Live Nation Entertainment is an American global entertainment company that was founded in 2010 following the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster. The company promotes, operates, and manages ticket sales for live entertainment in the United States and internationally. It also owns and operates entertainment venues, and manages the careers of music artists.
The company has faced widespread criticism over its central role in the consolidation of the live events industry, allegations that it proactively engages in anti-competitive practices, poor handling of the ticket sale process for highly popular events, and injuries and deaths that have occurred at many of its events.
Besides paying about $12 to $15 for Concerts Tickets when I was a teenager in high school, after I was out of high school, I went to see the late great Frank Sinatra live and in concert on 7 memorable occasions, and I paid between $25 and $40 for thosed tickets. Never more than $40. The last two times I saw Sinatra was two nights in 1990, when Frank was doing a 5 Night Engagement at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. I bought tickets for opening night, and closing night of the 6 night stint. I went to the opening night show with my girlfriend Merceditas. The same night at 3 o'clock in the morning, the great Sammy Davis Jr. passed away. He had been battling throat Cancer at the time. Frank Sinatra looved Sammy like a brother, and posponed the remaining 4 nights of the engagement, so he could attend Sammy's Funeral. A month later I saw Sinatra again, at the rescheduled concerts. As usual Frank was great, and I particularly loved those two concerts at Radio City. They were magical. The tickets for those concerts cost me $40 each, and worth every penny. If the SOBs at Live Nation were running a Sinatra Concert these days, those same tickets woulf most likely be between $250 to $300 a ticket. Thank God those bastards (Live Nation) were not around then.
Ticketmaster Responds to Senate Letter Investigating Resale Controversy: Exclusive
Ticketmaster president Jared Smith has responded to a letter from two U.S. Senators asking questions about the company's resale business in the wake of an investigative report by the Toronto Star and…
Ticketmaster president Jared Smith has responded to a letter from two U.S. senators asking questions about the company’s resale business in the wake of an investigative report by the Toronto Star and the CBC into Ticketmaster’s TradeDesk platform.
In his letter to Senators Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Smith says that Ticketmaster does not offer any tool or program that allows professional resellers to buy up tickets in bulk and says the company’s TradeDesk software does not give resellers an advantage when buying tickets on the primary market.
“Ticketmaster does not have, and has never had, any product or program that allows ticket scalpers, or anyone else, to buy tickets ahead of fans and circumvent the policies we have on our site regarding on-line ticket purchasing limits,” Smith writes in the four-page Oct. 5 letter.
Smith then goes on to answer four questions posed by the senators in their Sept. 21 letter to Michael Rapino, chief executive at Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, detailing the company’s policies on purchase limits, TradeDesk user agreements and whether Ticketmaster’s Professional Reseller Handbook actually deters resellers from illegal activities. Smith’s letter also discusses how the company enforces sales limits on its primary ticketing platform and the investment it has made in detecting and preventing scalpers from using automated programs like BOTs to buy up tickets.
“Through a combination of data science, enterprise grade software and new technologies, we are now blocking an average of 5 billion bot attempts per month, and over 60 billion per year,” Smith writes, adding that Ticketmaster uses “username, e-mail address, physical address, payment method, computer and/or device used and IP address” to detect users attempting to go OTL — over the ticket limit.
“Over the past 12 months, this process has blocked millions of OTL requests,” Smith writes. “We continue to invest substantially to improve our technology, and in the coming months expect to add new tools and data points to further improve our OTL detection abilities.”
The letter to the senators is part of Ticketmaster’s ongoing response to an undercover video filmed by two Canadian journalists at Ticket Summit, which has led to two class action lawsuits and was a possible impetus for an upcoming Federal Trade Commission workshop in March 2019.
LEGAL ISSUES AGAINST "LIVE NATION"
The company has faced various lawsuits alleging ticket price fixing, hidden fees and anti-competitive practices. Live Nation has been linked to at least 200 deaths and 750 injuries at its events in seven countries since 2006. From 2016 to 2019, they had also been cited for at least ten OSHA violations, fined for several more serious incidents, and sued civilly at least once for a concert incident.
Destiny's Child manager Mathew Knowles unsuccessfully sued Live Nation in 2011, asserting that the company had spread false information about his business dealings with Beyoncé.
In June 2013, Live Nation was charged with violating Ontario health and safety laws following a stage collapse at a Radiohead concert that killed one crew member. A 2019 inquest returned a verdict of accidental death.
In November 2021, a crowd crushing incident occurred at Astroworld Festival —a concert event in Houston organized and headlined by rapper Travis Scott and promoted by Live Nation—which resulted in 10 fatalities and nearly 5,000 injuries. Live Nation, Scott, and other parties involved have been named in over 387 lawsuits related to the incident, which in January 2022 were combined down into a single case. In December 2021, the United States Congress House Oversight Committee announced a bipartisan investigation into Live Nation's role in the incident.
In February 2022, Devante Caldwell (Ralfy the Plug) filed a 'wrongful death' lawsuit against the company, after his brother and rapper, Drakeo the Ruler, was stabbed to death backstage of the Once Upon A Time In LA festival in Los Angeles,CA. Live Nation attempted to get the lawsuit dismissed, however in January 2023 the Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Yolanda Orozc rejected the dismissal.
In May 2022, Representative for New Jersey's 9th congressional district Bill Pascrell stated that he had issued letters to the Federal Trade Commission and U.S. Department of Justice calling for Live Nation to be unwound and broken up, citing its safety record and other factors. These calls were repeated in November 2022 after the Taylor Swift (The Eras Tour) Ticketmaster controversy.
