How Concert Ticket Monopolies Ruined Everything | Moe Tkacik & Krista Brown | TMR

Sam and Emma host Senior Policy Analyst Krista Brown and Senior Fellow Moe Tkacik with the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP), to discuss their recent piece in the American Prospect, “Ticketmaster’s Dark History”.

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Senior policy analyst Krista Brown and Senior fellow Moe Tkacik

of the American economic Liberties project. Welcome guys. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having us. my pleasure. So you guys wrote a really big piece on Ticketmaster's dark history. And it's entitled that at prospect.org. and folks can get a little bit of a taste of Moe. I know you put up a thread yesterday in a sort of like anticipation of both of you guys watching the hearings yesterday. Let's just go into the history of Ticketmaster. I have to say that when I read the piece like it all sort of came back to me. Like I grew up in the Boston area. I remember Don Law. I remember the evolution of these things. I remember when you know Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam did this stuff. And I you know being skeptical of what their motives were because I was a fan of Nirvana like you know pre you know like teen spirit and so I was just skeptical of the whole thing and didn't pay that much attention and now I feel like an ass for that. So Moe do you want to start with like maybe that early history of Ticketmaster. Yeah, I was definitely on the team cart in in those squabbles. I was 15 when this was happening. So I remember it pretty vividly. And I remembered more what happened afterward in terms of just the tsunami of consolidation in the entertainment industry that took something that I thought was pretty great which was American pop culture of the early 90s and turned it into just this really like tyrannically vacuous Cesspool. and as it turns out these things were connected. It kind of all started with the crushing of Pearl Jam. But where it really started was in the 80s. And There were a couple of Moguls and the concert promoter there was this sort of loosely organized cartel of regional concert promoters that Ticketmaster kind of lent money to bid up the prices of you know high profile acts and split the fees with. So they're the CEO of Ticketmaster back in the 80s with this guy Fred Rosen and his friend Irving Azoff who at the time was CEO of MCA they really were almost plotting I feel like in the 80s to dominate the music industry and we're living that reality today. but Pearl Jam… can I just add I just want to say you know just for context the early to mid to late 80s seemed to be and maybe I'm wrong but seemed to be the absolute Pinnacle of like the touring world of concerts. I mean I worked at a parking lot in Worcester next to our Civic Center and it was I mean it was constant. like it was a 13,000 person Arena and it was booked every weekend. like the touring was amazing at that time.