Technology Blows

Room recording
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Intro
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​[00:00:00]

Dan Slimmon: Welcome to Technology Blows, the techno pessimist podcast that fans wait in line for hours to see.

If you're gonna be drinking while you listen to this podcast, just show my guest Meg here your ID. She'll give you a little audio bracelet so you can have some audio Pilsners while you listen to this podcast. And I hope you enjoy the show. Welcome, Meg.

Meg: Hello.

Dan Slimmon: Hello, uh, I'm so happy you're here.

Meg: I'm happy to be here. Yeah, I, uh, uh, very, very, uh, [00:01:00] uh, lo-love to be on a podcast.

Dan Slimmon: Yes.

Meg: do it very often, so happy to be here.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah, I don't think we've seen each other since, uh, since we met on that train and we signed a, a, a dark oath to both be on each other's podcasts, and now it's come to fruition. Yes.

Meg: and after this episode, we are both going to turn into dust.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah. Yeah. So, um, if you're expecting an episode next week, no, no, no good.

Meg: luck.

Dan Slimmon: Yep, no, no luck unless you wanna listen to a pile of dust tell you about cash registers. Uh, I, um, Meg, Meg, Meg and I have been friends for, for basically forever. Um, I don't know if you have any projects, Meg, that you wanna plug before we get started.

23 goddamn years, wow.

Meg: 2003. Um, projects? Um, sure. Uh, yeah, I have a, uh, Nicolas Cage podcast that is currently on hiatus, but we have a lot of back episodes up, and we are eventually going to re-re, uh, release some new episodes. Um, it's called

Dan Slimmon: people

Meg: the [00:02:00] Cage," and you can find it anywhere, uh,

Dan Slimmon: know what

Meg: podcasts.

Um, if you live in Los Angeles, you can

Dan Slimmon: improv shows

Meg: me do a lot of improv shows. I don't know. They're not... They're, they're, like, fine. Um, but

Dan Slimmon: are. People know improv shows are fine.

Meg: like, fine. We're not,

Dan Slimmon: Check 'em both out.

Meg: also have a, a birding Instagram if you

Dan Slimmon: Oh, shit.

Meg: Great. Those are, those are things you could, I can promote.

Dan Slimmon: That's great. I don't have enough bird content in my life.

Meg: That's, that's one place to start.

Dan Slimmon: well, Meg, do you, uh... So today we're talking about Ticketmaster. Do you have any plan- Are you planning to go to any concerts coming up?

Meg: Um, not concerts, but, uh, it's [00:03:00] actually an interesting week that this is coming up, um, because right now in Los Angeles we have the Netflix Is A Joke Festival, um, which is, uh, a lot of different comedy shows. And I've, I think I have tickets to see about five of them this week. Um, although I did check in anticipation of this episode, um, and none of them were actually through Ticketmaster.

They were all... Actually, no, one of them was through Ticketmaster. Um, I saw, uh, Philomena Cunk. Uh, do

Dan Slimmon: Awesome.

Meg: know who she

Dan Slimmon: Oh, yes, of

Meg: Yeah,

Dan Slimmon: course.

Meg: a, a, a panel with her and Charlie Brooker from Black Mirror. Um, and that one was through Ticketmaster, and that was very cool. Um, but then we have a lot of other ticket things like, um, let's see.

I think I had one through See Tickets. I had one through Squad Up. Um, it

Dan Slimmon: What up?

Meg: Squad Up,

Dan Slimmon: Don't mind if I do.

Meg: Eventbrite obviously. Um,

Dan Slimmon: yeah.

Meg: seem like a lot of different options for buying tickets at least. I don't know how many of them are local [00:04:00] to Los Angeles or how many of them are widespread.

Dan Slimmon: That's great to hear.

Meg: yes.

Dan Slimmon: That's great to hear because, uh, Ticketmaster sucks real bad, and, uh, they... I know Eventbrite... So, like, I was originally gonna do an episode on, like, ticketing systems, uh, uh, but there's so many of them, and they're all of such varying quality, and they have such varying stories. So I thought maybe someday...

'cause I, there's, I got stuff to say about Eventbrite that is not all positive. But, um, but, uh, I figured let's, let's, let's do the big, the big daddy of the ticket

Meg: one.

Dan Slimmon: first, and then, you know, we'll see where we're at. Uh, I'm gonna go see The Mountain Goats next weekend with Kristen. That's gonna kick ass.

Meg: Where, uh, is that a Ticketmaster ticket?

Dan Slimmon: I know. The-- So everything here is, um, A-E-A-X-S, AXS? Yes.

Meg: as well. Yeah.

Dan Slimmon: Um, we'll, we'll talk about where that came from because the guy who is the main character of the first part of this podcast [00:05:00] episode has started that one also. But we'll, we'll get there. Um, and then, and then I'm just getting... And they all just get bought up by the same people.

It's disgusting. Um, my... I would say my least favorite part of the ticketing experi- the concert experience is where you have to go out into the far corner of the parking lot because you can't get any data signal, and if you can't get any data signal, then your concert tickets won't load on your phone.

So you have to, like... I-I've, I've had m-multiple experiences where I have to, like, you know, go far away from everybody else and then hold my phone up over my head so that my ticket will load so that I can get into the show, which is...

Meg: a, a local experience, do you feel like, or is this a wider spread experience?

Dan Slimmon: just be

Meg: bad signal in your neighborhood?

Dan Slimmon: may just be Wallingford, uh, but it, but, uh, I think it, I think it's also just because, like, if you go to the Toyota Oakdale Theatre in Wallingford that...

Meg: that. But I've been there [00:06:00] several times,

Dan Slimmon: I'm sure you have.

Meg: Yeah.

Dan Slimmon: Uh, Meg, Meg and I, uh, both grew up in Connecticut, so

Meg: That's

Dan Slimmon: know a lot of the same concert venues. Yeah, um, that it's just, like, so everybody's so packed in there that you, nobody's getting cell signal, and everybody forgot that they were gonna need cell signal in order to load their goddamn concert ticket, because that's how things work now.

Meg: It's not like you can screenshot it, because a lot of them have the sort of like moving

Dan Slimmon: we're gonna talk about the moving bar.

Meg: Okay, great. Great.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah. It's, um, it's, it's quite a, uh, innovation in ticketing technology. so, so in,

Ticket fees by 1991
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Dan Slimmon: in 1991, an LA Times reporter brought a ticket to see, bought a ticket to see Dan Fogelberg at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheater, which was listed...

Meg: Fogelberg?

Dan Slimmon: Dan Fogelberg.

Meg: Dan?

Dan Slimmon: Now, uh,

Meg: Never

Dan Slimmon: his, uh, he had a string of [00:07:00] hits in the '70s, including "Leader of the Band," and, uh, like, he's, was a folk, sort of a folky s-

Meg: of

Dan Slimmon: in the '70s. Yeah.

Meg: All right. All right.

Dan Slimmon: A pretty, pretty big act in the '70s. Um, in 1991, they, he was, his tickets were selling for, listed for $25.

Uh,

Meg: Oh, that's expensive for 1981.

Dan Slimmon: yes, uh, and that was just the face value. So on top of the face value, they, uh, this, th- this article describes making liberal use of eye roll quotes. There was a $1 per ticket box office service fee, a facility surcharge of $2.25, and then on top of that, there's a separate convenience fee of $5.75 if you wanna order over your phone.

And then finally, of course, there was a processing fee for the whole order of $2.05, bringing the bottom line to $35.05, over 40% higher than the original list price. [00:08:00] And I wanna talk about how we got there today. Nowadays, face values for tickets are, for, for concerts are, like, 10 to 100 times higher than that.

Um, and the fees are less itemized. You can't really see what all the individual fees are anymore, uh, because of some laws that were passed recently. A lot of the fees have been replaced with things like, you know, meet and greet opportunities with Lil Jon, VIP upgrades

Meg: Yeah, it doesn't matter what concert you go to, it's always Little John.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah, he's

Meg: travels around as a, as a perk.

Dan Slimmon: the hardest working man in show business.

Meg: Yeah

Dan Slimmon: Uh, I saw him o-open for a local punk band the other day. It just got a-- They had a big, shiny, glittery background. You can meet Lil Jon for five seconds before you saw the, the DIY punks. Um, yeah, and that's that, like, 200, $300, I think, if you want the Lil Jon, the Lil Jon, meet Lil Jon experience.

Meg: Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's what he [00:09:00] does, right?

Dan Slimmon: I, I think so. I think he's the yeah one.

Meg: My, my little son impression is that I've never worked on that one, but I'll work on it for next time.

Dan Slimmon: I mean, y- I don't think anybody should work very hard on a Lil Jon impression. I thought that was pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good as far as Lil Jon impressions go. Anyway, I th- I think, uh, I think we all know from, from experiencing Ticketmaster a couple times, we all know that Ticketmaster is not a company that does anything, right?

Meg: I agree.

Dan Slimmon: It's a, it's a, it, it, it exists. It simply exists between you and something you need and makes money that way. And that thing that you need is, of course, music. Music is something that we as humans cannot live without.

It's an, it's an ancient magic older than speech that puts our spirits into resonance with one another, even across time and space, and makes us, for a moment, one being. [00:10:00] It comes from deep inside us, beneath rationality. But what is rational, sadly, is that companies will see a basic human need, build a wall around it, and charge us to go through the gate.

The historical stage is set
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Dan Slimmon: So this is a story of how a series of completely reasonable business decisions ended up producing a system that is utterly unreasonable. It's the story, Meg, of how the live concert industry stops making sense.

Meg: Ooh.

Dan Slimmon: And so I want to bring out the main characters in our story one at a time onto the stage, starting with the most important one, who strolls out onto the empty stage with nothing but a boom box and a big suit, and that's the musician, the act.

So, like, people have been, probably been playing music probably at least as long as we've been speaking. I, I don't need to explain why we [00:11:00] make music. We all know why we make music. It's beautiful, and we, and we love it. So that's where musicians come from. The next character, right away, to come out on the stage is the fan Right.

People love music of a particular musician. They'll go out of their way to go see that musician perform, and they get-- And, and the, the musician and the, the fan get to mind meld for a, a beautiful moment. It's, it-- So for like 99% of his- human history, those are the only two classes of people who were involved in music.

People playing it and people watching them play it with their direct eyeballs within earshot of them, right?

Meg: it any other

Dan Slimmon: [00:12:00] coming on to play drums on "Thank You for Sending Me an Angel" on "Stop Making Sense." Uh, I, I, I, I, I was like, "What is, what, what, how can I, how can I explain all these, uh, how can I explain all these characters in a way Meg in particular will appreciate?

Ah, I know. 'Stop Making Sense.'" Yeah, that's right. Good.

Meg: know.

Dan Slimmon: so, so venues are the first person, the first character on our stage that's not directly involved in music, right? The-- They have space, they have equipment, they have seats, but it's neither the supply nor of-- for concerts, nor is it the demand for concerts.

It's, it's essentially like a market where musicians can sell their shows and fans can buy shows, and the, the venue puts them together. Is it, is this sort of... I mean, i-is this similar... You, you work in the theater. Uh, what, i-is, is this [00:13:00] similar to how it works with, uh, you know, stage performances that are not music?

Meg: I mean, absolutely. Like, you have, uh, you can do an improv show in a park, but it's gonna be bad. Like, it's gonna be hard to hear people. There's gonna be a lot of ambient stuff going on, uh, you know, and then so it's, it's much better to pay for a space to perform.

Dan Slimmon: Yes, exactly. And...

Meg: there's the-- I have a really fun graphic in my mind going on that's, uh, the, the characters sort of stop making sense with like little labels on them.

Dan Slimmon: I'll

Meg: if you can add

Dan Slimmon: maybe I'll make a GIF or,

Meg: Yeah.

Dan Slimmon: do a, do a TikTok with that. yeah, yeah, exactly. So, so do you book it... You have to-- You, you pay to book the venue in advance, and then you take the part of the door. Okay.

Meg: Yeah, or, or if you're-- in some certain circumstances, there's a venue that will let you perform for free, and then they take the full door. Um, but those, you know, um, it just, you know, you... [00:14:00] If you wanna do it all yourself, you definitely have to pay for a venue.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah.

Meg: Right.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah, that makes sense. Uh, yeah. So, so we have lots of different kinds of venues now, and, uh, and as soon as the venue was invented, for music at least, uh, y-you had to i-invent, simultaneously invent the ticket, um, for, for basically for two reasons. First of all, um, it was mostly opera houses, and putting on an opera is expensive.

You, you gotta, you gotta buy lots of costumes, uh, big elaborate sets. You need, maybe need hundreds of performers for some operas. Uh, you know, a whole dang orchestra. So somebody's gotta pay for all... Somebody's gotta pay the venue to make sure that... a-and, and pay for all this stuff to put on the show in advance.

Uh, before this, before opera houses, you'd probably get, like, a wealthy patron to pay for your show. But this is the mid to late [00:15:00] 1800s, so most, a lot of the wealthy patrons in Europe have recently been guillotined or otherwise. And so, you know, now we've got venues which, which need to ra- you need to raise some capital before you can put on a show.

Um, the, the second reason they needed to invent tickets is n- if, with tickets, you can sell different tickets at different prices, right? You can charge extra for front row seats. You can charge way extra for a balcony, and that lets the venues take in more m- revenue per performance and lets the, lets the, like, different opera houses and music halls compete with each other.

so okay, so now we have tickets. We have, we have, uh, we have musicians. We have fans. We have venues. As soon as we invent tickets, we have, we also invent, accidentally, the ticket scalper. The earliest mention I could find of ticket [00:16:00] scalpers in the American newspapers was from an 1875 issue of the Chicago Inter Ocean newspaper.

Interestingly, it's a bulletin about a pair of ticket scalpers getting $250 worth of tickets stolen from them by a, quote, "sneak thief."

which I find very, which I find very funny, is it, like, it's not about the scalping. It's about that somebody else was stealing g- g- it's like sca- ticket scalping has always been sort of crime adjacent, right? It's like it's not a crime, but the u- the people who do it tend to be, like, large, scary-looking men who meet you in an alley.

Like, it, it, it's, it's sort of right there. It's intertwined with crime, kind of.

Meg: Sneak thief though. I, I don't want us to gloss over sneak thief. That's very funny.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah.

Yeah. Uh, I'm sure 1875 Chicago was, was rotten with sneak thieves. Yeah. You couldn't-- They were sneak thieving each [00:17:00] other. You know, it was a whole ecosystem. Uh, yeah, the, the scalpers, though, are not robbing anybody. It's just sort of like what happens when the venue is selling tickets for more-- for less than the tickets could go for,

Meg: Mm-hmm.

Dan Slimmon: then you end up with people selling them.

It's nobody's favorite thing about concerts, but at the scale of, like, the parking lot scalper, it's not really a big deal, right? Uh, now, at the modern scale, we'll see how Ticketmaster's own decisions make scalping into a much bigger problem than it, than it used to be, uh, because now we have bots. But we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll get to that.

Now, finally, coming on stage to round out our cast is our last good guy, or n-no- neutral guy, which is the concert promoter. Um, [00:18:00] promoters start appearing in the '50s, uh, when pop music is becoming a thing. Suddenly, you've got all these bands crisscrossing the nation, playing shows in a different city every night, right?

And if you're f- if you're a band from, like, Detroit, uh, you probably don't know any of the two dozen or so music venues in Providence. So you don't know which one you should book, how many seats you would be able to fill there, how much you should pay to book it. Y-you know, uh, you probably even have barely enough cash to get to Providence, much less book a show there.

So you gotta hire a promoter, usually. In Providence, that would be Frank Russo. There's just the guy in Providence who owns the Providence area. He's the promoter. You talk to-- You call Frank Russo. He knows all the venues. He knows how many seats he'll fill up with, for what act on what night of the week.

He knows-- He has relationships with all the venues, [00:19:00] and most importantly, Frank Russo has a big bag of cash that he can use to pay a venue to book your show. Where did Frank Russo get that cash, you ask? Don't worry about where Frank Russo got that cash. He's just, he's got it. Just think of him as an investor.

He's gonna... If, if his, if your show sells out, he gets his money back plus profit. If nobody shows up because all the hip teens are at, like, a sock hop that night, Frank Russo takes a bath. That's part of his business. He's willing to do that for you. Good old Frank. So there ends up being this whole network of, of these guys, concert promoters.

You know, if you're going to Boston, you get in touch with Don Law. If you're going to San Francisco, you get in touch with Bill Graham. And these are real people. Yeah, these are real people.

Meg: cool.

Dan Slimmon: Um, yeah, Bill Graham, uh, Bill, Bill Graham own... He was, he's, he was, uh, he had a super big promo- promotion company called, uh, Bill Graham Productions, and, [00:20:00] uh, that, that, like, owned all the San Francisco market for rock and pop shows in the '70s.

Um, it's not perfect. It's not a Garden of Eden. It, it involves a fair amount of exploitation and graft, and the concert promoters are fiercely territorial, and they're all in bed with the mob. But there's a thriving 1970s rock scene which proves that this works somehow. Uh, it's, it's causing music to be played for people and, and, you know, it's, it, it kinda just works out Until it breaks.

Ticket vendors invent ticket vending
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Dan Slimmon: And, and it hap- it happens in where you live. It hap- it breaks in, uh, LA. That's where the birth of the ticket, the, the, the ticket ma- ticket vendor market, and Ticketmaster in particular, happens in LA,

Meg: And that makes sense because, uh, [00:21:00] Stop Making Sense was recorded at the Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles.

Dan Slimmon: You are correct, Meg. Uh, see, it's all about you today. I thought,

Meg: you. Thank you. That's important to

Dan Slimmon: so it stops working and the whole industry starts to implode over the next 60 years. It starts with a company not called Ticketmaster, uh, but called uh, Ticketron. This is the first... You know Ticketron?

Meg: I, I've heard it before. Uh, one of my favorite-- I don't know if you like Run the Jewels, but one of

Dan Slimmon: Yeah.

Meg: Run the Jewels songs is called "Call Tikitron."

Dan Slimmon: Nice. I didn't know-- don't know that song. Uh,

Meg: RTJ3, I believe.

Dan Slimmon: that's great. I know nobody talks about Ticketron, nobody talks about Ticketron anymore. but they were big. They were big.

Meg: [00:22:00] [00:23:00] that

Dan Slimmon: office forever, since there were venues, and it costs them basically nothing to tell, to sell, sell tickets at the box office.

Uh, so why would they give you a cut of the ticket sales to sell all the tickets? Right.

Meg: gonna stop selling tickets at the box office.

Dan Slimmon: Exactly. If they, if they, there's nowhere else to buy a ticket, 'cause people will come to the box office and wait in line and get tickets there. They don't care. Um, the promoter also will not accept this system because the promoter has already put up money for the show, and now he's being forced to share his profit with these computer nerds.

it's a total non-starter for, for Ticketron. So they shift gears, and Ticketron is actually the one that invents the, the ticketing service fee that we all know so well today. So that's on top of, they're like, "Okay, the, the face value's all yours.

We're not touching the face [00:24:00] value. We're gonna add another, uh, fee on top of the ticket that is the service fee, and then that's our, that's how we get paid. We take the service fee." This is what, like, melts the concert industry from the inside out. But, uh, it, it works pretty well for them initially. They're charging tiny, tiny, tiny fees, um, because they're like, "Well, we don't wanna, we don't wanna make the, um, the customer mad, the c- ticket buyer upset. Then they won't buy the tickets through us and, you know, we won't make any money. We need to make sure we charge, like, a 75 cent per ticket, like, under a dollar fee on every, on, on every ticket, no matter how much the ticket is, ' and that's kinda nice that they were thinking, "Oh, let's not, let's not alienate the fans."

Meg: And just, just for my own... So at this point in time, we're in the '80s you said?

Dan Slimmon: This is, um, 19-- This is the late 1970s.

Meg: All right, late '70s. Okay. So at this point, you have [00:25:00] the option to still go to the box office and pick up a ticket in person, right?

Dan Slimmon: Generally, you must go to the box office and pick up a ticket in person.

Meg: And so is w- the value that they're adding the ability... 'Cause this is, in the '70s, this is really pre-internet. So like are we... the value that they're adding the ability to buy it over the phone?

Dan Slimmon: Uh That's part of it. So Ticketron has terminals. It's not until later that Ticketron starts putting terminals in the actual venues. Initially, the Ticketron terminal is in like a Bloomingdale's or your, or your bank, or it's somewhere where people go and they're like, "Oh, why don't I buy a t-ticket to see a play later?

There's a Ticketron terminal here. I can like plug in my info and I can get... Or I can like put in my cash and I can get some tickets to see a show later at the Ticketron terminal." And then you pay the service fee. If you still go to the, if you go to the box office initially, you're still just paying fa-face value and you're not [00:26:00] paying Ticketron for the ticket.

Meg: Okay, so the, the a- added value for the customer is the ability to buy tickets to see Steely Dan at the Blue Mendels.

Dan Slimmon: Yes. Correct

Meg: and interesting, and I hope this, this isn't too much of a quick sidebar, but, um, I did encounter this recently. Um, uh, so I was in Japan and, um, uh, they have in the 7-Elevens and the Lawsons and all the convenience stores, they have a ticket v- uh, terminal basically, like, um, that you can buy to concerts, and I was trying to get tickets to, like a, a wrestling show or something that I heard, like a, a J- Japanese wrestling show that was supposed to be really fun.

Dan Slimmon: Oh.

yeah.

Meg: and we couldn't... The w- I guess you could not buy them at the venue. You had to go to this ticket terminal. Um, and so of course it's, like, not in English, so we were using our phone to translate. Um, and we spent a long time digging through this ticket terminal and trying to figure out how to buy a ticket to the show.

Turns out it was sold out, but it

Dan Slimmon: Oh.

Meg: big accomplishment that we were able to use our phone [00:27:00] to translate to get through this fully Japanese ticket terminal in a convenience store.

Dan Slimmon: I mean, I bet it didn't feel like that big an accomplishment at the time because what you ended up finding out is it was sold out.

Meg: But it was... We were like, "All right," you know, we did, we did our due diligence.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah.

Meg: is interesting because I don't know, I don't, I don't really see that in the US or maybe I'm just not looking

Dan Slimmon: No.

Meg: is it, is it still in the US,

Dan Slimmon: N-

Meg: terminal?

Dan Slimmon: no, I've never seen one. They were, they were big in the, like, ea- la- um, late '80s, early '90s. You'd go to a Sam Goody. It would be at a Sam Goody, right? You'd go to a rec- a CD store, and you could buy a terminal at a CD store, a ticket at a CD store terminal. I don't know why that didn't, um... I, I, I think, uh, the...

I think what ended up happening is that, uh, we, in the '90s, uh, you, they ended up going fully online ticket sales, and Ticketm- at that time, Ticketmaster owned... We'll get there, but Ticketmaster owned all of the, they owned, like, 90% of the ticketing. So, you know, [00:28:00] they could just decide, "We're not doing terminals anymore," and there suddenly there are no more terminals.

Meg: It makes sense. I'm, I'm surprised that it's still a thing in Japan. I wonder what the difference is, 'cause obviously they have the internet too. Use it

Dan Slimmon: Yeah. Right. I wonder, I wonder if it just never, um, if there was never enough of a monopoly for anyone, uh, to just decide that, you know, like, this is how tickets are sold now, right? If the, if there's multiple businesses all running, maybe they all had their own, their own way of doing things. I don't know.

Ticketmaster, unfortunately, comes to exist
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Dan Slimmon: Now by the 1980s ticketron starting to lose more and more business especially in la to an upstart called ticketmaster very similar company key differentiator is probably that ticketron is run by computer nerds ticketmaster is run by the mob i literally i'm not just not i'm not kidding literally in 1981 [00:29:00] ticketmaster gets bought by they're they're running they're doing a little bit of business early but then in 1981 they get bought by this guy bert cantor who is an attorney for the chicago mob uh i don't think so uh i don't know k-a-n-t-e-r

Meg: Oh, no. Then, no. Canter's

Dan Slimmon: guy

Meg: with a C.

Dan Slimmon: um yeah i don't want to i don't want to tell nobody if if uh i don't want to tell anybody that cantor's deli is involved with the chicago mafia uh different different guy um although you know maybe i don't know uh

Meg: I

Dan Slimmon: is it good

Meg: safe. Uh, it's-- I think it's fine. I, I, uh, it's-- But it's with a C, so I think they're safe. But yeah, I've, I've only been there once or

Dan Slimmon: wow

Meg: Um, but, uh, it is, it is an institution. It's from 1931. Let's--

Dan Slimmon: dang

Meg: Which is pretty old for Los Angeles.

Dan Slimmon: yeah right i mean you guys didn't have like [00:30:00] water until like 1920

Meg: Yeah.

that sounds right.

Dan Slimmon: uh so bert cantor no relation to cantor's deli is uh buys this company most of this company and he puts his friend fred rosen in charge fred rosen is going to be the ceo of ticketmaster for the next 16 years he's he's a brilliant businessman by all accounts dogged uh you know he's he can always find a deal and and also by all accounts including his own he could not give less of a shit about music He, Fr- Fred Rosen has, has been to see so many of the great rock acts of the 20th century, Steely Dan, The Rolling Stones, Neil Diamond.

He's fallen asleep at all of them. Like, he's very well-known in the industry for, like, falling asleep at concerts.

Meg: This is not a bit. This is

Dan Slimmon: [00:31:00] No, this is true.

Meg: yeah

Dan Slimmon: Uh, like, he was s- he went to, um, see The Rolling Stones with Paul Allen, the Microsoft, uh, one of the Microsoft co-founders, and Paul Allen later said, "Yeah, he just fell as- fell asleep during the, like, second song."

Uh, so this is really the guy you want running the entire music industry for 16 years. Uh, but on the bright side, he, um, he did care a lot about the reliability of Ticketmaster's systems. Fred, he al- he would always tell his employees the system needed to be, like, rock solid in terms of security and throughput.

And, and as a, as a site reliability engineer, which is my trade, uh, I-- this warms my heart a little bit. It's very hard to make CEOs care about the reliability of computer systems when they're not actively on fire. So, [00:32:00] uh, but he would, he would have, like, company-wide meetings where he would, he would call out, he would have a little cheer where he would call out like, uh, "What's the most important thing?"

And everybody would have to respond, "The system." Uh, you know, I j- just makes me, makes me smile a little bit. I had to find something to say, I could say nice about Fred Rosen 'cause we got a lot a lot of other things to say about Fred Rosen for the rest of the episode. Um, so this obsessive, this obsessive interest in the system, uh, creates, like, a competitive edge for Ticketmaster over Ticketron.

Ticketron's terminals are s- are centralized. The terminal is always has to be, like, calling home over phone lines to a central server to, uh, be like, "What tickets are available? Is this ticket sold? W-w-will give me the whole list of tickets, and I know which ones I'm able to sell." And it has to connect to the central server to make transactions.[00:33:00]

Ticketmaster is much more decentralized, so a lot of the logic, a lot of the code lives on the, the terminal rather than on some sort of central server, which makes it much more efficient under periods of extreme load. Like, if, if a box office just opened for a big football game, Ticketron might go down.

Or, uh, but if y- or if you don't want your Ticketron to go down, you have to spend, like, a shitload of money on extra redundancy, whereas Ticketmaster won't go down. Um, which is, which is pretty big competitive advantage. Um- But the big competitive advantage is more that Fred Rosen realizes, Fred Rosen realizes something about the ticket business that Ticketron doesn't.

insight Fred Rosen has that will propel Ticketmaster into unchallenged dominance of the ticket business by the end of the decade, uh, and, and, and from there to a position of [00:34:00] unprecedented power over the entire concert business within three decades, is the insight that what keeps the money coming in is not happy fans or happy musicians.

Those aren't Ticketmaster's customers. Ticketmaster's customers are, number one, the venue, and number two, the promoter. That's who Ticketmaster has to keep out-- to, to keep, to keep happy. In other words, fuck the fans.

If the tickets-- If the ticket buying experience is made shitty in some way, but it makes Ticketmaster and the promoters and the venues money, fine, great. People are gonna buy the tickets anyway, and more money gets to be had by, by Fred Rosen and his buddies.

Fred Rosen: anti-public-transit warrior
---

Dan Slimmon: Do you by-- have any of you heard of Fred Rosen?

Meg: I've outed Fred

Dan Slimmon: Okay. Um, he's t- apparently he turned into, like, a big LA NIMBY. he's, like, really... He started this association that's really against the Sepulveda Transit Corridor.

Uh, [00:35:00] and he, like, goes to town meetings and yells at everybody and tells them, "You don't know who you're w- you don't know who you're messing with. I'm Fred Rosen." Uh, he, he got, like, a bunch of H-Hollywood people together to, like, protest the, the new transit line.

Meg: looking about him, yeah.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah.

Meg: into him, yeah. Uh, the Se- what is the Sepulveda Transit Corridor is a... a, it's a, um, a rapid transit line that does not exist to connect the San Fernando Valley, uh, the LA Basin through the Sepulveda Pass. Um, okay. okay, so basically it's a...

Sorry, just took me a second. It's a subway line that would go, uh, o- along the 405 over the mountains.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah.

Meg: and, uh, that sounds like a good thing to me personally. I mean, we could use a lot more public transit in LA. uh, yeah, sounds like he's got some sort of mansion over there and doesn't like it.

Dan Slimmon: Yes, he does not want a tunnel [00:36:00] dug under his house.

Meg: Um, and he's apparently very mean to individual LA Metro staff, and said that they deserve no courtes- courtesy and are entitled to no respect. So he's just yelling at subway conductors.

Dan Slimmon: Yep.

Meg: sounds like a real dick.

Dan Slimmon: He's a complete dick. He really is. Yeah. out of the music business around, like, 2008, 2009, and now he just got into the yelling at subway conductors business. Um, you know, he's gonna die doing what he loved.

Meg: Yep.

Dan Slimmon: Uh, so, so yeah,

The exclusive contract system
---

Dan Slimmon: what he does in the, in the '70s, and once he figures out this, this, the, the, the distinction between w-who, who, once he figures out who his real customer is, he starts going to meeting with venue owners around L.A.,

L.A., and he tells them, "Hey, you, you have Ticketron, right? Ticketron adds a service fee of 75 cents per ticket." They're like, "Yeah." He says, "Well, our service fee is gonna be $1.50." [00:37:00] And the venue's like, "Why would we wanna pay more for an in-service... Why would we wanna have the service fee be double? That doesn't make any sense."

He says, "Well, we're gonna give you 50 cents of it." And that's, that's the, that's the whole thing. He, he's g- he's like, uh, "It-- We're gonna give you... In fact, we'll give you a million dollar cash advance today against rebates that you're gonna get for future, that, that, that, uh, for, for, for future ticket sales.

We'll just give you a million now if you sign an exclusive contract with us that we can sell, that we sell all of your tickets and nobody else gets to sell your tickets, and you just get kickbacks, excuse me, rebates for every ticket that, that gets sold."

Meg: So they just say, "All right, well, so we're just gonna take more money from the customer and we'll give you some of it, and now, now we're your exclusive vendor."

Dan Slimmon: Exactly.

Meg: Okay.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah

Meg: [00:38:00] I I, I... It makes sense. See, I mean, I don't think it's, it's an... I don't think it's a great thing to do, but it certainly makes sense as a strategy.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah, it, it works great.

Meg: Yeah,

Dan Slimmon: Uh, it works obscenely well. The venues love it, obviously. The promoters don't love it right away, but Fred Rosen starts giving them kickbacks too, and everybody-- Immediately, Ticketmaster has long-term exclusive ticket vendor deals with every venue and every concert promoter in LA. Ticket, Ticketron just can't get any inventory.

Everybody's selling with Ticketmaster. Uh, and they, and they're rapidly-- Ticketmaster's, uh, expanding rapidly nationwide. And as they expand, we get to see this, like, really interesting, uh, structural quirk in this new business model that Fred Rosen has discovered. Because in most businesses, [00:39:00] competition leads to lower prices for the consumer, right?

You know, if they gotta sell, uh, one business starts selling for less, everybody else has to sell for less or they, or everybody will go to the one that's selling for less. That's not how it works in this business. When the, because when the, when there's multiple ticket vendors competing with each other, they bid up.

They bid the ticket prices up so they ha- so that they can have more money to s-share with the promoters and the venues. If they make, if they make the fee three times as high, then they have three times as much um, rebates to give back to the venues and the promoters, and so they get the business. And, and so competition does nothing to stem price rises.

It, in fact, encourages price rises over the c-- uh, and, and ticket, ticket prices just go like... For, for the next, um, 10 years, they start to rise crazy fast, and they don't stop rising until... Well, [00:40:00] actually, they still haven't stopped rising.

Meg: I was gonna

Dan Slimmon: Uh, yeah. We were not, we're not, we're just not prepared for this.

It, it's just like a

Meg: when?

Dan Slimmon: little, fun little quirk of the, of the concert industry. Gee, gee whiz, right? Um, this is the same, this is the sa- if, uh, incidentally, it's the same reason that, like, um, drinks are so expensive at concert venues, because you have some, you have a concessionaire whose business is to sell drinks and food at your concert venue, and you're gonna, and you're gonna end up picking the concessionaire who can give you the most money back as a proportion of the concession sales.

And so that's why a Liquid Death costs $7.50 at the fucking, uh, College Street Music Hall.

Meg: Yeah, that makes sense here 'cause the, the-- and the customer, the person buying it doesn't have a choice.

Dan Slimmon: No, right.

Meg: Yeah.

Dan Slimmon: only one, the only place you can get a drink.

Meg: Yeah,

Dan Slimmon: Yeah.

Meg: I see that. [00:41:00] I, yeah, see that, uh, this is not music venue related, but, um, I fly in and out of the Burbank Airport whenever I can do so, and was, uh, recently horrified to find that a juice, like a, a, a little Ocean Spray juice cost seven dollars and fifty cents.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah. Yeah.

Meg: like, "That seems, that seems wrong," but there's nowhere else I can buy it. You know, that's like, that's-- the, the, the prices are universal throughout the entire airport.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah, right. If you say no, the, the cashier can be like, "All right. Well, see you later, I guess."

Meg: Yeah.

there's no other options.

Dan Slimmon: they own, we own all of the other ones too.

Meg: Yep

Dan Slimmon: Um, sucks, sucks bad. Uh,

Kafkaesque fee structure as smokescreen
---

Dan Slimmon: another important part of the, how the fee structure works for Ticketmaster is they-- it's this fee structure is complicated as shit, um, which is what that, that "LA Times" article was gesturing to, right?

There's like, there's a per-ticket service fee. There's a [00:42:00] per-order processing fee. Then, then like, the, the one that's most, that's grossest to me is there's a facility charge usually, which Ticketmaster collects some money as a facility charge, which goes straight to the venue, which is basically just a give us more money please fee that you have to pay.

Uh Then if you wanna order for pho- order by phone, there's a huge fee for that. If, uh, later Ticketmaster starts hosting their own resi- ticket resale platform for, like, secondary resale of tickets, so there's a resale fee for that. If you want your tickets mailed to you, you gotta pay a delivery fee. Or if you don't w- wanna pay the phone order fee and you order, wanna order in person at a Ticketmaster outlet where you don't have to have things delivered to you, then you can pay the smaller in-person order fee.

Uh, and eventually, they-- Once they start doing online sales, you can choose, you can choose to skip the delivery fee and receive a [00:43:00] printable PDF instead that you print yourself. Uh, tho- that way you only have to pay the digital download fee.

Which, which is, which is a fee for sending you a goddamn PDF over email.

Meg: It's like, it's like part of buying a ticket is that it has to get delivered to you in some way, and so then it's just this extra fee that, uh, varies depending on how they send it to you. It's

Dan Slimmon: Right.

Meg: like, why can't that be built in? Like, what-- just gonna buy a ticket and then never see it if I wanna avoid that fee.

Yeah.

Dan Slimmon: Uh, I, uh, yeah, I guess it's mostly so, well, so, like, it's, it's initially it's so the promoters and the venues don't want, um, so d- like, don't have to say that they're charging the fees. Ticketmaster can sort of hide that they're... Like, the, the comp- the com- the complexity of the ticket fee structure helps the venues be like, "Well, you know, we charge, we're only charging this face value," and Ticketmaster has [00:44:00] all these fees that they have that, that, that are set up.

And Ticket-- And so Ticketmaster can, like, take the bruises for fans who are mad about the increased fees, and they don't mind. They're-- In fact, that's, like, explicitly, uh, one, one candid, one particularly candid Ticketmaster executive has said, "Ticketmaster, in effect, agreed to take it on the chin for these contracts with venues.

Part of the unspoken agreement, or maybe even spoken, was that Ticketmaster will be the face of ticketing. We'll take the bruises from people who don't like the process." This is, like, part of their value proposition.

Meg: Gosh. That's wild. Can you imagine being a, uh, customer service person at Ticketmaster where your job is just to get yelled at?

Dan Slimmon: Jesus Christ. Yeah.

The lost art of waiting in line
---

Meg: It-- is... Sorry, I'm gonna move, move this. Real quick, slight other detour. I was just thinking while we were talking about, um... So there's, uh, a couple buildings near me, [00:45:00] um, that used to be concert ticket, like, offices, I would say.

Like, uh, they're just standalone buildings. I can think of two of them. One is in Atwater Village, and one is in Um, and they're both shut down. Like, they're both, like, for lease and have been for lease in a while. But they used to be a place that you go to buy concert tickets in person.

Dan Slimmon: Huh.

Meg: associated with Ticketmaster, but I've always wondered what the deal is with those. But that seems to be, uh, an industry... A, a, a small storefront thing that does not really exist anymore. But it was there recently 'cause they're still, you know, they're still up for lease.

Dan Slimmon: Maybe it was like the last Blockbuster.

Meg: Exactly, yeah. Like, it just, it feels very retro. Like, "Oh, I'm gonna go buy my ticket at this little office."

Dan Slimmon: You know, uh, there's something to be said for... I mean, I don't know. There's something to be said for waiting in line at a box office, uh, I, I think. Because as inconvenient as it is, it does not allow-- [00:46:00] It, it does not require Ticketmaster being involved in the process at all. Uh, and, and so there's no way for this, like, crazy, uh, you know, auction for who can charge the most in service fees to emerge.

But we can't have nice things, so we don't have those anymore either.

Meg: I also wonder if just, like, waiting in line for something is kind of a dying thing. You know?

Dan Slimmon: Yeah.

Meg: Like, they... I think of all the things that we used to wait in line for, and, like, how many of those do we still wait in line for? but I'll tell you, I'll tell you one place that is still going strong is, um, my neighborhood really has a lot of, like, uh, shoe, um,

Dan Slimmon: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Meg: And so the shoe people, they, they... The sneaker k- the sneakerheads will, will get out and they'll put up their, um, their, like, uh, lawn chairs, and they'll wait overnight to get the sneaker drops.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah. Uh, I, I've seen there's a huge line out in New Haven, [00:47:00] uh, some nights at the, yeah, Sneaker, Sneaker Junk. I, I forget what the name of the sneaker store is. Yeah. Yeah, I've

Meg: because

Dan Slimmon: seen, that, that big line. I wonder how they maintained the monopoly on customers waiting in lines for things.

Meg: a sneakers, sneakers online very easily.

Dan Slimmon: Yes.

Meg: And I'm sure that there are, like, sneaker resale places or sneaker, you know, retail places in general where you can buy your sneaker drops, but I just wonder what, where that, that's one of the places that still has a culture of waiting in line for stuff.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah. Maybe it's so everybody... I mean, maybe, I don't know. Are your shoe, your shoes are worn out by the time you're done waiting in line for the shoes, so you need new shoes now? I don't know.

Meg: The other one is, um, uh, weed shops. There's a, a place me, uh, that on 4/20 gave y- gave the first, like, couple people in line, like, c- like, $1,000 worth of weed.

Dan Slimmon: Whoa!

Meg: so we were there the [00:48:00] day before for some reason, and there was a woman out there in a, in a lawn chair just sort of sitting happily, and the security guard was like, "Yep.

Yeah, she's gonna be here overnight. She's gonna get $1,000

Dan Slimmon: Yeah, I

Meg: products."

Dan Slimmon: that actually makes a lot of sense.

Meg: But yeah, I just, I wonder, uh, the, the, the waiting in line culture.

Dan Slimmon: good reason to have a 10. Yeah, I know.

Meg: Dying. thing.

Dan Slimmon: I know. Uh, there's, there's... Um, we had a thing for this. It was just, it was just a little bit inconvenient and people had to wait in lines. But on the, but on the brigh- on the brigh- on the other side of it, there weren't, um, there weren't bots buying up 100% of the tickets for your favorite concert in 10 minutes and then reselling them for 10 times the face value on some shady website.

Grateful Dead Ticket Service
---

Dan Slimmon: So Ticketmaster will end up with a lot of power because they're willing to take these lumps. Um, but back in the, back in the 1980s, there's still bands that have actual power, uh, [00:49:00] uh, negotiating power, and one of these is the Grateful Dead. So I don't know, I don't know a ton about the Grateful Dead, but, but I do know that they're, um...

You know, if Ticketmaster sees the music experience as a commodity, the Grateful Dead are the opposite of that. They, they play for hours. They don't do banter. They c- they come up and they play a long set. They take a break. They play another long set. Um, they even They explicitly encourage their fans to record bootlegs of their shows, right?

Um, as, as everybody knows, if you've ever had, uh, as your school bus driver a 50-year-old acid casualty named Todd who listens to nothing but Grateful Dead bootlegs every goddamn day, um, there's, like, millions of these recordings. and this is how they get such intensely loyal fans who are still listening to nothing but Grateful [00:50:00] Dead bootlegs 30 years later.

They've, they got fans following them from state to state, uh, um, because they, because they really are all about, you know, music. They're very suspicious of, like, money men, venue owners, and promoters and stuff. Um, and they end up... They had, they had, they worked with promoters. They worked, they obviously worked with venue owners, but, like, they don't wanna be involved in the, the, the bidding war, anything Ticketmaster in- involves.

As Ticketmaster starts coming up, they do not wanna be involved in that. So they actually start their own ticketing company. Did you know this?

Meg: No, I didn't know that.

Dan Slimmon: It's called GDTS, Grateful Dead Ticketing System, I think. Uh, and it, and it, it kicks ass because it's, it's just for Grateful Dead tickets. They don't have any of the fancy technology that Ticketmaster has.

They end up having their own,

Meg: They're

Dan Slimmon: janky stoner ticket vending tech. [00:51:00] Uh, it's, it's very, like, if, if, if Ticketmaster is the Protoss where everything's powered by, like, shiny psychic crystals and glowing energy fields,

Meg: Zerg.

Dan Slimmon: they're the ... Uh, who's the Zerg? I was gonna say they were the Terrans,

Meg: Fair enough,

Dan Slimmon: where everything looks like it's, it's built out of tractor parts.

Um, I think, I think Live Nation is, is the Zerg. Maybe I'll try to figure out how to work that into the script next time. Uh, uh, it, it's all just sort of like there's, they have a, they have a hot- their hotline that you're supposed to call to find out information about the new shows is just a shelf with 10 digital answering machines on it.

It rings, and there's one lady who just records the message, and she has to, like, talk as fast as she can to fit it into the three-minute digital recording loop. Uh,

Meg: It's like it's just part

Dan Slimmon: system where you have to, like, send a specific sized index card to the, to, to Grate- to GDTS that requests your [00:52:00] tickets, how many tickets you want for what shows.

Um, send stamps with it so they can mail you back your tickets. Um, it's a pain, which, which on one hand is a pain in the ass. On the other hand, it reduces scalping immensely because...

Meg: experience.

Dan Slimmon: And it's just part of the experience. It's really fun. Yeah. They start, they start doing, like, psychedelic art on the outside of their ticket requests so that, like, people will notice them, and, and they'll g- be more likely to get- Um, see, it's really cool.

Meg: Yeah, I love that.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah. Um, I love it too. It's very human. It's built on human relationships and human creativity. We need more technology like that in the world.

Meg: We used to do such fun stuff with mail,

Dan Slimmon: Yeah.

Meg: know? Like, we'd mail in, like, cereal box barcodes, and then we'd

Dan Slimmon: Yeah.

Meg: and stuff like that.

Dan Slimmon: Do you remember how every, like, kids programming or educational [00:53:00] thing in the '90s for kids would be-- would tell you, like, "Did you know you can mail any object if you write the name, if the, like, address, if you put enough postage on it? And you can, like, mail a potato or a shoe. You can mail a sneaker."

Meg: the first thing that comes to mind.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah.

Meg: There was like a... I feel like there was a whole prank industry of mailing people potatoes. Like, you would pay someone to mail someone a potato.

Dan Slimmon: Really?

Meg: That, yeah, I don't know where that comes from, but I, I really do think there was, like, a mail someone a potato service

Dan Slimmon: I wonder why we stopped that, maybe.

Meg: I-- It's probably still there. I'm sure if I wanted to mail someone a potato, I could find someone to help me out.

Dan Slimmon: Uh, all right. You test it. Get, get back to us. Um, I'll, uh, I gotta, I gotta know. I would imagine somebody at some point must have sent a pot- started sending a potato with, like, anthrax in it and said, "Now you can't send potatoes anymore,"

or something. I have--

Meg: it for

Dan Slimmon: Nobody's mailed me a potato anytime lately, so, um,

Meg: I'll check your mail in two weeks, see what I can do.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah.

Meg: on the outside, too, just to [00:54:00] fit with the theme.

Dan Slimmon: hey, and if anybody listening wants to send me a potato also, I can't wait to cook all the potatoes that you send me, uh, to my house. I'm sure my address is online. so this is, this is, this is, this is beautiful. I think it's great. Um, good for the Grateful Dead. Ticketmaster, of course, hates it, and they-- but they're, like, there's powerful enough that, that, and it scares them enough, um, that, that, that, that, uh, Grateful Dead is able to, like, convince enough venues to do this with them that they're, like, violating enough of Ticketmaster's contract, like, exclusive contracts, that it's causing them a great deal of anxiety about their, their money.

Um, so Ticketmaster sets up this big fancy meeting at the Hyatt with, with hors d'oeuvres picked out by Jay Pritzker himself, uh, you know, big, big, big famous heir to the Pritzker fortune, uh, who owns a large part of [00:55:00] Ticketmaster, and they try to hash out a deal. it, it gets pretty heated.

Fred Rosen accuses the Dead of interfering in a business relationship.

Meg: is he-- he's at a fancy brunch with Jerry Garcia at this

Dan Slimmon: Yes,

Meg: this what's

Dan Slimmon: correct. Jerry, Jerry's there. He does not want the caviar, I think. He's not interested in the hors d'oeuvres. Uh- Uh, but he's there and, and the other, the other members of the band are there, and they have a lawyer. Um, and their lawyer's really good. Their lawyer, um, uh, uh, Fred Rosen's like, uh, "You're, you're-- by breaking these, uh, by, uh, convincing the venues to break our contract, you're interfering with a business relationship.

Like, you're, you're, um... that's, and that's illegal. We can sue you for that." And the, the Grateful Dead's lawyer is like, "Actually, about that, we're thinking about suing you for interfering in our business relationships, because we've been playing these venues for 20 years. [00:56:00] You just show up and say they have exclusive contracts with you, so I don't think so."

Um, which is, which rules and, and does the impossible. It shuts Fred Rosen up, and they end up with a handshake deal where Grateful Dead's allowed to sell half of their tickets to the, to arena shows, which is basically what they were doing anyway. which is, which is awesome. Somebody actually-- This is gonna be, like, one of the last times, maybe the last time, that an artist has enough power to, like, challenge Ticketmaster and get a deal out of them.

Meg: Isn't there-- I'm sure this is way skipping ahead, but wasn't there something with Taylor Swift?

Dan Slimmon: Yes, there was something with Taylor Swift, uh, which I don't have in the script yet. But I could do some research for the next part, and I,

Meg: All right. Sounds

Dan Slimmon: we'll, talk about Taylor Swift. Uh, there was a big thing with Miley Cyrus, uh, uh, with, with a Hannah Montana, uh, [00:57:00] show, but that's when we get to the scalpers.

Meg: Gotcha.

Dan Slimmon: nobody hate-- nobody likes... Like, all the artists, but all the artists, like the big artists, will talk a big game about hating Ticketmaster, and many of them do. I think somebody, a s- country, country star released an album called "All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster."

Meg: Nice.

Dan Slimmon: but-- And e- e- eventually, they're all on the take from Ticketmaster, too.

Not, not all the artists, but the big, the big artists, the ones that, um, that, that play the arena shows are all getting their share of the service fees, too. Anyway, so, so understandably, from between 1985, this meeting I think is in 1985. Um, and

Ticketmaster becomes master of tickets
---

Dan Slimmon: between 1985 and 1991, Ticketmaster buys up seven of its major competitors, including Ticketron. They buy up Ticketron. Uh, and they end up with a 90% share of the concert ticketing market. By 1991, 90%.[00:58:00]

Meg: Yikes.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah.

Meg: That's crazy.

Dan Slimmon: One in, one in 10 tickets to a concert in 1991 i- is sold by some-- in the United States, is sold by someone other than Ticketmaster.

Meg: What's that today? Do you know?

Dan Slimmon: Uh, I think it's, um, I think it's lower because they, a lot of the, um, E-Eventbrite and other, um, sort of the, there's, there's also A-AXS. Um, there's a, there's a few other competitors that, uh, cater to, like, different, diff- somewhat different markets.

Um, AXS caters to, like, amphitheaters generally, and, uh, and, like, Eventbrite is, caters to small theaters like The Space in, in Hampton, which I go to a lot. Uh, but... And so there's a little bit more of a spread. Um, but Ticketmaster owns-- [00:59:00] Ticketmaster has the big... Live Na- Live Nation, Ticketmaster, whatever the-- I think they're called Live Nation Enter-Entertainment now, has, like, all the big stadiums.

They have exclusive contracts with all the big stadiums.

Meg: Yep.

Dan Slimmon: and it turns out they didn't need 90% of the market share, but that's what they have, by 90%. People are calling-- People are like, "Well, that's a monopoly," right? That's what we call... The, the, obviously that's a monopoly. Fred Rosen doesn't see it that way.

According to Fred Rosen, quote, "The only true monopoly in the business are the acts. An act decides how much it's gonna play, how much it's gonna charge. All the, the big acts in particular have total control over what they do." That's how, that's how Fred Rosen sees it. Because, like, uh, 'cause, like, there's only one Radiohead, right?

There's only one Prince, is what he's saying. Um, but, like, that's not what monopoly is. Monopoly is the thing Ticketmaster is. It's clearly, obviously a monopoly. [01:00:00] Um, I, I don't know who he's, he thinks he's fooling with this. I guess he's just a guy. He, the kind of guy who's always gotta have an angle, where he, he makes it s- makes him s-self feel like he's smarter than you.

Uh, i-if the, if the acts... The, the thing, the thing about it is, even if it's true, even if the acts were the big monopolies, like, everybody would be fine with that,

Meg: Yeah.

Dan Slimmon: right? Like, everybody's here for the music. It's so... If the v- if the, if the, my favorite band makes a ridiculous amount of money when I go to see them, great.

I like them. I'm glad they're making money. Um, nobody's like, "Oh, the poor venues, the poor promoters. Nobody, nobody got their cut," right?

Meg: Yeah.

Dan Slimmon: Uh, but that's, that's the argument that he makes. And actually, as it turns out, in 1991, um- That kind of gets borne out. Fred Rosen's argument kind of gets borne out by the, um, by the [01:01:00] justice system, which is very sad.

Uh,

The grunging of American culture
---

Dan Slimmon: In 1991, the American youth music scene is taken by storm by this crunchy, scratchy, screechy, heroin-soaked, beflabeled new rock sound called grunge,

Meg: Yep.

Dan Slimmon: right? I was not listening to grunge in 1991. I was mostly into, like, Raffi.

Meg: Yeah, we were, we were six-ish,

Dan Slimmon: Yes. Yeah. Raffi, um, occasionally Everly Brothers. My parents put on, uh, like, the Everly Brothers a lot. Um, what were you listening to in 1991, Meg?

Meg: In 1991, gosh, uh, honestly, whatever my parents wanted to listen to. Probably Billy Joel and Sting.

Dan Slimmon: Hell yeah.

Meg: Yeah.

Dan Slimmon: Lot of Billy Joel.

Meg: A lot of musicals. My mom loves musicals,

Dan Slimmon: Oh, really? What,

Meg: then I was at, uh, she loved Oliver!, Les [01:02:00] Mis,

Dan Slimmon: Totally.

Meg: late '90s.

Dan Slimmon: Post-"Melancholy" and "The Infinite Sadness" is when I got into it, which was, like, way late.

Meg: yeah.

Yeah.

Dan Slimmon: I remember my, a lot of my friends' o- cool older siblings having, like, Kurt Cobain posters and baggy jeans and long, greasy hair. Um, about 15 years later, I remember a lot of them... I heard a lot of them were just getting out of rehab.

Uh, was what, what, what, what grunge kind of did to a generation. Uh, but it, you know, kicked ass. People, people liked it a lot.

Meg: Yeah, I was in a Nirvana cover band in middle school,

Dan Slimmon: Oh,

Meg: let's, let's say [01:03:00] that would've been like '98-ish, I

Dan Slimmon: Yeah.

Meg: guess. Like, like when I was like 13-ish. Um, so it was, it was just like a couple years late. Like a couple year... Like, that my friends were really into Nirvana. So it's just sort of, don't know. I, uh...

My, uh, my, my personal trainer a very young man. We was talking about this with him the other day. Uh, he's like 26, um, and my boyfriend and I go to him, uh, twice a week, and he always plays the same playlist. Uh, and it's, uh, um, often a lot of like grunge stuff. Like, he loves Nirvana. and so I asked him that j- just this week.

I was just like, "Did you grow up listening to this? Like, how... What is your relationship with it, given that you're so much younger?" And he's like, "Yeah, no, my, my dad really liked it."

Dan Slimmon: Yeah. Yeah, that's... Boy, that feels d- that feels bad.

Meg: I know. Like, I doubt his dad is that much older than me, to be honest.

Dan Slimmon: Oh, boy. That just made [01:04:00] my whole body sag to hear that. But it is amazing that the v- the influence of, like... I think it's hard to remember in the modern era, it's hard for people to imagine how popular grunge music was in the early '90s. Like, you were in a Nirvana cover band in 1998,

Meg: Yeah.

Dan Slimmon: you know, seven years after Nevermind came out, um, and, like, five, five years after Kurt Cobain was dead, I think, something like that.

It, it, it's, it's popular in a way that this kind of, like, anti-commercial, anti-consumerist, you know, s- grungy sound, for lack of a better word,

Meg: Girl

Dan Slimmon: couldn't be

Meg: Jam?

Dan Slimmon: uh, in the modern music environment, I feel like. Uh, the... Never, n-never s- Nevermind, in January of 1992, Nevermind is selling 300,000 copies a week.

Uh, Soundgarden's blowing up. Alice In Chains is [01:05:00] blowing up. Uh, and it, it... Grunge music just cuts through demographics like, like crazy. Um,

Pearl Jam takes a last stab at Ticketmaster
---

Dan Slimmon: the biggest new grunge band to hit the scene in 1991 is a Seattle band called Pearl Jam.

Meg: Yes.

Dan Slimmon: Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam. Uh, did you ever get into Pearl Jam?

Meg: Uh, I, I like them. I, I don't... I wouldn't say I've ever, like, listened to a full album, but

Dan Slimmon: Yeah.

Meg: do remember enjoying... They always had like f- like, great, um, music videos, like back when we all used

Dan Slimmon: Great music videos. Great hooks. Uh,

Meg: Yeah

Dan Slimmon: I real- I, I don't... I was never, like, a big Jam head, but, uh, I, I, I really like that one really pretty song of theirs that goes, "I want to see you, yeah. Yeah." You know that one?

Meg: know which, which song is that one?

Dan Slimmon: I don't know. That's the one that, that's the one that goes like that.

Meg: that? That doesn't really get any better, yeah.

Dan Slimmon: Somebody, write in.[01:06:00]

Meg: it's, uh, it's very-- I mean, I, I, I definitely, you know, he, he was a real, a real charismatic guy. Music was

Dan Slimmon: Hell yeah.

Meg: you know, very imit-imitable.

Dan Slimmon: Very, very imitatable.

Meg: huge, and they lasted obviously a lot longer than Nirvana did.

Dan Slimmon: They sure did.

Meg: even, are they still technically a band? Like, do they

Dan Slimmon: I don't know. Let me Google that. Is Pearl Jam still technically a band?

Wikipedia says Pearl Jam is an American rock band, not was. So yeah

Meg: go see them on tour?

Dan Slimmon: Oh, Temple of the Dog was a spinoff. I didn't know

Meg: Could you go see them on tour?

Dan Slimmon: I don't know. Uh, Pearl Jam tickets. Upcoming shows.

Meg: Vedder's doing a lot of solo stuff.

Dan Slimmon: Busy. Yeah, no Pearl Jam shows scheduled right now.

Meg: Okay.

Dan Slimmon: Um, which is fair. They've been around since 1991.

They deserve a break.

Meg: [01:07:00] Yeah.

Dan Slimmon: Um, yeah, inc- incredible, incredibly popular band. Uh, but they... They're-- By 1992... So, like, they form in 1990. By 1992, they're playing for crowds of 10,000, 20,000 people, and when you get that big, all the industry players are gonna want you to start charging more for tickets, right? They're gonna be like, "Oh, but why aren't you charging more?

People are-- People will pay more. You should-- Why should you leave money on the table? You should charge more." Uh, that way you get rich, and all the middlemen get rich, and it works out for everybody. Pearl Jam doesn't wanna play that game. It's very important to Pearl Jam, in particular Ed- Eddie Vedder, that their fans be able to afford to come to their shows, You know, like I said, grunge comes with this, like, anti-commercial ethos. Uh, uh, they want their... They wanna do their 1994 national tour for $18 [01:08:00] ticket face value, full stop. Um, t-ticket service fees capped at 10% on an $18 ticket. Uh, and that way they think that's what their fans can afford.

Their fans will be able to come to the, to the shows. Ticketmaster says, "If you're gonna undercharge for tickets, then we're gonna raise our service fee to what we think... so that the ticket will be what we think the market will bear, and you don't get to decide what our service fee is. We decide what the service fee is.

We'll raise it to 30% if we have to to get the money that we think we can make on Pearl Jam tickets."

Meg: My homies hate Ticketmaster.

Dan Slimmon: They fucking suck.

Meg: Yeah.

Dan Slimmon: Uh, like, what are you even doing here? Why, why are you even here, Ticketmaster? You don't-- You're not doing anything anybody wants. Um, but they have the contracts. They have all these exclusive contracts. Uh, uh, they get the, they get the CEO of the North American Concert Promoters Association to [01:09:00] tell all the promoters, basically, "If you work with Pearl Jam, you'll get sued.

Don't work with Pearl Jam." So nobody will let them play. They have to cancel the tour.

Meg: Wow.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah. The b- Ticketmaster, at this point, Ticketmaster is telling the biggest band in the country, like, "If you don't work with us, you can't tour."

Meg: If you don't charge a certain amount for your tickets, we-- you can't work with us. Yeah.

Dan Slimmon: Right. yeah, it's sick. Um, and through, through this... There's this bizarre series of events where Eddie Vedder ends up visiting the White House to help Bill Clinton because, um, after Kurt Cobain's death, Bill Clinton is asked... Which gives you a sense of, like, how big grunge was, again, is like Bill Clinton is asking v- Eddie Vedder to come to the White House and help him, like, message to the youth on Kurt Cobain's death, 'cause it's such an important issue that the president needs to talk [01:10:00] about so he does that. He gets this... So Eddie Vedder helps out Bill Clinton, and Bill Clinton helps him, helps Pearl Jam spark a congressional antitrust investigation into Ticketmaster.

Meg: That's cool. I didn't know any of this. Or I mean, I had, like, a very, very faint idea of it, but yeah.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah, I didn't know any of this either. I had no, I had no idea. I thought they were just the, the, the band with the, the "Horror, Horror" songs.

Meg: burn.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah. Uh, no, it, it, it's, it's very cool. So, so, like, there ends up being a whole, like, investigation, congressional investigation. There's a hearing and everything.

Um, during the investigation, Ticketmaster makes Pearl Jam's life even more of a hell, um, to, to try to, like, get them, intimidate them off the stand or whatever. Um, they, they hire this shady motherfucker named Marty Bergman. Marty Bergman is a freelance private investigator and con artist [01:11:00] who's like, who moves in DC circles.

Marty Bergman gets in touch with congressional investigators, and he tells them he's producing a segment for "60 Minutes" on the, on, like, the seedy underbelly of the concert industry. Uh, he's like, "Oh, you're investigating this. You're investigating Ticketmaster for antitrust. I would love to interview you and, like, know about all your sources and all your information, uh, so that I can work on this '60 Minutes' piece."

And they talk to this guy for hours and hours and give him all of their, all of their information, all of their dirt, which immediately he turns around and goes to his brother, who's a journalist, and gets published in, like, rags about, um, to, like, as, like, dirt against Pearl Jam. He finds out all the dirt on Pearl Jam and goes and publishes it in newspapers

Meg: on Pearl Jam?

Dan Slimmon: Uh, that they, that they, it's, it's all, it's all kind of [01:12:00] made up. Um, but it comes, it's, it's like he learns a lot about, um, he learns a lot about the contracts that Ticketmaster has with, with different artists and how Pearl Jam was talking to, um, Sony about like helping Sony launch a competing ticket vendor in the U.S.,

which didn't happen and may not, that meeting may not have ever happened. But like Marty Bergman hears about it, a guy, from a guy who heard about it from a guy, and that gets published, which makes Pearl Jam look, you know, mercenary rather than makes it, makes it look like Pearl Jam's, you know, starting a whole thing just to get the money from Sony or whatever.

Um, but they like slander-- he just like goes ahead and s- uses all, every information, piece of information he can get to slander Pearl Jam in the media. and, and, you know, we know, we, we know, we know very well that Pearl Jam hired them, hired them to do this. So, uh, you know, that shows what kind of integrity is going on at the highest levels of this investigation.

Yeah.

Meg: [01:13:00] Yeah.

Dan Slimmon: a few months later, one of these committee members is having dinner with Mike Wallace, the host of 60 Minutes, and he's like, "Hey, whatever happened to that segment you guys were making on the concert industry, you know, that your producer i-interviewed me for?" And Mike Wallace is like, "What are you talking about?

We're not doing a piece on the concert industry. Who told you that?" "Oh, oh, I, I interviewed... Your producer talked, came and talked to me. His name was like Marty Bergman." And Mar-Mike Wallace goes white, and he's like, "You talked to Marty fucking Bergman? How many hours did you talk to Marty Bergman? Oh, you're so fucked."

and like he, he puts him on the phone with another guy from 60 Minutes who just tells him repeatedly, "Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Marty Bergman is a very bad man. Do not talk to Marty Bergman." Uh, but it's too late.

Meg: Eddie Bergman still around?

Dan Slimmon: Now he's dead.

Meg: Wonder what else he got up to in his life. Sounds like a, quite a character.

Dan Slimmon: I don't think he ever got in trouble. I [01:14:00] think he, I think he got a, it got up to a lot, but a lot of it, most of it is not on paper.

Meg: Yep.

Mr Vedder goes to Washington
---

Dan Slimmon: but there does end up, anyway, there does end up being a co- congressional hearing, and Pearl Jam argues that Ticketmaster is a monopoly that needs to be broken up, as you would expect them to argue.

Ticketmaster, for their part, argues, ha-has, has this to say. This is Fred Rosen speaking to Congress in 1994. We, we had no direct contact with them and told them that we would compromise in this area and that we would lower the service charge to two and a quarter or two fifty depending on the area. And the fact is that if the word compromise had been used, which is something that this great institution is built on, that's what Congress is built on, that's the way legislatures make things work is by compromise, this problem might not have arisen to the level that it's on today. The fact of the matter is, uh, both i-in bands' statements and in their memo that they submitted to Justice, they said, "This [01:15:00] was it. Take it or leave it," and that caused some of the problem.

So that's Fred Rosen's argument. I don't like that guy at all.

and it's true, Pearl Jam wasn't willing to compromise with Ticketmaster. but why-- The, the question doesn't come up, right? The, the investigation's not about this. The question society should be asking is why is there-- why are they even in the position of having to compromise with Ticketmaster? Uh, which is an entity that, again, provides zero value to society and whose only power comes from these, this labyrinthine network of backroom deals that they've signed with venues.

Meg: [01:16:00] Right.

Dan Slimmon: and the promoters are the customers. So they're like Okay, well, our new theory is the venues and promoters are harmed by Ticketmaster's mo- monopoly. So they go talk to the venues and promoters, and they're all like, "Oh, we love Ticketmaster.

Ticketmaster's great. Like, we get so much money through Ticketmaster. That's fine. Of course they're a monopoly, but that's fine with us. That's cool." All my homies love Ticketmaster. And, and so the DOJ is like, "Well, we have no investigation here." They shut it down.

Meg: That sucks.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah.

Meg: I say this as someone who did not remember enough about this to know how it turns out. I'm hearing about this now, and it makes me sad.

Dan Slimmon: It's so sad. There was a moment, and there [01:17:00] isn't a moment anymore really, and we'll talk about it. Ticketmaster's gonna have to die some other way, and it might take another 50 years. Um, there was a moment when, like, a band that came out of this-- uh, came out of, like, a, um, counterculture could gain enough popularity that they could threaten Ticketmaster on the national stage.

But they still couldn't beat them because Ticketmaster owns the infrastructure, and then the, they're completely insensitive to fan pressure.

Meg: So what happened to Pearl Jam? Like, obviously they've toured since then. How have they handled

Dan Slimmon: Yeah, they ended up going back to working with Ticketmaster.

Meg: Oh,

Dan Slimmon: What are you gonna do?

Meg: Yeah.

Dan Slimmon: yeah, they, they, they kept touring, and then, uh, honestly, um, they ended up, they ended up doing the same thing every other band had to do because Ticketmaster owns all the-- Live Nation owns all the arenas, right?

Meg: Yeah.

not

Dan Slimmon: of, the ticket vendor are crossing at this [01:18:00] moment.

Ticketmaster unleashed
---

Dan Slimmon: And Ticketmaster, Ticketmaster's influence on the music industry goes stratospheric after this point, is it puts them on a national stage and shows how willing they are to be the bad guy for, for promoters and venues, um, and, and how quickly power is going to, like, coalesce around a small group of... Now, now that Congress has shown they can't do anything with antitrust, with US antitrust law against this, like, everybody's just like, "All right.

Well, I guess we're getting behind Ticketmaster." And they-- And so in part two, we're gonna talk about how since nobody's gonna stop them, Ticketmaster ends up swallowing up thousands of promoters, radio stations, and record labels in the years following this antitrust case. Did I warn you that this was a depressing podcast?

Bye bye
---

Meg: figured, I figured this would be a depressing podcast. Honestly, like, yeah, this is... There, there's a lot, there's a lot [01:19:00] worse, uh, topics we could be covering. Like, this is, you know... Like, I do think the one thing about this is you, you do have the choice to not participate in this, whereas there's so many other things

Dan Slimmon: That's true.

Meg: where you do not have the choice at all.

Dan Slimmon: That's true.

Meg: Yeah.

Dan Slimmon: yeah. Where, where, where like people can just-- where the, the, uh, some company like can just say, "We're using this technology now," and you-- that's-- you're using that technology now. Uh, park- parking,

Meg: Yep.

Dan Slimmon: right? The fucking ParkMobile app that you have to

Meg: yeah.

Dan Slimmon: the app to pay for parking.

Meg: Don't like that one bit.

Dan Slimmon: Uh, should do an episode on that.

Meg: Yep.

Dan Slimmon: Anyway, thank you, Meg, for coming to my podcast. This has been fantastic.

Meg: Awesome, yeah.

Dan Slimmon: uh, do you wanna, uh, do you want, do you wanna do your plugs again?

Meg: Uh, sure, yeah, um, you can, uh, check me out on Instagram [01:20:00] Um, or, I don't know, I really do feel like my birding account could use some more followers, so, like, if you, if you like, um, birds, uh, check out I'm, like, looking this up so I remember. Meg Goes Birding. Meg Does Improv, Meg Goes Birding, and I'll, I'll post some pictures of birds, and you can give me some likes.

I don't know. It's

Dan Slimmon: Oh,

Meg: hobby I have.

Dan Slimmon: yeah. Do you ever post, um, like videos where you can hear the bird?

Meg: Uh, no, I don't... I mean, my... I have not experimented with that

Dan Slimmon: There's

Meg: but

Dan Slimmon: a bird-- birds make some pretty cool sounds. I think that might get... It might be good content.

Meg: do. Yeah, and while we're promoting it, um, check out the Merlin app. It's a, it's a app you can download. It's free, and it's like SoundCloud for birds. So

Dan Slimmon: Yes.

Meg: and it tells you what bird you're hearing.

Dan Slimmon: What's that bird?

Meg: Yeah.

Dan Slimmon: Yeah. That's, that rules. That's a good use of technology. I really like that.

Meg: Yeah, that's a great one.

Dan Slimmon: Uh, all right. Well, this has been Technology Blows [01:21:00] with me, Dan Slimmon, and my guest, Meg Sinick. I, uh, I can't wait to see you next time when we'll finish the story of Ticketmaster being No Face from Spirited Away and just swallowing up everybody else in the entire establishment.

See you next time on Technology Blows.

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