John Oliver’s program Last Week Tonight With John Oliver took on Ticketmaster/Live Nation on the show this week, calling out corrupt practices, shady fees, price gouging and the creation and manipulation of the secondary market for tickets. In addition to resellers such as Stubhub and Seatgeek and others, Olvier pointed out the common practice where bands do not release swaths of tickets to each to the public, but hold them back to charge huge sums as resale tickets that were never publicly available in the first place. Among the artists called out: Justin Bieber, Mariah Carey and Metallica. Famously Metallica was outed after their original “S&M2” at the Chase Center in 2019 sold out in minutes as scalpers bought most of the tickets, with resales in the $1000s. Many top bands like Metallica have their own operative that works with Ticketmaster/Live Nation to choose the best seats at every show, so they can in effect “scalp their own tickets.” In fairness to Metallica, they did put on a second show geared toward fanclub and sales to real fans, as opposed to scalpers and bots. Ghost Cult covered that story extensively, which you can read here and even the US Congress reviewed the scandal. Continue reading
