The recent sale of tickets to Oasis’ 2025 reunion tour was “the biggest on-sale in history” with “the most demand in history,” Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino said.
During an appearance at Bloomberg’s Screentime conference in Los Angeles on Wednesday (October 9), Rapino also revealed that Ticketmaster – Live Nation’s ticketing division – was hit by “multi billions” of bots during the sale.
He also said that scalpers were selling $6,000 tickets to Oasis shows – even before ticket sales officially opened.
Bots – high-speed, automated programs that buy large quantities of tickets at the moment they go on sale – have been a problem for the live music industry and music fans ever since ticket sales became an online business, and Ticketmaster has often taken the blame when ordinary ticket-buyers found that a concert was sold out just minutes after tickets went on sale.
“They’re a professional, $12 billion business trying to capture seats. So it’s an arms race with us trying to stop them, not let them in the door, not let them hold the tickets,” Rapino said.
To that end, Ticketmaster has put in place measures to stop bots, including, among other things, a requirement for ticket buyers to sign up in advance of a ticket on-sale.
Last year, Rapino said Ticketmaster’s efforts to stop bots were behind the infamous collapse of the ticketing system when tickets went on sale for Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour.
Much like that incident, the recent sale of Oasis tickets has also caused fan frustration and criticism of Ticketmaster. Many ticket-buyers were unhappy with the “dynamic pricing” system used during ticket sales to Oasis’ UK shows.
Dynamic pricing adjusts ticket prices in real time based on demand, and in the Oasis on-sale, some tickets more than doubled in price during the sale.
Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing model is now the subject of an investigation by the UK’s competition authority.
Earlier this month, Oasis announced that dynamic pricing wouldn’t be used in ticket sales for its North American tour next summer.
In a statement on X, the band also suggested that Ticketmaster’s system might not be able to manage dynamic pricing for a high-demand tour.
“When unprecedented ticket demand (where the entire tour could be sold many times over at the moment tickets go on sale) is combined with technology that cannot cope with that demand, it becomes less effective and can lead to an unacceptable experience for fans,” the band’s X account stated.
In his appearance at the Bloomberg conference, Rapino suggested that Ticketmaster’s system had handled Oasis ticket sales well.
“We have the best platform in the world. It’s very hard when you have 10 billion bots hitting your system at [the start of sales] to steal your tickets… I’m so happy the system didn’t go down. We stopped them. We got it done.”
Here are three other things Rapino said at the Bloomberg conference:
Scalpers were selling $6,000 Oasis tickets before they even went on sale – which is why the secondary market needs reform
Rapino and Live Nation have long been pushing for reforms to the secondary ticketing market – the industry phrase used to describe ticket resellers such as scalpers and reseller platforms like StubHub.
Rapino suggested a rule that would limit the prices that resellers could charge for tickets to 20% above the original ticket price.
“It’s frustrating for the fan to spend $4,000 when Bruce Springsteen says, ‘You know what, I only want to charge $300 for the front row.’ But no, the fan isn’t getting it for $300, the bot is, and then they charge you $3,000,” Rapino said.
He said that the secondary market was selling Oasis tickets for $6,000 apiece even before they went on sale. That’s the result of “speculative ticketing” – resellers selling tickets they don’t even own yet, and assuming they will be able to get their hands on those tickets (possibly via bots) when they do go on sale.
“You go to SeatGeek or StubHub, it’s like ‘Buy now! Limited tickets available!’ They don’t even have tickets… So fans are confused,” Rapino said.
(Speculative ticketing is now in the crosshairs of legislators: This past spring, the US House of Representatives passed the Transparency in Charges for Key Events Ticketing (TICKET) Act, which, among other things, would ban speculative ticketing.)
“You shouldn’t have a middleman that has nothing invested in the business mak[ing] any money from it.”
Michael Rapino, Live Nation
Rapino has long argued that the solution to the bot and scalper problems is to allow prices to rise to what the market will bear, just as other businesses do – but he recognizes that this is unrealistic in the live music business.
“If you really want to fix it, just charge market [prices]. Then there’s no secondary. Well, the artists aren’t going to do that because they’re worried about their fans. So they’re going to sacrifice the revenue, which is unheard of for businesses,” Rapino said.
“You shouldn’t have a middleman that has nothing invested in the business mak[ing] any money from it. So we would love [to] regulate it in some sense, cap it at 20%. Some people can [still] make a little money,” but artists and promoters would get “the biggest part,” Rapino suggested.
Artists are brand managers, and “as a brand manager… you can’t charge $3,000 for the front row and look your fan in the face. The problem is, scalpers and everyone else have done that,” he said.
“That artist gets to look every day on SeatGeek and StubHub and go, ‘Oh my God, some scalper’s making four grand a ticket, and I’m paying all the costs, me, the artist… Ninety percent of what they’re going to make in life is coming from the road, so it’s their financial business.”
Rapino said the challenge for artists and the live music business is to “find that line where [concerts are] accessible, [where] the fan feels connected to [the artist].”
Artists don’t feel they’re gouging their fans, but prices are going up “and that creates a lot of the social news and tension that exists… What is the right price [where] you can deliver supply and keep fans happy?”
Live Nation wouldn’t exist today if it hadn’t bought Ticketmaster
Not surprisingly, the US Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation and Ticketmaster came up during the conference.
Rapino and Live Nation have argued that their business isn’t a monopoly, pointing to the fact that Live Nation doesn’t enjoy the sort of large margins that a monopoly player can extract from the market, and the fact that Ticketmaster doesn’t set the prices for tickets.
But at the Bloomberg conference, Rapino made a unique argument for why Live Nation’s acquisition of Ticketmaster was a good business move: He suggested that, if Live Nation hadn’t made the move, it might not exist at all today.
Before buying Ticketmaster, Live Nation was a relatively small company, and “promoters didn’t talk about us. You wouldn’t even need to take my call,” Rapino said.
“If I didn’t buy Ticketmaster 12 or 13 years ago, and remained the middleman… I wouldn’t be here today.”
Michael Rapino, Live Nation
“When we started building, I said to the board, ‘Man, we’ve got to be direct-to-consumer,’” he said. If Live Nation remains a business-to-business enterprise, “we’re going to get screwed. The artists are going to take all the money and [so will] whoever knows the customer well…”
“If I didn’t buy Ticketmaster 12 or 13 years ago, and remained the middleman… I wouldn’t be here today. The business we would have been, it would have been over, because as a single-minded promoter, you couldn’t survive. You needed to build a business.
“We have 900 sponsors. I wouldn’t have 900 sponsors if I didn’t own the customer, own the data, understand the customer… So I’m proud of our path.”
Live Nation won’t be expanding into China anytime soon
In recent years, Live Nation has focused on expansion outside its home market of the United States, moving aggressively into Asia and Latin America, where the company has been building its own venues – due to what Live Nation’s execs say is a lack of appropriate venues for artists that creates a “white space” that the company can fill.
At the Bloomberg event, Rapino pointed to a number of markets that he sees as having above-average potential for Live Nation going forward – namely, Africa and India.
“We think Africa is going to be a big business,” he said.
And as for India? “We just sold out Lollapalooza in India for the first time in history. Three Coldplay stadiums in a second.”
“I don’t want to do China… They won’t let most artists in because they censor all the lyrics. Not a good business.”
Michael Rapino, Live Nation
He noted that in these developing markets, concert tickets are now selling at prices comparable to Western countries.
“It used to be [that] maybe you could play those markets, but you had to charge a lot less.” But now, “those stadiums are getting pretty much the same gross as Detroit… From Asia, Latin America, Middle East, demand is there from the consumer. Pricing is there.
“Other structures are not there… We talk about building because most of those countries all have soccer stadiums. They don’t have an NBA, an NHL team, so they probably don’t have arenas, and they don’t have any great venues. But that’s coming.”
And as for markets Rapino doesn’t want to enter?
“I don’t want to do China. That’s too hard,” he said. “They won’t let most artists in because they censor all the lyrics. Not a good business.”Music Business Worldwide