I've never been a fan of his music, but at that time he really seemed to be focused on ensuring that as many regular fans got to see his shows as possible.
He limited the price of his tickets to I believe $25. This was when he was at the peak of his fame so he easily could have gotten away with charging much more.
Secondly he would often book a massive amount of dates in each city but only announce one of them. The next show in the block of dates would go on sale after the previous one sold out. It didn't fully stop scalpers but the unpredictable nature of how many shows in total there would be and when they would be on sale cut down on a lot of the scalping.
Again, not a huge fan of his music, but he seemed genuinely interested in helping his fans get to his shows.
25 years ago, I did an odd job taking calls for Livenation for a U2 Show. While not cheap, ticket prices were well below market value and strict purchase limits in attempts to curb scalpers.
Today the same venue starts auctioning tickets when nearing sold out and ticket master runs a scalping service.
My explanation is back when records was big business, tours were seen as more of a promotional tool. Today very few artist makes sustainable money off of record sales or streaming so music sales is more of a promotion for other services, the main one being live shows.
One of the most fun gigs I had was a garage concert at a friend's place in Luxembourg we did on our way to a festival. The fact that weed had just been legalized in Luxembourg certainly contributed to a very receptive and enthusiastic audience. We ended up repeating our whole set :-D
(they already had it planned but wanted to make sure the first show on the less popular day was sold out first)
I think the whole point is that only Superstar Divas used to be able to operate like this.
Now, even "starving artists" are employing grey-area price-gouging techniques.
My anecdata is that concert fatigue is real.
I doubt this is going to bode well in the mid or long term.
My crystal ball doesn't work any better than anyone else's though...
(I just invented that term, but it's real for me!)
Yeah, one of the most famous club in Berlin used to pull that trick, now it is about to close because the owners are not making enough money. People aren't fooled by these tactics anymore.
Also production costs do tend to balloon dramatically each time you jump from clubs -> theaters, theaters -> arenas, arenas -> stadiums, etc.
Within the industry - I can see that. Producers, managers, booking, PR, etc everyone loves the bandwagon.
And a big artists not selling as they would is kind of negative news, but I don't think that has anything to do with people respond to the next album.
Just a preference for the artist. If you go for bigger venues and stretch a little bit, you might end up filling it, and then you'd make more money. If you underplay, then you're guaranteed to have a good vibe at the show, which musicians care a lot about.
That's really, I think, the dynamic that most people use. There is an aspect of it that is public perception-facing, but I've been around a lot of musicians ranging from just starting out to household names, I think it's mostly a trade-off between those two options. Just about every musician prefers smaller venues because they're more fun to play, and less financial risk.
Like anything there are exceptions. For example, an artist who wants to headline Madison Square Garden for the first time might make a different choice. But I don't think the strategy is that much about cleverness. It's just about preference.
Not quite sure this is an issue that needs an article in Bloomberg
I’d love it if a news site said occasionally, “there’s nothing really news worthy today. Yesterday’s important stuff will do.”
Also I’m mad I can’t get tickets to see angine de poitrine in Philly.
The show was in a stadium. The sound was terrible. Everyone around me was smoking pot. I was so far away that the musicians were barely visible. The only consolation was that Pink Floyd had a great lights show and a big movie screen behind them showing flying pigs and things like that.
I went to one more stadium show after that--The Smashing Pumpkins and Garbage--and it was somehow worse. The sound was deafening but also unintelligible.
There are many musicians I would love to see, but the big show experience is awful. Fortunately, I have since seen many, many shows in smaller venues. I fondly remember watching Low play in a candlelit (!!) venue with audience members sitting/laying (!!!) on the floor. Way, way better, and definitely hipper than thou.
I started going to more shows in college (mostly jam) and then even more as an adult with just a smidge more money.
Two shows stick out as particularly bad:
1. Dave Matthews Band - Fenway Park. There is no way to correct all of the oddities (and charm) of the place. The sound was terrible. I enjoyed the show anyways, but it was the worst sound quality I had seen for $90.
2. Phish - Fenway Park. Sound terrible too. From what I saw, the Phish show is folks listening to the music and folks doing whatever-else to the music. I enjoyed being with friends and people watching but nothing else. Luckily, scalped tickets were cheaper once the show started.
In contrast, went to many shows at Cambridge House of Blues, Boston's Paradise Rock Club, and many other similarly sized venues. Best sound, best experiences.
Lucky now to live near the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester NY - a true gem among all the other venues around.
I've reached a similar conclusion. I've broken my rule a few times, but just about all of them just reinforced my belief in my rule.
Here I tend to aim for venues where the tickets are $25-35. I'll order a couple and invite someone. I've had some of my best concert experiences this way, surpassing the large concerts I've been to by orders of magnitude.
I also find that in most cases, the sound is much better at smaller venues. That is, there are good spots and bad spots, but you can easily move around to a good spot and then it's really good. The large 2000+ venues I've been to have never had good sound, just decent at best.
Considering all of that, everybody in the chain prefers and benefits from sold-out shows for myriad reasons, and all live performance is theatre at its core anyways, so IMO what's a little extra theatre on top to make sure the shows go on in this year of our Lord 2026, where very little is cheap and affordable?
The ticket prices are not high because of market realities. They're high because of illegal monopoly behavior that inflates costs and then steals the money and gives it to Michael Rapino and his friends. The behavior of Live Nation has been shown to be much closer to organized crime than what most people think of as standard business practice.
There's extensive on-the-record testimony and an official federal court verdict backing up my side of this argument.
I guess I'm in the Lefsetz School of Thought [0][1] about it all (and I know, he's a polarizing personality, so I get it when people think he's full of shit), but I also think that two things can be right at the same time (Rapino and gang are criminals, ticket prices cost a lot because that's what they cost)
Maybe I'm wrong! I don't have much skin in this game man, I just personally find that his takes mirror what I see happening in real life to friends and colleagues who are artists, promoters and venue operators.
[0] https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2026/04/20/capping-resale/
[1] https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2026/04/15/live-nation-loses/
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/LYV/live-nation-en...
Are you suggesting Livenation’s leaders (Rapino, etc) are stealing from the other shareholders?
Looks like Liberty Live Group owns 30% of Livenation? And Rapino owns less than 2%, per Yahoo Finance.
https://www.libertyliveholdings.com/about
Page 31 of Livenation’s 2025 10-K shows $25B revenue, $19B direct operating expenses, and $4B selling, general, and admin expenses. I wonder how much of the expenses is not going to performers and the expenses of operating venues.
https://investors.livenationentertainment.com/sec-filings/an...
They own StubHub so they’ll buy the tickets from themselves and “resell” them on StubHub for 5x-10x because people will pay it for a top line performer. It’s been well documented over the years if you do any kind of digging.
For example, you don’t report revenue or expense from moving money from your right pocket to your left pocket.
In which case, the benefit of the higher prices would be going to (some) performers. Which supports the claim that Livenation is useful as a punching bag for the most popular performers.
Even Coachella, which was supposed to be an F-U to high ticket prices and Record Label red tape, is now $5,000/ticket.
I know these people personally. I'm telling you that it's true. I can think of one example where all the insiders created a startup in the ticketing space that had no reason to exist, really, and nothing worth buying solely so that they could acquire it and all the insiders could profit off of it. Lo and behold, COVID came along and made it so their plan made even less sense, and they just ran with it anyways. Money went straight from the stock market into their pockets.
There's a million examples, but again, a lot of the stuff is on the record. I'm sure Rapino is giving money to shareholders for the most part (being one is a pretty relevant part of that for him obviously) but he's doing it via illegal actions. He has made himself a billionaire in the process.
You can hedge however you want on that, but it's horrible and bad and your posts sound like they're defending it or acting like it's natural or normal in some way. It's not mitigated by the fact that someone like Ari Emanuel or a few guys in Nashville had their hand in the cookie jar too. Victims are millions of normal Americans, like me and you, and basically every working musician, except for a few special people at the top.
Being skeptical of reported profit is a prerequisite for any conversation about entertainment industry accounting.
> Are you suggesting Livenation’s leaders (Rapino, etc) are stealing from the other shareholders?
Of course I am. These guys are basically mobsters.
> Page 31 of Livenation’s 2025 10-K shows $25B revenue, $19B direct operating expenses, and $4B selling, general, and admin expenses. I wonder how much of the expenses is not going to performers and the expenses of operating venues.
Lots. There is on-the-record testimony and hard evidence in the docket. They inflated prices and faked costs. They shuffled money between entities.
There's tons and tons of reporting, testimony and an official record of the federal courts of the United States of America, all covering these issues. You don't have to read that stuff, but if you haven't got any actual understanding of this issue, there's no reason to post about it.
This organization has been a willful, blatant lawbreaker for decades and a leech on an entire industry. I've seen it first hand. But again, you don't have to believe me. It's proven in a court.
They quite literally bribed their way out of this federal case but they somehow managed to get blindsided by the state AG's sticking around. It's only this miscalculation that's caused them to suffer any consequences at all for basically the first time in history.
If you are referring to Hollywood accounting, that has nothing to do with audited figured in SEC filings. Hollywood accounting is just poorly written contracts litigated in civil court.
Misstated financials in SEC filings are a criminal offense, which obviously could be happening, but I have yet to see any evidence.
> There's tons and tons of reporting, testimony and an official record of the federal courts of the United States of America, all covering these issues. You don't have to read that stuff, but if you haven't got any actual understanding of this issue, there's no reason to post about it.
So you are alleging the federal courts and prosecutors know about all of this fraud, provably, and are not indicting anyone. Which, of course, could be true due to corruption. I just haven’t seen a reputable article connecting all the dots, which is odd because it seems like the type of thing journalists like to publish.
Also, seems like the other Livenation shareholders would not like to be defrauded, so wouldn’t they be at least suing Livenation for their missing profits?
30% of livenation is owned by another publicly listed company, with majority voting shares held by this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Malone
He seems influential enough to not want to take missing profits on the chin. Or is he in on the fraud too?
You see where this starts needing a decent amount of evidence without sounding like a conspiracy theory.
This is like the equivalent of this economist joke:
https://www.econlib.org/bills-on-the-sidewalk/#:~:text=Kevin...
Has anyone not noticed that the Justice Department has literally been for sale? That we have stopped prosecuting white-collar crime in this country for a generation or two?
There's always a way. They hire the former prosecutor, they employ the children of congressmen. The money permeates everybody and everything. It's a criminal organization. It's obvious to anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention.
The idea that you can tell that people aren't committing white-collar crime because they haven't been prosecuted is a hilarious assumption.
It's not a conspiracy theory. It's right out in the open. They think they won't ever face real actual personal consequences. They're probably right.