Ticketmaster, Taylor Swift, and Tickets.

The last few weeks have been filled with ticket news about Ticketmaster, Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen, and more…

Interesting times to be sure.

I was invited to the American Antitrust Institute’s panel in DC about monopoly power in tickets with the target being directly on Ticketmaster’s back.

I went and listened.

I took a bunch of notes.

I hosted a podcast with the folks behind the #BreakUpTicketmaster campaign.

I wrote a few notes about the stuff in the ‘Talking Tickets’ newsletter.

• Ticketmaster: All Eyes on Them
• Dynamic Pricing: What’s That?
• Fans Didn’t Think Taylor Swift’s On-Sale Went Swiftly (Come on…I made a funny with the title. That may have been the primary reason to do this one.)

Over the last few weeks as the Taylor Swift tour was announced and the Verified Fan registration period took place and the tour’s pre-sales started, people reached out to ask me about my take. I’ve found myself going one way with my thinking and then going another. Changing my thinking along the way.

For me the topic sits like this:

• I’m interested in the antitrust story because I’m interested in competition and anti-competitive behavior as a whole.
• From a technology standpoint, that’s not my area of expertise. I do know that from a marketing and brand management POV, technology is a tactical tool that impacts whether or not you can fulfill your brand promise and your strategy. So I look at this side of the business through the lens of marketing.
• From the execution of the pre-sales and sign-ups, I have a bit of interest in the topic because I’ve been writing one of the most-read project management columns in the world for the last 10 years.
• With Taylor Swift, watching how her team manages her brand is interesting from a brand management standpoint.

My opinion on these:

• Monopolies and antitrust law enforcement are a government question. If the government and the courts don’t take action, then it doesn’t matter what I think at all. But my primary training in marketing and strategy always leads me to think about the question: “Why do some businesses succeed and others fail?”
• From a technology standpoint, I do think that the situation that unfolded over the last two weeks highlights the need for a more robust ticketing ecosystem in the United States. If that is only because of the promise that superstar brands make to their customers…so be it. Because in my mind, no customer…no business.
• On the registration and pre-sale situation, coming at it from the angle of a consultant and from the angle of my PM background, in any project, there are multiple stakeholders. The job is often to tell people things they may not want to hear for the overall success of the project. I get it…folks will say anything to get a deal done. Or, some people don’t like to say the hard stuff. The job is saying the stuff that needs to be said.

So, Ticketmaster:

My starting point is that markets need competition.

At the AAI event, the panelists laid out numbers that showed Live Nation and Ticketmaster control something like 80%+ of the large venues in the United States.

On this topic, I try to hold two ideas in my mind at the same time:

One, a certain amount of consolidation is likely to happen by the nature of these buildings. There are not a ton of them and some specialization and consolidation is likely to occur naturally.

Two, seeing all of this consolidation happen means that the ecosystem can become unstable. Diversification tends to help create more stability in ecosystems. We’ve been teaching our kids this forever: “Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.”

Contradictory, certaintly.

Also, true.

Taylor Swift:

I thought the tour announcement went pretty well.

The announcement on pricing was good and seemed to fit the framework that I coach people through:

• The process
• The price
• The promotion of the price

It also seemed like she learned her lesson from a previous tour with the “boosts” and other things that could feel manipulative to her fans.

Also, rolling out the initial cities and adding dates…straight from PR 101, well played.

Pretty solid product launch strategy, spend most of your time and attention getting people hyped for the launch. Again, solid work because we see many examples of brands not launching their products well.

My Take:

I’ll go the list road today to hit on a few things:

1. Taylor Swift should be able to set the prices that she wants: The most popular artist in the US should be able to set the prices she wants. Her brand equity is off the charts. This gives her pricing power. She should be able to use it. The same as any business.
2. Taylor Swift should be able to control the distribution of her tickets as well: I’m not one of those distribute your product everywhere folks. Distribution is a key part of the execution of your marketing strategy. If you want to limit the ways that your product is sold because you have the brand equity to make that decision, you absolutely should because every touchpoint matters.
3. Taylor Swift should be upset that her fans had a bad experience: I’m sure no one sat down and said, “You know what we are going to do…screw the fans.” But the fans ended up with a bad experience and that ultimately is going to fall on Taylor Swift’s shoulders.
4. Should the platforms have crashed during the pre-sales?: No. Due to the challenges during the registration process huge demand should have been expected. At the same time, I’ve been learning about the way that BOTs work to jam systems and crash sites. My thing here goes back to what are Taylor Swift’s expectations: she expected the job to get done. Her fans suffered. It is like Bill Parcells said about you being what your record says you are.
5. Will this increase the antitrust scrutiny of Live Nation?: Duh! Live Nation and the people selling tickets are the easiest targets for political gain going right now. This is non-partisan…the ultimate freebie. If people weren’t rattling cages about this stuff, it would be political malpractice.
6. Is there a transparency issue in tickets?: Most certainly. I say this because that’s what the customers say. Ian Taylor brought up a point a long time ago that stuck with me about other industries not having to be transparent. It changed my position on the topic, but if the customers feel it is an issue…it is an issue. So that’s a marketing and PR challenge that needs to be addressed at some point.
7. Is there another company that could have handled this? I mentioned other companies during Ken Troupe’s Twitter chat. Twitter isn’t good for context. So in a longer form, if there is only one business that can handle this type of on-sale that is an indictment of the system that is in place because it is an unstable system. Along with this unstable system comes what Cory Doctorow calls Chokepoint Capitalism. Which drives up prices, limits opportunities, and often leads to worse service for customers.
8. What does this say about tickets? It highlights a system that is struggling or broken in a lot of places. As Ken Hanscom pointed out on LinkedIn that the era of rebounding demand seems to have ended. Meaning that folks are going to need to get back to the basics of strategy, branding, marketing, and sales to drive sales. And, I get it…”we don’t do strategy” is a fairly common refrain. Having no strategy is a strategy and it leads to chaos.
9. What about the secondary market? Never underestimate the folks on the secondary market when it comes to finding ways to capture value. That said, the secondary market feels like a bit of a casino right now…or, a lot of one, with the language of gambling coming to mind when I hear brokers talk about “hitting big on shows”. (This section alone needs its own post.)
10. Tickets on the whole: Feels like a system in need of a reset. If the era of rebounding demand is over, what will that mean to venues, performers, and teams? We see soft demand in small and middle size acts and venues, but will we see bigger teams and acts suffer as well? I’ve seen data that would give me pause and make me look at my research a bit more.

Entertainment has the tendency to be resilient because of the emotional connection, the crowds, and the sense of release that people get from going to events.

P.S.: I was chatting with Eric Fuller about this and he said I needed a conclusion…which is accurate. He jotted down the nature of our conversations about this topic over the last few months and I’ll share it here with his permission.

Life being the way it is there is going to be a lot of noise about breaking up Live Nation, and Ticketmaster. Who doesn’t love the instant rush of publicity as they go all David v Goliath? As the noise starts to die down about the Taylor, Swift debacle, that issue will start to fade.

The reality is that no one can compete in North American stadiums with Ticketmaster because the owners of those stadiums want the money which only a large public company can pay them in return for the ticketing rights.

We cannot legislate away the greed of stadium owners. Newer companies, like SeatGeek, are slowly breaking into acquiring those ticketing rights. They are succeeding by promising money and or equity in their company in return for the right to ticket the venue. But, progress comes slowly. 

Still, displacing a giant, publicly traded company is very hard. Has anybody noticed that IBM and GM are still around? There’s a reason the way capitalism works is the entrenched have an advantage over all those who wish to play King of the Mountain.

Also, history teaches us that no one remains the most popular artist in the world forever. There is always somebody new who comes along and wins the crown. Taylor Swift will be touring for another 30 years. Likely, as something new takes center stage tickets will be much easier to get for her future tours. If there is any rule which is universally true in entertainment it is this: the artist keeps playing long after the frenzy dies down.Or, as David Byrne, formerly of the Talking Heads, whose tickets are now reasonably easy to acquire might say: “same as it ever was. “