Live Nation supremo Michael Rapino’s recent comments about concert tickets being too low have been criticised by super producer Jack Antonoff.
Antonoff, a eleven times Grammy winner who is best known for his creative partnership with Taylor Swift, has taken to Twitter/X and rebuffed much of what Rapino said. Quoting Rapino’s words about music being “underappreciated” and comparing it to tickets for sports, Antonoff wrote: “This breaks my heart and is a sick way of looking at it.”
answer is simple: selling a ticket for more than its face value should be illegal. then there is no chaos and you give us back the control instead of creating a bizarre free market of confusion amongst the audience who we love and care for.September 25, 2025
He then went on to propose a solution: “(The) answer is simple: selling a ticket for more than its face value should be illegal. Then there is no chaos and you give us back the control instead of creating a bizarre free market of confusion amongst the audience who we love and care for.
as always when i read things like that i call my people right away to think of new ideas around it. we’ll never stop doing that. it could all be so easy if the people up top didn’t see the audience as a faceless group to extort money from.September 25, 2025
Antonoff then followed it up with a dig at Rapino, saying “as always when I read things like that I call my people right away to think of new ideas around it. We’ll never stop doing that. It could all be so easy if the people up top didn’t see the audience as a faceless group to extort money from.”
It’s highly unlikely that any administration, either in the US or Europe, would propose such a solution as Antonoff’s that would be antithetical to the whole idea of free market capitalism. It would, however, be effective.
In any case, the ticketing snowglobe could soon be shaken up by two ongoing actions in the States. The day after Rapino’s comments, the Federal Trade Commission brought a suit against Live Nation/Ticketmaster, alleging that the ticketing giant has been colluding with touts to break limits on the numbers of tickets sold, which were then resold on Ticketmaster’s own secondary sites.
Then there is also a separate antitrust suit brought by the US Department of Justice that alleges that Live Nation/Ticketmaster is operating as a monopoly. It could see the company broken up, which - in theory - would be good news for the consumer.
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