Starting in September, Live Nation will automatically list all prices up front for
all tickets to events at more than 200 venues of its own,
benefiting over 30 million customers.
And will give customers the option of an all in price for
all other tickets sold on its platform.
>> So right there you hear what seems like good news,
a good development from President Biden.
People have been very furious with Ticketmaster and
other ticketing services over the past year.
And he's saying there that now they have all voluntarily agreed, and
you know it's good because they volunteer to do it, to disclose junk fees upfront.
So rather than seeing a price for a ticket, and then
you go through an interminable process to finally get to when you can buy it and,
it's three times as expensive because they tacked on a bunch of nonsense.
Now you'll know about the nonsense up front, and that is great because people
don't like that and they also don't like when tickets cost a lot.
The issue is that none of this necessarily drops the price of the tickets.
It could, there could be behavioral things where it makes people more hesitant
because maybe they hide the junk fees so that by the time you get to them,
you have a feeling of ownership sort of vested in that product.
But there is nothing that requires them to lower their fees, to eliminate their fees.
It starts to make you wonder, like,
no wonder they volunteered to do this in the first place.
And we're gonna talk through some of the history of this and why we've gotten to
this point where Ticketmaster and Live Nation and Sea Geek and all of them feel
pressured enough that they would be willing to engage in this with Biden.
But I will also say that it kind of reminds me of the Republican student debt
plan that came out this week.
They had four different bills that come together, and
they are the Republicans reason that Biden does not need to cancel debt.
And they almost all are like this.
It's like you'll know more about how much college costs, but like this,
none of it cuts the cost of any of it.
It's all just disclosure.
It's not actual regulations that make things more affordable.
What do you think?
>> Yeah, real quick, when they say they volunteered for it,
that means it doesn't have any teeth.
There's no regulation that corporations voluntarily sign on to that
actually checks them, otherwise they'd fight it to no end.
They'd send in lobbyists and lawyers.
We've seen this movie thousands of times.
And anytime that they volunteer to do something,
it's usually basically a disguise that they put on, a veneer, so that it seems
like they did something and Biden gets credit from the mainstream media.
Yeah, congratulations, historic agreement with Ticketmaster, Live Nation,
et cetera, and everybody chuckles all the way to the bank, okay?
So now the second thing is, it kind of proves that there's an oligopoly because
normally the way that competition and free markets would work is, hey,
if Ticketmaster is putting on too many fees and
charges and it's too expensive, well, I'll go to Live Nation.
Well, if Live Nation is doing, I'll go somewhere else.
And it said, there's only a couple that are available and
they somehow agree that the fees should be about the same.
That's why we need the government to do something,
because we've got an oligopoly, right?
And that's when the government is supposed to actually step in and regulate,
because it's obvious that the free market is not working in that case and
competition has been reduced.
And that's when you get Democrats into office to say, don't worry,
we're not going to do that.
We're just gonna have them volunteer for something that's usually meaningless.
>> Yeah, I'll never forget a couple of the concerts I went to back in the day
where the artists specifically said,
we're not gonna work with the Ticketmaster's of the world.
And that's just a reminder, so I think of groups like I saw Prince back in the day,
only charge $20, including any fees.
I used to watch Fugazi back in the day when I was like a punk rocker and
once punk always a punk.
So these are intermediaries and they're like platforms, right?
They're not very dissimilar.
They being like Ticketmaster, Live Nation from an Airbnb or
any other platform, right?
The value is provided by the artist and the venue.
We pay for it.
They are in the middle, a corrupt intermediary.
I would say corrupt because they extract so much out of the equation.
And so disclosing to one, actually,
this is how much it actually costs is better than nothing, but
it doesn't make it affordable at all, as John you pointed out, right?
And so if we really want change, then we have to think about the affordability and
shifting the economy so we don't have corrupt intermediaries hogging up all
the money, grabbing all the data when it comes to tech kind of intermediaries.
Which all of these are increasingly in that space, and hiring nobody and
owning almost nothing and providing almost no service at all other than simply
providing us a digital ticket, an e ticket, if you will.
So, I think that right now there's a huge opportunity to actually get to the bottom
of it, right?
The pressure should be on Biden to deal with this ending moratorium on student
debt, to actually fight like hell for at least his fairly milk toast plan,
as opposed to the plan that I supported,
which would be canceling student debt as per the Debt Collective and other groups.
So, maybe better than nothing but transparency,
which this isn't even deep transparency into their business practices.
Transparency is the bare minimum of a democratic accountability.
And you're totally right, this is oligopoly.
This is not a free market.
Let alone anything that may be more public interest.
And the real reason we don't have really robust regulation is because our
regulators are corrupted by these industries, right?
So that's why you see Biden, everyone like holding hands, chilling,
hanging out with that nice campfire setting, saying that this is our
great announcement and he's gonna take political credit for it.
I just don't think it's gonna make much of a difference for what really matters.
>> We'll know, we'll be able to look back in a couple of years and
see if it made literally any difference.
Maybe it will, maybe it won't.
But by then we'll have already had all the time necessary for
the political value to have been extracted from this.
Because despite this having nothing baked into it that lowers the cost and
it's seeming totally uncertain whether it will,
there's already headlines like in the LA Times to jump ahead of graphic four,
How Biden and Taylor Swift Beat Ticketmaster.
Yeah, I bet the board of Ticketmaster is just like weeping today.
We've been crushed, there's nothing left.
Come on, how are you guys gonna decide that they beat?
They did it voluntarily.
>> Yeah, so I got to say one more thing about that.
Look, guys, this is what corporate media is part of their job.
So the way that every one of these dramas unfolds, whether it's debt ceiling or
Ticketmaster or fill in the blank, okay?
So the Republicans ask for something incredible and extreme usually.
In this case it's corporations that are just doing something that's extreme enough
that the populace is agitated by, greatly agitated by it, but something extreme.
And then the Democrats come along and go, no, not on our watch.
And then the Democrats do something incredibly weak and soft and go,
problem solved, when actually the problem is not at all solved.
They're playing good cop, bad cop.
And then if you know that and you watch like the Young Turks, you go,
wait a minute, my prices aren't any lower, I'm mad, right?
But if you watch corporate media, which is both mainstream media and
right wing media, they're like, boy, Biden crushed Ticketmaster.
And right wing media might paint it as like, can you believe how much he
intruded into poor Ticketmaster's right to corporate, okay?
They could corporate all day long and made this, could affect their profits at some
future unknown date, even though it doesn't today, right?
But they'll all be like, Biden, what a world beater.
So that it looks like he has the appearance of having done something, and
then everyone forgets that there was a corporate problem in the first place.
And then corporate media gets a giant check from an advertiser maybe sometimes
involved in that particular story, and
then all of a sudden they pass the money around, they're incredibly happy, and
you're paying the same exact price for that ticket.
>> Yeah.
>> You know what I call it, Cenk?
It's a Trojan horse move.
It's very similar to, I don't know if you all read that book, Winners Take All.
It's a really good book.
It basically says how the system like those that are essentially behind the tax
code, that essentially means that they don't pay any taxes,
bazillionaires, right?
And stave off any form of regulation, have nice foundations, and
sometimes they do a couple of good things.
But what that does is it redirects attention from the actual structural bases
by which injustice and inequalities are amplified and generated, right?
So now with these headlines and clickbait and
all of us oversaturated with information, I'm gonna be like, that's cool.
Biden took on Ticketmaster, maybe pick up a few progressive votes.
But in reality, what's actually occurring is perpetuating a particular type of toxic
extractive business model.
>> We do have to move on to another topic but if you wanna find out more about this,
I have an op ed I'm writing, it's called Biden should pardon Ticketmaster, really.
>> [LAUGH]