POLLSTAR PANELISTS TALK TICKETS

Garth Brooks, Irving Azoff and Madison Square Garden Executive Chairman James Dolan tackled ticketing and the government’s recent scrutiny of the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger at this week’s Pollstar Live! conference. They even got a former DOJ attorney to say that the issue has little to do with the merger and that the problem lies with the unregulated secondary-ticketing marketplace.

“The biggest factors driving exorbitantly priced tickets and lack of face-value ticket availability to the general public are scalpers and the secondary-ticketing companies that have provided a platform to scalp tickets on a large scale as a business model,” Azoff said Wednesday (2/22) at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. “These companies have no skin in the game; they have invested nothing, risk nothing, created nothing, yet they reap the lion’s share of the profit. How does that make sense? What these companies have invested in is technology and lobbyists.”

Dolan added, “It’s a gouging problem; it’s a scalper problem. Government officials should attack that if they want to protect consumers… What we should do is hire their lobbyists.”

Brooks provided an altruistic point of view but did not have a solution. “The less we can make a shit show out of it with the robots and the more we can get rid of the people who really don’t give a damn about the music and just want to make money on it... I think you get the artist and the people who allow people to be an artist in the same room, and that’s when music is at its best. I’d just love to find a way to do that.”

Former attorney general for the Department of Justice’s antitrust division Makan Delrahim said that congressional hearings have involved too many technology companies and middle men who contend they have the right to buy tickets from a primary source by any means necessary. “If the artist was able to control that, many of these problems would go away, and it seems to be the right way to deal with the property rights here,” said Delrahim, now a partner at Latham & Watkins LLP. “[The artist] should have the right to treat the resale” any way they choose.

Peep the entire panel discussion here. Or settle in with a nice corned beef on rye from Nate N Al's and read Irving's opening remarks here.