Live Nation’s leadership team observes stark differences between sports fans and music fans when it comes to buying tickets, CEO Michael Rapinoe This was summed up succinctly during the company’s third-quarter earnings call.
“We always find it a little funny that sport is a badge of honor – how expensive these tickets are [are] – But music is much cheaper than sports and seems to elicit more emotional responses,” Rapinoe told analysts on Monday (November 11).
This price difference has existed for some time. Los Angeles Lakers game courtside tickets $200 and $600 About three-quarters of concert tickets sold by Ticketmaster are priced below $100according to comments Rapinoe made at a conference Goldman Sachs conference earlier this year.
However, it’s usually music-goers who complain about prices, and Ticketmaster has also felt the brunt, such as overpriced tickets for Bruce Springsteen’s 2023 tour, or recent complaints about soaring ticket prices for Oasis’ 2025 UK tour.
Fans outraged at seeing Oasis ticket prices increase in real time – the result of Ticketmaster’s “dynamic pricing” model that responds to demand – criticized the ticketing company online, sparking a review of dynamic pricing by the UK Competition and Markets Authority investigation.
“We always find it a little funny that sport is a badge of honor – how expensive these tickets are [are] — but music is much less expensive than sports and seems to elicit more emotional responses.
Michael Rapinoe, Live Nation
Apparently, Oasis took their share of criticism, announcing that they would not be using surge pricing on sales for their North American tour.
Live Nation has argued in the past that dynamic pricing is a way to cut into the secondary ticket market — namely scalpers and resellers — that can profit from high demand for shows without actually investing any money to host them. show.
Rapinoe has previously argued that dynamic pricing allows artists to generate more revenue from fans willing to pay, rather than having that money go to secondary sellers.
During Monday’s earnings call, Rapinoe reiterated Live Nation’s hope for tighter regulation of the secondary ticket market, especially since “the U.S. appears to be a market where secondary tickets can operate freely.”
Rapinoe said he would like to see tighter regulations cracking down on resellers using bots to buy large numbers of tickets from regular consumers, as well as speculative selling, where secondary sellers offer tickets they haven’t purchased yet.
“We hope that over time, better regulations will be developed to help consumers,” Rapinoe said.
Rapinoe’s comments came as the company reported stronger-than-expected profit for the quarter ended Sept. 30. $1.66 per share, versus Wall Street estimates $1.59.
However, the company’s revenue took a hit during the quarter, falling 6% annual increase arrive $7.65 billion. That’s largely due to weakness in stadiums this summer, an issue Live Nation noted in its earlier earnings call. The company said 2025 will be another strong stadium year, and Live Nation expects the year to be more like 2023, with blockbuster tours in 2025. Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteenand others.
Here are three other things we learned on Live Nation’s latest earnings call:
1. Live Nation is ‘hopeful’ about antitrust fight under Trump administration
Live Nation is “hopeful” that the incoming Trump administration will take a more lenient approach to the company as it continues to fight the government’s antitrust lawsuit.
In May this year, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Live Nation, accusing it of “monopoly and other illegal conduct that hinders market competition in the live entertainment industry.” The U.S. Department of Justice is seeking to break up Live Nation and its ticketing unit, Ticketmaster. Attorneys general from 39 U.S. states and the District of Columbia have joined the lawsuit.
Live Nation president and chief financial officer asked by analysts if Donald Trump’s election as president is ‘a very good thing for you’ Joe Bechtold said the company was “hesitant” to say too much on the issue given that “the transition process is still in its early stages.”
Still, the company “hopes we’ll see a return to a more traditional antitrust approach, in which agencies typically try to find ways to address the problems they see and pursue targeted remedial measures,” the company said. Minimize government intervention in the market.
“Targeted remedies” are typically solutions to anti-competitive conduct but are not sufficient to break up a business. One of these targeted remedies was implemented in 2010 as a condition of government approval of Live Nation’s acquisition of Ticketmaster.
It prohibits Live Nation from “retaliating” or threatening venues for using other ticketing companies for concerts. The agreement was originally scheduled to end in 2020, but was extended for an additional five years after the Justice Department determined that Live Nation violated certain aspects of the agreement.
This year’s lawsuit went further, asking a federal court to order Live Nation to divest Ticketmaster, a move that Live Nation strongly opposed before the lawsuit was filed. The company has repeatedly argued that the matters that frustrated consumers and policymakers were outside Ticketmaster’s scope. The company also said prices are set by artists and sports teams, not Ticketmaster.
The lawsuit “accuses Live Nation and Ticketmaster of charging high service fees but ignores that Ticketmaster retains only a fraction of those fees. In fact, primary ticketing is one of the cheapest digital offerings in the economy,” Live Nation said in response to the lawsuit time indicates.
During the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Monday (November 11), Berchtold said the lawsuit reflected “a much stronger interventionist philosophy today than you would expect from a Republican administration.”
He added that Live Nation would be ready to “engage” with the new government once it is ready.
“They need to finalize their appointments and finally resolve the issues, but we certainly hope to be able to start engaging with them early next year,” Bechtold said.
2. Live Nation predicts 20% of concert capacity will eventually go to super fans
Many music companies are talking these days about how to better monetize their superfans, but Live Nation argues it has long been delivering on that promise.
“We’ve been selling to super fans for a while,” Rapino said, noting that at Live Nation, customers who are willing to pay for a better experience are called “advanced fans.”
“It’s an ongoing skill set that we’ve always had,” Rapinoe said.
He believes there’s still a lot to be done to expand superfans’ market share at live events. He noted that many renovations at Live Nation-owned venues include increasing their share of VIP seating. Rapinoe thinks he can expand the high-end portion of concert tickets to 20% All sales.
“We always sell right out of the box and sell the quality stock first. We’ve never had a problem selling it,” he said.
“This is an important part of our capital expenditures and our [refurbishing of venues] And what happens when we build new buildings. We start by requiring that they have a certain percentage of premium seating, lounges and experiences. As a result, these venues get better returns right out of the gate.
3. “Ticketmaster is a technology company”
One of the arguments made by the U.S. Department of Justice in the antitrust case against Live Nation/Ticketmaster is that the two companies’ partnership means “American music fans are being deprived of ticketing innovation and forced to use outdated technology, while Fans pay more for tickets than fans in other countries.
Live Nation sees things entirely differently. In fact, the company’s leadership believes that Ticketmaster became the dominant player in ticketing by developing better technology than its competitors. Rapinoe said on the earnings call that because of the technology, Ticketmaster is able to “sell tickets in volumes that other companies can’t handle.”
He was likely referring to recent ticket sales for Oasis’ world tour next year, which Rapinoe described last month as the “biggest sales in history” and “the biggest demand in history.”
“Ticketmaster is a technology company. So [we’re] Products will continue to be developed on a corporate and market basis.
Michael Rapinoe, Live Nation
At a recent Bloomberg conference, Rapinoe said Oasis ticket sales have been hit by “billions” of bots trying to acquire secondary market tickets.
“We have the best platform in the world. It’s very difficult when there are 10 billion bots attacking your system [the start of sales] Stealing your votes… I’m glad the system isn’t broken. We stopped them. We’re done.
During Monday’s earnings call, Rapinoe said investments in Ticketmaster’s technology — both on the back-end and consumer-facing side — will continue.
“We spent tens of millions of dollars on Ticketmaster,” he said. “We continue to innovate what we offer on the enterprise side to our venues, promoters, others who use the platform…which includes a lot of pricing technology to help everyone understand the market value of the content they offer.
“Of course, the same is true on the marketing side, developing strong marketing science capabilities to help people market their shows, and significant investment has been made over the past few years to continue to enhance our ability to handle high sales demand.”
He added: “Ticketmaster is a technology company. So [we’re] Products will continue to be developed on a corporate and market basis.global music business
