3. Set a cap on resale profits. I think a fair amount is 5%, but ideally it would be 0%, requiring a sale at face value. The idea is that if someone needs to resell a ticket due to changing plans—especially given how presales happen almost a year in advance, and before youve heard the album now—they can, but you cannot resell tickets as a means of making propesterous amounts of profit at the expense of fans, additionally this benifits artists, as they do not get a cut of the profits when resale is done, and when resale prices are almost double or triple face value, only ticketmaster (or the other resale company) and the reseller make that money, the artist sees none of it.
4. Cap ticket prices, I think a fair amount would be about 400-500 dollars as a MAXIMUM, and that would mean for things like front row seats, or VIP experiences. You should be able to get in the door for 30-40 dollars, and that is something that can reasonably be done.
5. Require people to prove they HAVE a ticket before they are allowed to sell it, fixing the speculation problem.

These solutions are not perfect, and there are certainly ways around them that will be figured out, but for now, this is the only way forward. Be it my recommendations or some policy figured out by people who are more aware of the inner workings of this industry, we have to make a change. Allowing live music to become inaccessible to the average person is not something we can do, because in a society where the people do not have access to art, it is a society barreling towards its own collapse at a destructive rate. Art must be for the people; it cannot be allowed to become a luxury.

Timothee Chalamet got some heat for saying something similar to this, while tlaking about keeping movies accesible, and how ballet and opera are dying art forms due to their inaccesibility (im sure you remember this), but he was right. And we must protect ALL art forms from death by profiteering.

Thanks for reading,

Aarav Puri