Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino suggests that concerts are underpriced despite rising ticket costs.
Rapino made the comment at CNBC Sport and Boardroom’s Game Plan conference on Tuesday (Sept. 23), while comparing the prices of concerts to live sporting events.
“In sports, I joke it’s like a badge of honor to spend [$70,000] for Knicks courtside,” Rapino said. "They beat me up if we charge $800 for Beyoncé.”
He continued, "When you read about the ticket prices going up, it’s still an average concert price [of] $72. Try going to a Laker game for that, and there’s 80 of them [in a season].”
Rapino added that while streaming offers little financial return, live performances now make up the overwhelming majority of artists’ earnings.
“The artist is going to make 98% of their money from the show,” he said. “We just did Beyonce’s [Cowboy Carter] tour. She’s got 62 transport trucks outside. That’s a Super Bowl she’s putting on every night.”
He added, “No matter what you bring to that table that day, you unite around that one shared experience. For those two hours, I tend to drop whatever baggage I have and have a shared moment.”
Smith Entertainment Group CEO Ryan Smith echoes a similar sentiment, saying, “In sports, we’re really media companies. We’ve got talent, we’ve got distribution. We’re putting on a show or a wedding or something every night.”
The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation last Thursday (Sept. 18), accusing them of deceiving consumers about ticket prices and collaborating with scalpers to inflate resale costs, harming both artists and fans alike, according to NPR.
The FTC outlined three key illegal practices, such as Ticketmaster’s alleged “bait and switch approach,” advertising deceptively low ticket prices that jump by 30% or more during checkout due to hidden fees. The agency says as a result, Ticketmaster “has reaped massive profits by misrepresenting the total price of tickets to consumers, who pay billions of dollars each year in mandatory fees not reflected in the list price.”
The lawsuit also claims Ticketmaster knowingly enabled scalpers and brokers to bypass limits intended to keep ticket sales fair. The FTC says the company benefits from “triple dipping” on fees—by charging service fees when scalpers initially buy tickets, again when they resell them on Ticketmaster’s own secondary market, and a third time when fans buy those marked-up resale tickets.
The FTC estimates that between 2019 and 2024, Ticketmaster collected $3.7 billion in fees from resale transactions alone.
In 2022, fans of Taylor Swift filed a lawsuit accusing Ticketmaster and Live Nation of price gouging for the Eras Tour.
Earlier this month, Ariana Grande said she was “bothered by” the secondary ticket resellers for her upcoming Eternal Sunshine Tour.
“I’ve been on the phone every second of my free time fighting for a solution. I hear you and hopefully, we will be able to get more of these tickets into your hands instead of theirs. It’s not right,” Grande wrote in a statement shared on her Instagram Story. “I just wanted you to know that my team and I see it and that I care very much and we will do, and are doing everything we can.”
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