Why Do Gigs Cost So Much?

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1:11Hello and welcome to another edition of The Rest is Entertainment with me Marina Hyde. And me Richard Lovsman. Hi Marina. Hello Richard, how are you? Yes, I'm alright. You've sort of been on the tour of all the different politicians this week. It sounds like a lot of fun. Yeah, I've been on the election trail. I've been around the country. That will continue as we lurch or skip towards July the 8th. Sorry, July the 4th. It's sooner than I think. Thank God for that. But no politics on this podcast. There's enough politics out there, isn't there? Yeah, we're going to mention the US Attorney General, but that's it.

1:44And honestly, we will talk about the US Attorney General for two hours, absolute max. Oh, yeah. No more than that. Big Merrick Garland fans on this show. Yes. So, yeah, we're talking about Ticketmaster and their sort of near monopoly of ticket sales and why we pay so much for tickets and so on. Yes. We're also talking about... The return of Loaded magazine in one form or another. Which would be nice for 80 % of our audience will find out what Loaded is. Yes, absolutely. Then we talked right back near at the start of this podcast, we talked about Netflix releasing their viewership data for the first time.

2:16And that was the first six months of last year. And they've just done the second six months of last year. So we'll have a look at what the first global TV channel, what we're all watching on it. Start, shall we, with Ticketmaster? We'll start with Ticketmaster. The Attorney General in the US, Merrick Garland, has launched a monopoly suit against Ticketmaster because they control everything and ticket prices are too high and it's in their interest to act for the consumer. And there is, in general, a lot of anger about ticketing, including in this country, which we'll also talk about because one of Labour's...

2:5710 % over face value, which they already do in some other European countries. Shall I say how Ticketmaster started? People, I think, are slightly confused as to what Ticketmaster do, how they make their money, why they make their money. They know they hate them, and they know they're paying them a lot of money. It was a sort of a genius business decision in the 1970s, really. Theatres and concert halls used to sell their own tickets, because if you think about it, if there's a gig, you've got the band or the act, and you've got the venue, and those are the people you imagine are making you all the money.

3:23and the little stuff of paper in the middle, which is a ticket, that isn't anything. It's a receipt, essentially. And that's all it used to be. Then a company called Ticketron started setting up little kiosks in major stores and they would say to the theatres, you pay us 25 cents every time we set a ticket for you. And the theatres thought, okay, I can sort of see that. That kind of works for us. Someone else taking care of all that business and people would put their credit card details into machine and take the tickets out. Ticketmaster came along, a guy called Fred Olson, and it completely turned it on his head.

3:55He thought, I'm not going to get the theatres to pay me. He said, I'm going to pay the theatres. I'm going to say to the theatres, if you let me have absolute exclusive control of your ticketing, I will give you 50 % of what I make or 40 % or 30%, depending on what the theatre is. So he turned the whole thing around. The theatres went, well, this is great. We don't have to worry about the ticketing at all because that's a hassle. We're getting a bit of extra revenue as well. Of course, we'll sign up with this company. So that's how Ticketmaster made their money. That's how they continue to make their money.

4:24That's why they're the people in charge of pricing. And that's why they're the people who pretty much any big gig or big theater you go to, Ticketmaster are the people you deal with. But then they went a step further. Oh, this is in 2010 when they acquired Live Nation. Now, Live Nation sort of ran the venues. And so basically what that meant was that Ticketmaster suddenly became this everything corporation where they controlled the entire entertainment supply chain. And in the US, they do a lot of secondary ticketing as well. and you know people obviously quite swiftly started to hate them for a number of reasons but the big flash point of course once again she is at the center of it when the taylor swift tickets were released last year and you could only get them through ticketmaster and by the way that's interesting because she's the most powerful woman in entertainment and even she and the aeg group who are promoters they could not get past this because all the biggest venues had exclusive deals with ticketmaster she couldn't book her tour without there would be nowhere for her to play The Ticketmaster website crashed.

5:21You know, people were in queues for sort of 10 or 12 hours. They took days off work to do it. But they also have discovered that, you know, there are bots that can do 1 ,000 tickets. This is the trouble. You see, there's software that can... Scalping bots. Yeah, scalping bots. There's about 10 different varieties of these scalping bots. And then it's immediately like a 7 ,000 % resale. The head of the FTC, Biden's Federal Trade Committee, is a woman called Lina Khan. and she said this catastrophe converted more Gen Zers into anti-monopolous overnight than I ever could. But I think it is slightly more shaded as always as a story.

5:55People like to hate Ticketmaster and the artists love to say, oh, you've paid, can I just come up with a random number? Say you've paid£50 for a ticket, but why do I get to the end of it and discover I'm paying£100 when I've been on this website for hours and hours trying to do this? And then at the end it's like, oh, you're not going to take the ticket because it's all these fees. People are thinking, oh, that fee's going to Ticketmaster. that by the way, we know that that goes in some part to the artist. And the big artist. Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes. Okay, the big artist, right? Yeah, the big artist.

6:23The big artists love having Ticketmaster there. It's a little bit like, it reminds me a little bit like when Boris Johnson had people like Gavin Williamson in his cabinet. You love Gavin Williamson in the cabinet because if they're talking about Gavin, they're not talking about you. You know, they're the lightning rod and they've taken all the hate. They actually say we make a tiny amount of money, but yeah, they don't. And actually the way bits of their business make lots more. and when they're saying we've made a tiny, we make 1.4 % or something, they're foregrounding little bits of their business that they can say that about, which are loss leaders for the big stuff where they do make huge amounts.

6:53Sometimes they charge you£2.50 to print out your tickets at home. Yeah. That I've never worked out, like they're paying for the upkeep of my printer. Yes, well, I get this in some sort of check in the post. Will it come to me? This seems to me quite an election year play, by the way. I'm sorry, why are we talking about politics? But it's such a consumer-facing thing, like saying, oh, poor you, you're spending too much for all your fun stuff. We're going to do something about it. I don't believe that this will get passed on to consumers. Aspects of it may work better. But if you're asking me whether that notional ticket, I would have just said, will come down to£50.

7:24No, I don't think so. Well, there are rivals to Ticketmaster and they pretty much charge the same amount each time as well. And some of those rivals may come in. They may have to say, you can't monopolise venues any longer. You're going to have to allow some of the rivals to have some of the tickets, etc. Exactly. Listen, if the market is that tickets cost a certain amount and the big artists are selling out time after time after time, which they are, because there's huge demand now for live performances, then there is nothing in anyone's interest really to reduce the price of those tickets apart from possibly the artists.

7:54So that's the only place you could go with that, is for an artist to find a way to team up with a ticket retailer or a series of venues where they could suddenly charge an awful lot less because there's still money in it if you do charge a lot less. Taylor Swift can do this. She could, but it was fascinating even then. As a turbo capitalist, will she? I don't think so. I mean, secondary ticketing, which I have got some Taylor Swift tickets. I don't want to say what I paid for them. It was slightly more than the opening box office of Mad Max Furiosa. Which, by the way, opened very disappointingly, as I predicted.

8:28Although, again, a great film. Do you think? Yes. I loved it. Did you go and see it? I haven't seen it yet. I'll have to see it. Or did I go and see it? Yeah, of course you did. You went to the show. I loved Fury Road. Yeah. Fury Road is amazing. It's like Fury Road, but with a few bits in between where there's some dialogue. Right. And not bad dialogue. But she's no Charlize, I'm sorry. Oh, I thought she was great. TV star. Anyway, we'll move on. Now, I got mine from Via Gogo and we always stub up. They've got the whole thing sewn up. Labour are trying to bring the prices down, as I say, on resale, because I know lots of Americans, and Americans connected with a show that we've just finished making, are coming to Europe to watch Taylor Swift, because you can get a ticket in Madrid for, they've got a price cap on it.

9:10London, you are allowed to sell it for a lot more than face value. I mean, huge amounts more than face value if you look at these websites and what it would cost. I'm not even in the same postcode as Taylor Swift, by the way. I'm technically in Wembley Stadium, but I'm really, it's very unclear whether we will be able to see her, even with the binoculars, which we're taking. There's a lobbying group. They're called the Campaign for Ticketing Fairness. Okay, CTF. They sound great, don't they? Yeah. They're run by Vigogo and stop up. Isn't that great? It's like when you... The carbon footprint, that sounds interesting.

9:42Who came up with that? BP. Yeah, campaign for climate change. It's really... Yes, exactly. Lobbying is incredible. But that group has sort of formed a particular effort to take down this policy. And there was a Guardian story about it last week where they've come up with£73 ,000. Again, lobbying is cheap at the price, isn't it? Yeah, isn't it just? Yeah, cheap at the price. To put pressure on MPs to sort of drop that policy. and make you millions upon millions for years after years americans by the way would never countenance this like this 10 % cap even though i know some americans who are coming to europe to watch taylor swift they would never countenance this they kind of feel like if you bought your tickets it's your right to sell them on for whatever possible price you can get for them and i just don't think that it's in their part of their birthright it's socialism yeah this that is genuine socialism but they also their fees are much more i mean we think our fees are huge in the UK but it's somewhere around 15-20 % here and it can be up to 40-50%.

10:36By the way there's a terrific book called Ticketmasters which is by Dean Bundick and Josh Barron all about this. It's from a few years ago now so it hasn't got the last few years but it tells you all the kind of early stuff. Yeah the first gig that Ticketmaster ever did was ELO in 1977 and they charged 25 cents on a$6.25 ticket which is kind of doesn't sound crazy. We don't live in that world anymore. I'm not sure what you're doing yeah but they can literally do what they want and also they have um dynamic pricing much like uber which means that you know if tickets are going super quickly they can suddenly the prices go up and there's they've got an awful lot of ways that they can get more money out of you if they can see that the demand is growing and growing but the ticket scalpers is interesting isn't it because the world in which ticket scalpers might work when you say scalpers do you mean those people likes okay the bots is fine fire go go and stub hub and you know one of the things I need is resale tickets and I need people to buy Taylor Swift tickets and give them to me, then there's not a lot of those people around other than if you are setting out to make a deliberate campaign to buy a lot of Taylor Swift tickets that you don't want.

11:42So I'm not saying there is complicity, but certainly, you know, it's something that helps. I'm saying a lot of things after I bought my Taylor Swift tickets. I'm saying a lot of things and I feel I'm entitled to. I feel I've paid for that, right, Richard? God, haven't you just? I think that there is some, it just doesn't seem to me possible that that many people want to get rid of those i mean it's just it's clearly not possible that that many people that you can get tickets for any night you want anywhere and they are just at these insane resale you're not meeting anybody who said oh who's yesterday said great news i've got four taylor swift tickets and then the day after go do you know what actually i'm gonna sell them to stub hub actually now i think about it my daughters i know really want to go but you know i just think stub hub i worry about their margins where are those tickets coming from is very very interesting also whether there's complicity of artists in that sometimes which by the way on almost all occasions there isn't but you know again it's a it's it's a good way of making some extra money the resale and value of tickets um so yeah there's a there's a lot going on but the basic thing is Ticketmaster work by being exclusive to venues and exclusive to enough venues that you know you have to go with them and then as you say they did the clever thing of actually buying up loads of those venues anyway so they can sort of charge what they want and And that's Merrick Garland's point, I think.

12:56Yes. And that monopolies just saying sort of, oh, we do this better than anybody. Therefore, which is the argument of a lot of enormous monopolies. Google, we do search better than anybody. Yeah, I still think it's quite bad how it's ended up. So it's in everyone's interest to break these things down. Although I don't think antitrust has a great record recently in the US. I don't, it will be interesting to see. It will take a long time to work through the system, this. Yeah, it feels like in a world in which, you know, that Taylor Swift tour sold out everywhere and it had all the problems we're talking about.

13:31It had the problems with buying the tickets. It had the problems of the prices of the tickets. It had the problems of the resales of the tickets. And it had the problems that there weren't five different places you could buy them. And yet it sold out everywhere around the world. So we are complicit in all of this. But if we want to do something, I mean, I guess you could put a cap. As you say, in certain foreign countries, they do do that. And, you know, I guess it would help out. And acts do sometimes try and take Ticketmaster on Pearl Jam, famously did it in the 90s, and it nearly bankrupted Pearl Jam.

14:02But, you know, they're super, super powerful. So I just thought it was an interesting thing to talk about because I know people, we tend to dialogue with Ticketmaster four or five times a year, most of us. And each time we're like, how on earth are they making money? And then we forget about it again. So I think it's just sort of know how that money is made. It's like childbirth. Once you've got to the end of 10 hours of it, you're like, I don't want to think about it again. Yeah, the same reason people would have a second child is the same reason they'd go back to Ticketmaster. Yeah, right. Should we go to a break now, Richard?

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16:28welcome back we are now going to talk about the return of loaded magazine now loaded magazine was part of uh i feel like 104 loaded magazine this is melvin bragg in our time loaded magazine was part of the sort of lad culture that began in the 1990s and then we'll talk about what happened. We'll talk about the switcheroo, what happened to it. It was originally, I don't know if it was originally edited by James Brown, but the big kind of era of its pomp, it was edited by James Brown, had terrific writing in, lots of sort of sexy women, kind of with some clothes on. They weren't totally naked. Anyway, they're bringing it back.

17:06It fell out of favour, as you can imagine. Most magazines have fallen out of favour. Things do. The printed word has fallen out of favour. The printed word has fallen out of favour. The editor, who's now a woman called Dani Levy, the new editor, she's a 39-year-old fitness influencer who lives in Spain, she says that the new version of Loaded's magazine goal is to bring back ogling for the 35 to 55-year-old men who are being cheated out of society. When can men look at an acre person in our society, is what I would like to know. I mean, there are so few opportunities. someone should set up some sort of I don't know some sort of yeah portal yeah now if there was some way of transmitting anyway there's quite a lot of confusing stuff here she says whilst it was acceptable for women to be feminists men don't have the equivalent freedom there's a lot of pc gone mad stuff she then says a weird dichotomy has opened up in society where there's an attitude that no one can say or do anything but then when you open social media it's full of porn loaded to see particular to occupy the middle ground and say it's okay to appreciate beautiful women men need to have a safe place to read stuff like that and secretly relate to it she also says now this is the key line for me we are targeting the original loaded audience who are now living happily at home with their wife and kids but still reminisce about their nights spent clubbing until 3 a.m drinking one pound shots with a bedroom covered in posters of half-naked women i mean it doesn't feel like it's going to do great well but it is and i don't think it will work because for reasons we'll come to, but that is totally the Adam Sandler of Netflix play, isn't it?

18:38It's like, oh, people used to go and see this guy in the movie theatre and actually think, you know, in their early 20s. The reason that guy's the biggest movie star in the whole world is because they are now living at home with their wife and children. They're not getting, you know, it's expensive to get a babysitter. And Adam Sandler continues to make movies for them on this thing. And there's an element of that to this because the first cover star is Liz Hurley, brackets 59. Wow. There's no shame in it, certainly. But yes, I don't know whether the photo is taken by her son Damien, who seems to do most of her photos.

19:07I've got a huge amount of time for that relationship, by the way. What's that? Tell me about that. Liz Hurley also has bikini ranges and things like that and promotes them via social media. Bikini ranges? Is that like a firing range, but for bikinis? Yeah, she fires up bikinis. It's like a T-shirt cannon, but a bit sexier. Damien, her son, now a film director, we'll come to that in a second, takes all the photos. They're very sexy. Really? And it's wonderful. He does all the pictures. He's now directed her in a, I think it's called Strictly Confidential. Shoot me if I'm wrong. With a bikini, not an actual bullet.

19:41With a bikini gun. Shoot me with a bikini gun. The name of my new US punk group. And in which he had to direct his mother in a sex scene. But then they said, did you have an intimacy coordinator? No, we don't need any of that. I'm hugely here for their relationship, for everything about it. That sounds very healthy. It's hilarious. The whole thing is brilliant. I love it. Anyway, she's on the front of this magazine. I mean, she is an original sort of loaded cover girl going back. The cover lines are quite interesting. I'll tell you what the cover lines are because you've got to become a member, by the way, which I think tells its own story, and then they'll post you the magazine.

20:13Sorry? It really is literally something. It's like the Grattan catalogue. If you become a member, I will post you the magazine. That's like I once became a member of the Howard Jones fan club and they posted me a magazine. It's virtually the Pony Express. I think that was 1981. Okay, you have to sign that you have to be a member. Yeah, I think so. Okay. Obviously, they're using the data for something different. But the cover lines are Iron Mike versus Jake Paul. Obviously, that's the Tyson YouTube. Inside Tyson's training camp. Yeah, we'll read. Bugsy Malone, the black brand behind the beats. Okay, he's a British music success actor.

20:47We'll read that. How It Works, the MP. Now, that is an explainer culture of which I think we are part. This podcast is part, so I can see why they've got that. But in a way, more interesting, what has happened to the women? Actually, one of the things she said is, I think there's no shame in men being able to ogle beautiful women again like Liz Hurley, Melinda Messenger or Pamela Anderson. Pamela Anderson has now sort of reinvented herself as a survivor of all this. I'm pretty sure she doesn't necessarily want to do Loaded again. But the girls who are on it, now women, you know, like Sarah Cox has got a great book club.

21:22Cat Dealey's doing This Morning. Seen Caprice on the school run. Gail Porter, that ended much more sadly, that story. and I don't say it ended, but she talks really moving about her time. I think FHM projected her famously looking over, she was totally naked, looking over her shoulder and they projected her on the House of Parliament without her permission. I think it's like that Onion headline, which is ironic porn viewing leads to unironic masturbation. Yeah. And it's hard for younger people listening to this to really overestimate how huge Lode was. It sort of went off like a big bomb in 1994.

21:59It's this huge thing. As you say, James Brown, not the singer, was the editor and he'd been at the NME. And the press up to then had this sort of NME quite earnest, all those sort of things. And he said, I want to do this magazine. And there's like GQ. So he said, look, there were Savile Row suits and people in Bentley's. Yeah, I was really smart. And then there was, you know, people in duffel coats. But there was nothing in the middle, which were the sort of men that he felt were being underserved. But I bought it for the articles. Sorry. I know it sounds like a cliche, but the articles were brilliant.

22:26It was a good magazine. It was exuberant. It was kind of gonzo. Funny. We didn't really have that sort of, it was really, yeah, and for a bit. And also, it seemed as though the girls could join in this culture. I think that's the key thing is, you know, it started off and, you know, it was for men who should know better. Yeah. Which you kind of get, you know, listen, I'm a good guy, but, you know, I've got a bit of an edgy side as well. And it was like sport, music, tech and women, I think, was the sort of, the kind of order of things. Yeah. But women crept up and up that order as the years went by.

22:58And as you say, the likes of, you know, brilliant broadcasters and smart women like Sarah Cox and Zoe Ball and Gail Porter sort of had to make themselves complicit with this because this was the culture. And I think it was run by white middle class men who had kidded themselves that the problems of inequality were over. Yeah. I think we were in the era of the end of history and Blair coming in and we got rid of Thatcherism. We got rid of, you know, all this trouble. And, you know, the struggles of the 80s have paid off and suddenly we were living in this world where everyone was free and equal, which sounds stupid.

23:28But every generation is uniquely stupid in their own way and uniquely clever in their own way. And I think that was a real blind spot for that generation. And so I think Loaded started. It had real energy, great ideas, full of great stuff. But, yeah, I think it's, you know, that sort of celebration of laddishness very slowly turned into misogyny and no one noticed it happening. I totally agree with you. I remember when I first stopped being secretary at The Sun, I went on to picture research for features. And it was my job to be in contact with all of these magazines. And when their new issues came out each month, they would give you their best pictures.

24:02And then you would have to run them with a tiny picture of the magazine covers. And you suddenly saw that instead of being actually part of it, the same thing. Oh, dear, it's happened again. I'm afraid sexism has happened again. Who could have predicted after so many millennia of it that it would happen again? Honestly, we thought we'd wiped down every surface and then it's come back. I don't know how there's any of this left, but here we are. And you can see the bloodline between that and the noughties where it becomes absolute, where celebrity culture of the noughties is all the kind of absolute train wreck, you know, like a truly hateful form of toxicity for women.