Thread by @moetkacik

Good afternoon music fans! In honor of all the chumps over 40 camping out in online Hell to score concert tickets today, a thread on all the times your (least?) favorite musician crossed paths with the omnipotent empire known as Ticketmaster/Live Nation.

What the "Ticket Masters" understood from the start was the power of installing themselves as gatekeepers btwn rock stars & fans.

(This story *probably* starts with the CIA money launderer who bilked Creedence Clearwater Revival in the 70s and bought Ticketmaster in 1981, but..)

For now let's start with the @gratefuldead, whom Ticketmaster threatened to boycott from captive venues in 1991 if the band didn't allow TM to sell ALL their tix.
Historically the Dead had reserved 50% of tickets to sell by mail to fanclub members.

The band threatened to unleash mobs of angry Deadheads upon Hyatt hotels.
Ticketmaster czar Fred Rosen backed down and let the Dead have their 50%. This became known as the Grateful Dead Exception. And it would NEVER, he swore to himself, happen again.

In the early 90s Aerosmith's Steve Tyler became dismayed by reports that kids were camping out to buy tickets & leaving empty-handed. He had staff interview all the people sitting in the front section of a concert & learned that every single one had bought tix from a scalper

While touring Italy @iamstevent likened Ticketmaster's control of concerts to Mussolini's railroads.
The band tried to broker a Grateful Dead Deal.
Instead, Ticketmaster offered to pay them an extra dollar per ticket, Aerosmith's manager testified before Congress.

Then came L'Affaire @PearlJam which started when Ticketmaster refused to give the band a break on service charges when it played free shows & charity fundraisers.
Then the band tried to get a Grateful Dead deal to keep tour tickets below $20, and Ticketmaster declared war.

I & @KristaKBrown explored Ticketmaster's war on Pearl Jam in the upcoming issue of the American Prospect. It's a wild tale replete with mysterious break-ins, Giuliani-connected double agents, Roger Stone and classic Clinton treachery. prospect.org/power/ticketma…

One of Ticketmaster's shrewdest moves in its war on Pearl Jam was enlisting @GreenDay who essentially advised Vedder to take a "pay cut" & even @IanMacKaye who said he didn't think TM's Fred Rosen was a "bad guy" but the product of a "bad system"

Courtney Love however was not fooled. She repeatedly defended Eddie Vedder. Of course she fucking did.

Ticketmaster's victory over Pearl Jam & the Telecom Act of 96 unleashed a tsunami of music consolidation. By 2000 TM was essentially an offshoot of an empire that controlled 1000s of radio stations & billboards, 100s of venues & even 100s of musician FAN CLUBS (thanks to his guy)

that's right, Dave Matthews sold out big time to Clear Channel, selling a stake in its MusicToday fan club management business in 2000 and later selling the whole thing.

At this point Clear Channel & Ticketmaster were still ostensibly separate companies..hitsdailydouble.com/news&id=273346…

BUT, once the Evil Empire swallowed the DMB's fanclub company, a little band called the String Cheese Incident @SCI_Official that had been selling concert tix directly to fans found itself frozen out by Ticketmaster's exclusive relationship with MusicToday.
So String Cheese sued

Ticketmaster ultimately offered SCI a Grateful Dead deal
(Rosen was gone at this point, having launched a consultancy w/ future Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff)
But SCI was not allowed to tell anyone abt its deal.
The band regretted settling, but by then it was 2003.

In 2003 Clear Channel was 1 of the most powerful companies in America, the Dixie Chicks were 1 of the most popular bands & George Bush invaded Iraq for reasons that are still unknown but basically boil down to Epic Deep State Cash Grab.
The Chicks did not agree with the invasion

Clear Channel went into overdrive to punish the band, organizing pro-war rallies across the country where fans destroyed the band's CDs, removing their songs from hundreds of playlists, and boycotting the band from dozens of markets.

The saga inspired a song called "Monopoly" from Chicks songwriter & longtime family friend Terri Hendricks, wherein she rhymes "all-time low" w/ "all about control"
The vibe is "Howard Dean biodynamic vineyard fundraiser" & I mean that in the BEST way

Taylor Swift, who shares the Chicks' concert promoter Lou Messina -- who had sold out to/left/sued Clear Channel in 1999-2000 -- said the band's blacklisting had "terrified" her as a young fan.

But Clear Channel did not sabotage artists solely for political reasons. When Britney chose (Messina backer) AEG to promote a tour in hopes of boosting her (sigh) film career, CC removed her songs from playlists, inviting a DOJ "investigation" that SOMEHOW never amounted to much.

Clear Channel continued to terrorize Britney though, airing a hoax account of her "death" in grisly a car crash & later taking out billboards with photos of her manic head-shaving episode to advertise its "crazy" morning shows...

In 2005 Clear Channel renamed its concert biz "Live Nation" & spun it off in apparent response to litigation.
Live Nation's chairman was Michael Cohl, who got rich & famous giving MASSIVE upfront payments 2 rock stars, then collecting phony 10% "taxes" on each concert ticket

As CD sales cratered, Cohl started doling out 9-figure "360" contracts to @madonna, @ladygaga, @sc etc.
Wall Street thought Cohl spent too much $ on Madonna & Cohl's protege iced him out of the company. But Cohl knew they'd figure out a way to make back the cash

the spending spree decimated what remained of the indie music business. Live Nation & its sole legit competitor spent >100% of ticket sales on proven acts, destroying regional promoters & and sending ticket prices soaring. When @ladygaga signed on with LN, her tix soared 133%

Meanwhile, Ticketmaster was doubling down on new forms of gouging. It bought off regional ticket brokers, teamed w/ @vanhalen to sell off their best tix to scalpers & split the profits, & rigged systems to direct fans to scalped tickets even if primary tix were still available

What could possibly make this system worse? Only one thing, according to The Boss: the merger of these two symbiotic concert vampires

Reader, he married him.

The merger of Ticketmaster & Live Nation seemed unthinkably wrong to everyone in the music business. But once it happened, what was anyone supposed to do? As @nineinchnails Trent Reznor put it:

The thing about monopolies, however, is that once you've eliminated the need for them to compete for anything at all, you've pretty much ruled out the possibility that anything will get better. They will only get worse, and with no recourse.

Which brings us to the Astroworld tragedy, a mass death that before it was memory-holed by a dozen newer mass deaths was widely blamed on... a shithead rapper.

But the real manslaugter ofc was committed by the omnipotent music monopoly, as @MrChuckD pointed out

This brings me though to a recurring trope of LN/TM PR: Always Be Blaming Rock Stars. If tix cost $23,000, it's that Taylor Swift was too lazy to tour last year. If folks doled out a month's salary to not see @sanbenito, surely he owes it to them to play a free show

@sanbenito It's not Taylor Swift's job to block bots, or Travis Scott's job to control crowds, or Drakeo the Ruler's job to confiscate murder weapons from titular fans.
It's LiveNation's job, but as with airlines/hospitals/railroads/baby formula plants there's no one forcing them to do it

The Break Up Ticketmaster coalition is trying to get the DOJ to do its job, and break up Ticketmaster and/or somehow regulate it like a utility. We've collected almost 100,000 letters of support. Help us crack 100K this weekend? actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-t…

AAAnd, the rest of the thread is here:

https://twitter.com/moetkacik/status/1616503715938308097

Another attempted heroine I forgot to mention. @Adele who is I think the only modern act who sells more actual music than Swift, tried to plan a 2016 tour without Livenation OR AEG & hired a company called Songkick to root out scalpers. It did not go well hypebot.com/hypebot/2015/1…

Livenation EXECUTIVES pled guilty to hacking into Songkick's databases & punishing Adele by suppressing info on her tour from its website.
Songkick filed Chapter 11 & sold out to LN
DOJ fined LN $10 million.
Last year LN reported revenue of $16 billion bloomberg.com/news/articles/…