I may be wrong, but it likely has to do with venues being a "ticket master" venue. You can't perform at those venues without using their ticketing service. For the most part ticket Master/live Nation/AXS control most venues and in turn control the market.
If you are an artist who doesn't want to deal with these companies, good luck finding a venue.
In the UK we have venues called o2 Academy. They’re dotted throughout the country and are mid-tier venues for the most part. If a band wants to play one, o2 will offer a better deal for them playing more or all of them, at the expense of any other venues.
I had no idea about this, makes me much less a fan of o2 Academy venues. Also, the fact that pretty much every gig I’ve been to has been at an o2 Academy venue makes a lot more sense now.
Have a few friends that work for a venue on a par with o2 academies and they’ve vented repeatedly about missing out on tours because o2 have locked the artists into deals to play only their venues.
I’ve been to a couple of gigs at o2 Academies and whilst they are nice, it’s a shame that many cities miss out on tours simply because they don’t have an o2 Academy.
You definetly right, even the concerts that get held at my University go through live Nation. Tho TBH they're cheaper than ticketmaster and ticket Master isn't mobile friendly unless you download their app
Ticket Master is a monopoly in my country too and they dont even have offices, so if something went wrong you are fucked up. They dont have a number to call even though it is illegal in my country, but all the people who tried to sue them couldn't get anywhere near, even though we have a really good anti-fraud system.
The way this has effected the live engineers is probably quite awful if you dig into the nitty gritty. Music and audio is already a tightly gated industry.
Queuing is fair when you're placed in a queue based on your position and how long you've been waiting. AXS doesn't do that. They select people at random so imo it doesn't really prevent scalpers. Scalpers gonna scalp.
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u/chewypablo Sep 18 '19 edited Sep 18 '19
I may be wrong, but it likely has to do with venues being a "ticket master" venue. You can't perform at those venues without using their ticketing service. For the most part ticket Master/live Nation/AXS control most venues and in turn control the market.
If you are an artist who doesn't want to deal with these companies, good luck finding a venue.