www.ticketnews.com: Live Nation Entertainment reported its earnings and financial outlook for the fourth quarter and full year of 2022, and it’s safe to say that things are booming for the California entertainment giant. With ticket surge pricing systems like “dynamic” pricing during periods of high demand and “platinum” pricing charging customers far above any semblance of a face value for tickets, the company saw revenue soar to $16.7 billion over the year, a 44 percent increase over 2019.
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I wonder about this a lot when it comes to the future of live entertainment and ticketing. Right now, live entertainment seems to be a booming industry, especially perhaps the effects of the pandemic made it so that everyone is eager to see their favourite artist for a little more money since the pandemic cut fans short of those opportunities and taught the greater public that anything can happen at any time. I wonder however with the surge in ticket sales if that curve will eventually flatten out, and the industry will become stagnant if the demands for such concerts wain with the ticket prices still staying the same. Until when will consumers justify the cost of the ticket to go see their favourite artists? I think right now there is a little bit of a pandemic effect, but I worry that later the prices will, at worst, make live entertainment inaccessible and therefore less popular to the general public.
It’s crazy to me what people will pay to attend a certain artist’s concert *cough Taylor Swift’s most recent ticket chaos* from a mediocre seat. I suppose emerging from the pandemic, some people may have extra money saved from Covid from not attending public performance activities such as shows and concerts but at the same time the pandemic caused a lot of people to get tangled into the economic depression. Ticketmaster and Live Nation Entertainment currently have a chokehold on ticket prices and while case by case it is unclear if the artist of interest controls the price jacks, it is probably safe to assume that the ticket companies push their prices to be competitive and know from facts listed in the article that concert goers highly prioritize attending live performance at any price hike. The article did mention ticket resellers as one of the causes for the ticket sale spike, however I don’t give all the power to Ticketmaster and Live Nation Entertainment for second hand purchasing as the article suggests is the best case scenario either.
The entertainment industry in the situation of ticketing has always been a blooming industry that takes up a decent amount of proportion in the entertainment industry. Personally, I have been seeing a lot of concerts, productions, and musical events in the last couple years. The increase in ticket has been dramatic and scary to me in how one ticket can increase their price in a short amount of time. For this, I often think about how the electric prices, gas and fuel prices have gone up leading to the increase in the ticket price. For me personally, I was trying to see a concert in another city during the winter break and the price of that ticket increased by 60% through the time of an hour. It is definitely not surprise for me to see such article and a report on it. It is comforting to see that it might not increase in the ticket in 2023.
Articles like this make me wonder: Isn’t it kind of weird that there is such a thing as a ticketing industry in the first place? It’s strange that companies like TicketMaster just resell tickets for hugely marked up prices. And I know, there are good reasons for the industry to exist, and LiveNation is more than a ticketing company. But then, why is ticketing such a big industry? I think that there’s a problem with the ticketing industry and that we’re going to see a breaking point soon. Last semester, there was an article on the blog about TicketMaster and how hugely inflated its prices were. This article doesn’t get into the specifics of LiveNation ticketing, but one can assume that LiveNation’s profits are up because of similar reasons. At what point will these companies push too far and start killing the demand for their own industry? I don’t know, maybe there is an economic strategy to this – but to me, it seems like this bubble will pop soon.
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