It's tragic: Book explores hows and whys of concert ticketing

Book explores hows and whys of concert ticketing

It’s a question that concertgoers have probably asked at least once in their lives: Why on earth does it cost so much to see my favorite band? It is often followed by another question: What are all these extra fees and nickel-and-dime dings that make it more expensive to go to a concert?

Dean Budnick and Josh Baron, authors of “Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped” (ECW Press, $24.95), wrote their book in part because they wanted to know the gnarly truth behind those questions.

“Josh and I are big fans of the Fred Goodman book ‘The Mansion on the Hill,’ which talks about the rise of concert promotion in the U.S., and he ends his story really in the early ’70s,” Budnick said.

“We wondered why no one had taken that story further â€" the story of promoters, on through the rise of SFX Entertainment and the String Cheese Incident lawsuit, which ultimately was settled out of court. By 2008, we were just so eager to learn about this story and we’d recognized that no one else had seemed to write the book that we wanted to read.”

The hows and whys of skyrocketing ticket prices and fan-gouging fees are subjects the book deftly tackles. But what also emerges is a fascinating history of the past 40 years of event ticketing, from the rise of powerful promoters and industry players like legendary impresario Bill Graham, former Live Nation chairman Michael Cohl â€" credited with the idea of “package touring,” covering tour dates, promotions and merchandise sales â€" and Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff, to landmark lawsuits brought against Ticketmaster, first by Pearl Jam, in the 1990s, and later The String Cheese Incident.

The two authors also cover trends like the emergence of StubHub and other secondary market and ticket reselling operations that thrive in the Internet age.

There’s no one reason, they argue, why concerts cost so darn much, but there are many stories that explain the current state of the business.

Budnick and Baron spent more than three years on the book. They conducted hundreds of interviews with industry sources both obvious â€" former Ticketmaster CEO Fred Rosen, who built Ticketmaster into a behemoth â€" and obscure, Dorothy McLaughlin, a junior high school math teacher who developed an early seat location software program called Select-A-Seat in the early ’70s.

The jamband scene and innovations in the ticketing industry overlapped plenty. The Grateful Dead and Phish, for example, are among the better-known bands that set up ticketing systems to keep prices as low as possible and shorten the distance between devoted fans and good seats to shows.

Budnick and Baron devote a chapter of the book to bluegrass-flavored jammers The String Cheese Incident, which sued and then settled a lawsuit with Ticketmaster in 2004. String Cheese in effect picked up the torch from Pearl Jam, which had gone after Ticketmaster in the ’90s on grounds that Ticketmaster used its size and market influence to monopolize the concert ticketing industry and marginalize competitors in the majority of U.S. markets.

In 2003, String Cheese Incident’s ticketing agency, then known as SCI Ticketing, filed a lawsuit against alleging Ticketmaster violated the Sherman Antitrust Act because contracts between Ticketmaster and most venues in the U.S. prevented bands from obtaining “holds” that exceeded 8 percent of a venue’s ticket allotment.

In essence, if it played by Ticketmaster’s rules, String Cheese couldn’t sell any meaningful amount of tickets directly to its fans in more than 90 percent of U.S. venues in which it might play, and those fans would also be overcharged.

In one example String Cheese used, as documented in the book, buying four tickets through Ticketmaster to four different shows by String Cheese at the Warfield theater in San Francisco would cost a fan $85 more overall than if they went through SCI Ticketing.

The lawsuit was settled and String Cheese, as revealed in Budnick and Baron’s book, again held up to 50 percent of its ticket inventory, free of the imposition of Ticketmaster’s rules.

According to Budnick, part of the agreement with Ticketmaster was that String Cheese had to stay quiet on the terms â€" in other words, not do a victory dance over the fact that they’d gotten what they wanted.

Budnick, whose previous books include “The Phishing Manual” (1996) and “Jambands: A Complete Guide To The Players, Music and Scene” (2003), became interested in the ticketing industry question while writing his doctoral dissertation as a grad student at Harvard University in the early ’90s.

One historical curiosity he came across during his research was ticket scalping during the final U.S. lecture tour by Charles Dickens more than a century earlier.

“There was a moment then when I was thinking about a book on the cultural history of scalping,” said Budnick. “This has really been in the back of my head since the ’90s.”

He and Baron began pursuing interviews in earnest in 2008, with Budnick approaching Fred Rosen and Baron targeting Michael Cohl.

“I really do believe almost every chapter could be its own book,” he said. “There’s so much to all of this.”

Budnick said he and Baron were “gratified” that most of their target sources were eager to tell their stories, especially when they learned the authors’ intention was not to vilify Ticketmaster and the executives who built the current industry.

They were able to interview almost everyone they sought, Budnick said, with a few notable exceptions.

“Irving Azoff was one person we couldn’t get to, and tried a couple of times,” he said. “It became too much of a challenge.”

After concert revenue and ticket sales plummeted in 2010.Data released in July 2011 by industry chronicler Pollstar suggested total revenue from the Top 50 tours worldwide increased 11 percent, year-over-year, for the first half of 2011. That was one metric most observers pointed to when describing 2011 as a “rebound year” for concert tours.

To Budnick, however, changes in the ticket industry â€" especially with the music industry undergoing several simultaneous paradigm shifts behind online ticket brokerages, social media and other forces â€" are inevitable.

White label ticketing services are gaining popularity, for example; former Ticketmaster boss Rosen in 2010 launched a new ticketing company, Outbox, which allows venues and various entities to sell tickets from their own websites, thus de-centralizing the Ticketmaster model.

“What I think we’re going to go back to is a way of promoting music by people who know their local markets,” Budnick said.

“Before, they had a relationship with their local markets and that way could be a little bit more conscious of price points as they were building and nurturing an audience, and that way support the bands ... from the club level up through the amphitheater level.

“I do think we’re heading back toward the way it was when promoters handled their individual geographies,” he said.

The Patriot Ledger