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      Madonna Hospitalized with Infection, Postpones ‘Celebration’ Tour

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      The 64-year-old pop icon was hospitalized for several days and remains under medical care, her agent said. A new start date for her tour has not been announced.Madonna was hospitalized for several days with a “serious bacterial infection,” forcing her to postpone her forthcoming “Celebration” tour, her manager said on Wednesday.The 64-year-old pop icon developed the infection on Saturday, leading to a stay in an intensive care unit, her manager, Guy Oseary, wrote on Instagram.“Her health is improving, however she is still under medical care,” he said. “A full recovery is expected.”Madonna’s world tour was set to begin on July 15 in Vancouver and to last seven months, highlighting songs from the past 40 years of her career.A new start date for her tour has not been announced.Madonna announced her tour, which would be her 12th, in January, with a five-minute black-and-white video that showed her speaking at a dinner party with a group of famous friends. Her conversation and party games made references to her some of her songs, like “S.E.X.” and “La Isla Bonita,” as well as her documentary and concert film “Truth or Dare.”“I am excited to explore as many songs as possible in hopes to give my fans the show they have been waiting for,” Madonna said in the video.Tickets for her “Celebration” shows in New York, London, Paris and Amsterdam sold out in minutes, according to Billboard.The tour, produced by Live Nation, was to span about 40 cities before concluding in Mexico City on Jan. 30, 2024.In North America, she had stops planned in Detroit, Chicago, New York, Miami and Los Angeles. In Europe, she was scheduled to perform in London, Barcelona, Paris and Stockholm.Caldwell Tidicue, a New York comedian better known as Bob the Drag Queen, was slated to appear as a guest on all dates of the tour.“The Celebration Tour will take us on Madonna’s artistic journey through four decades,” the tour announcement said.After announcing the tour, Madonna collaborated with the pop and R&B singer The Weeknd and rapper Playboi Carti on the single “Popular.” The collaboration brought her back to Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for the first time in years. More

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      Live Nation and Other Ticket Giants Promise Transparency on Fees

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      Live Nation and SeatGeek said they would show customers the full cost of concerts, after the White House’s complaints that “junk fees” for tickets and hotel stays can mislead consumers.Under pressure from the Biden administration, some of the biggest companies that handle ticketing for concerts and other live events announced on Thursday that they will make it easier for consumers to see the full price of tickets they want to buy, including the fees that can often add more than 30 percent to the total cost of an order.Live Nation, the world’s largest concert company, said it would begin introducing “all-in pricing” — showing consumers the full price up front — at the venues it controls, which include more than 200 amphitheaters, clubs and other spaces in the United States. Ticketmaster, which is owned by Live Nation, said it would make this tool available to other venues and promoters as well. Those changes are expected beginning in September.SeatGeek, a major vendor for reselling tickets that also works for major venues and sports teams like the Dallas Cowboys, said it too would begin introducing a feature that would reveal to consumers the full price of a ticket.Those changes come as the Biden administration has stepped up its pressure on the entertainment and travel industries to rein in what it calls “junk fees.” Before beginning a round table at the White House with executives from Live Nation, SeatGeek, Airbnb and other companies on Thursday, President Biden framed the crackdown on surcharges as a way to appeal to the working class — a major theme of his re-election campaign.“These hidden charges that companies sneak into your bill make you pay more without you really knowing it initially,” Mr. Biden said. “Junk fees are not a matter for the wealthy very much but they’re a matter for working folks like the homes I grew up in.”As Mr. Biden spoke, a screen showed an example of a “service charge” of $12.99. But for the most in-demand concerts, those fees can be many times higher. For one Drake concert, for example, a screenshot ricocheted around social media in March showing that for two tickets costing $544, three surcharges — service fee, facility charge and order fee — added another $541, nearly doubling the total cost.Ticketing, and questions of competition and consumer fairness in the entertainment industry, became hot-button issues in Washington after a botched presale in November for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. Ticketmaster’s system was overrun with bots, and many fans reported that tickets they had selected disappeared from their online shopping charts.At a Senate Judiciary hearing in January, Live Nation came under harsh, bipartisan attack, with senators openly calling the company a monopoly. The Justice Department has separately been investigating Live Nation for potential violations of the consent decree that was a condition of the company’s merger with Ticketmaster in 2010; among the terms in that agreement were that Live Nation cannot threaten venues with retaliation for not using Ticketmaster as their official ticket vendor.But the extent to which the most recent promises by Live Nation and SeatGeek would substantially change the ticket market are unclear. The concert industry is complex, with pricing and fees controlled by various parties that have little incentive to reduce their take — especially with live music rebounding after its near-disappearance during the Covid-19 pandemic, and ticket sales now reaching record highs.The changes by Live Nation and SeatGeek do not lower prices or include any commitment to reduce surcharges, which are often set by venues; those companies are simply promising to disclose fees as part of a ticket’s total cost.After Mr. Biden’s State of the Union address in February — at which he said, “We can stop service fees on tickets to concerts and sporting events and make companies disclose all the fees upfront” — Live Nation proposed federal legislation that, among other things, would mandate all-in pricing.Without all competitors held to the same standard, many executives in the ticketing world say, those that comply voluntarily would be put at a competitive disadvantage, since other venues and ticketing services could lure customers by advertising lower prices, only to reveal surcharges once a customer completes a transaction.Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat of Connecticut who is a sponsor of a bill called the Junk Fee Prevention Act, offered a mixed review of Live Nation’s pledge of transparency.“Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s announcement is a step in the right direction,” Mr. Blumenthal said in a statement, “but no substitute for legislation to provide consumers with transparency and prevent companies from imposing ridiculous junk fees.”Still, Mr. Biden said that all the companies he had gathered for the round table were “voluntarily committed to ‘all-in’ upfront pricing,” and he called it a victory.“This is a win for consumers in my view,” Mr. Biden said, “and proof that our crackdown on junk fees has real momentum.” More

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      The Cure Says Ticketmaster Will Issue Refunds After Fee Complaints

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      The band said it wanted to make its North American tour “affordable for all,” but after tickets went on sale this week, fans said that fees had ratcheted up the price.The Cure’s frontman, Robert Smith, said on Thursday that Ticketmaster will provide $5 and $10 refunds to fans who purchased tickets for the band’s North American tour after the band complained to the company about high fees.In recent months, Ticketmaster faced increased criticism from ticket buyers as well as from members of Congress who accused its owner, Live Nation Entertainment, of being a monopoly that hinders competition and harms fans.Mr. Smith said on Twitter that Ticketmaster would provide the refunds. “Ticketmaster have agreed with us that many of the fees being charged are unduly high,” he wrote.1 OF 2: AFTER FURTHER CONVERSATION, TICKETMASTER HAVE AGREED WITH US THAT MANY OF THE FEES BEING CHARGED ARE UNDULY HIGH, AND AS A GESTURE OF GOODWILL HAVE OFFERED A $10 PER TICKET REFUND TO ALL VERIFIED FAN ACCOUNTS FOR LOWEST TICKET PRICE (‘LTP’) TRANSACTIONS…— ROBERT SMITH (@RobertSmith) March 16, 2023
      Ticketmaster did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Smith said that people who had purchased the lowest-priced tickets would automatically receive a $10 refund per ticket and that all other ticket buyers would get a $5 refund. He said that these refunds applied to people who had purchased tickets as a “verified fan,” a Ticketmaster system that requires people to register to gain early access to ticket sales.Fans who buy tickets during the general sale on Friday will “incur lower fees,” he said.This week on Twitter, Mr. Smith addressed questions and concerns from fans about buying tickets for the 30-show tour, which runs from May to July and includes three performances at Madison Square Garden in New York in June.The Cure had said in an earlier statement that it wanted tickets “to be affordable for all fans.” As part of this effort, Mr. Smith said that the Cure had refused to participate in Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing system, which adjusts ticket prices based on demand.The system was criticized last year after it drove up the cost for Bruce Springsteen tickets, some of which were selling for thousands of dollars.After tickets for the Cure’s tour went on sale on Wednesday, fans shared screenshots that showed tickets priced at $20 with added fees close to or above the $20 base price.Mr. Smith said on Twitter later that day that he was “sickened” by Ticketmaster’s fees.“I have been asking how they are justified,” he wrote in all capital letters, his usual Twitter writing style. “If I get anything coherent by way of an answer I will let you all know.”Ticketmaster and Live Nation Entertainment have been under increased scrutiny since November, when the company botched its planned public sale of tickets to Taylor Swift’s latest tour.In November, the Justice Department opened an antitrust investigation into Live Nation Entertainment focused on whether it had abused its power over the live music industry.In December, 26 of Ms. Swift’s fans filed a lawsuit accusing Live Nation Entertainment of anticompetitive conduct and fraud.In January, the company was the subject of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in which senators from both parties criticized the company’s handling of ticket sales for Ms. Swift’s tour as well as its wider business practices.Last month, on the same day Live Nation Entertainment announced it had made $651.3 million in ticket revenue in the fourth quarter of 2022, the company responded to politicians in a statement.The company, which sold more than 550 million tickets last year, said it had submitted more than 35 pages of information to policymakers to provide context on the “realities of the industry” that it has dominated since Ticketmaster and Live Nation, an events promoter and venue operator, merged in 2010.“These include the fact that this industry is more competitive than ever: Ticketmaster has actually lost market share since the 2010 merger, not gained it; that venues set and keep most of the fees associated with tickets and are increasingly taking an ever-larger share; and Ticketmaster has for years been advocating for a federal all-in pricing requirement,” the statement said.Ticketmaster and Live Nation Entertainment have for decades been criticized for their business practices. The Justice Department said in 2019 that Live Nation Entertainment had “repeatedly violated” the terms of the regulatory agreement that the government imposed as a condition of the merger.The Justice Department investigated complaints of anti-competitive practices by Ticketmaster in the 1990s, after a dispute with the Seattle grunge band Pearl Jam. More

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      How Far Are Beyoncé Fans Traveling for the Renaissance Tour?

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      Members of the BeyHive are going to extraordinary lengths — some of them trans-Atlantic — to ensure they don’t miss the superstar on her coming world tour.How far would you go to see the winningest artist in Grammy history? Is it more or less than 5,800 miles?For Janny Nascimento, a 29-year-old English teacher in Brazil, missing Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour — the singer’s first solo tour since 2016 — was not an option. So she plunked down 850 euros, or about $900, for a pair of tickets to see her favorite artist on June 24 in Frankfurt, Germany.“I would do it again if I had to because this is the dream come true,” Ms. Nascimento said from her apartment in Campos dos Goytacazes, a town four hours northeast of Rio de Janeiro. Though she has never before traveled outside Brazil, “now I’m going through two continents to a place that I have never been to, a country where I don’t even speak the language,” she said.The announcement of the tour on Instagram last week immediately touched off a frenzy for tickets, with fans losing their minds with presale (and resale) anxieties. Chances to snag tickets before they went on sale to the general public were offered to members of Beyoncé’s official fan club and holders of certain credit cards through exclusive presale drops.But early in the registration process, Ticketmaster issued an ominous warning that “demand already exceeds the number of tickets available by more than 800 percent” in several cities, prompting some worried fans to consider an unlikely option: If I’m determined not to miss this tour, is it possible that the rational thing to do is cross an ocean for a concert?Bre Harper, 27, a creative partnerships manager at Spotify who lives in Los Angeles, realized her chances of getting tickets to a North American stop on the tour were slim to none.“I, with the rest of the internet, went on Ticketmaster, where you have to be verified as a fan,” Ms. Harper said, referring to restrictions on sales for U.S. tour dates.Ticketmaster Under ScrutinyThe ticketing giant has come under fire after it botched the rollout of tickets to Taylor Swift’s tour last year — a failure the company blamed on bots.Unhappy Customers: Fiascos involving Swift and Bad Bunny have made Ticketmaster the object of a significant amount of public discontent.Senate Hearing: Live Nation, the owner of Ticketmaster, came under attack from lawmakers in both parties, who called the company a monopoly while quoting lyrics from songs by Ms. Swift.Biden’s Proposal: Days after the Senate hearing, President Biden called for limits to be placed on the fees that companies like Ticketmaster can be charged for tickets to live entertainment.Under Investigation: The Justice Department is said to have opened an antitrust investigation into Live Nation, which predates the latest debacles.“I did not make a Verified Fan account with Ticketmaster,” she added. “I just have a regular account. I didn’t feel like fiddling with the whole Verified Fan thing.”While scrolling on TikTok, Ms. Harper learned that she did not have to be verified to buy tickets to the European leg of the tour. She also noticed that tickets for European dates were often hundreds of dollars cheaper than comparable tickets in the United States, she said. When she asked her boyfriend if he would be willing to travel with her, he said yes.The only European city she could find with tickets available in the “Club Renaissance” standing section was Warsaw, Poland. Ms. Harper, who said she believed the 40-city tour could be the artist’s last, bought a pair of $475 tickets as quickly as she could.“She now has a life, a family,” Ms. Harper said. “I think this is going to be her last hurrah and I didn’t want to miss it.”Tickets to the tour, which is in support of Beyoncé’s seventh solo studio album, “Renaissance,” went on sale to members of the BeyHive fan club on Monday. Ticketmaster’s decision to require Verified Fan registration reflects one of the company’s most muscular attempts yet to thwart bots and stop scalpers from buying tickets and reselling them at absurd markups.Late last year, Ticketmaster was forced to cancel a planned general release of tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour after an overheated presale period ended in chaos. Ms. Swift’s fans complained that tickets were being sold at preposterous markups of up to tens of thousands of dollars on sites like StubHub.The Justice Department has opened an antitrust investigation into Live Nation Entertainment, which owns Ticketmaster. Last month, during a nearly three-hour Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, politicians painted the concert giant as a monopoly that hinders competition and harms consumers. Shortly after the announcement of the Renaissance World Tour, the Senate Judiciary Committee issued an ominous warning to Ticketmaster on Twitter.Ticketmaster, whose parent company’s president has acknowledged problems with the presale for Ms. Swift’s tour, did not immediately respond to questions on Friday.The tour is scheduled to begin on May 10 in Stockholm, cutting a path across Europe through June before heading to North America in July.Ms. Harper, a self-described military brat, said she had traveled through Europe extensively, but she had never been to Poland.“It’s not that frightening to me,” Ms. Harper said. “You only live once — let’s go!”Ms. Harper, who posted on Twitter about acquiring her tickets, said that, as a Black woman, she was nervous about only one thing.“I had a lot of people comment or quote my tweet and tell me that there are some racial issues in Poland currently,” she said. “That’s probably the only thing that I’m just a tad bit nervous about.”“But the BeyHive is so supportive,” she added, referring to the superstar’s legion of fans. “There are so many folks that are in my DMs saying that they live or they have relatives in Poland. They are already offering to help me with places to go, eat, and how to navigate the metro.”After she missed an opportunity to see Beyoncé in Rio de Janeiro in 2013, Ms. Nascimento was resolved not to let another chance go by. Although she doesn’t have a passport yet, she has already taken a photo for it.“I’m still struggling, looking at the credit card receipt,” Ms. Nascimento said. “I would do it again if I had to,” she added wistfully.“This is inspired by the album,” Ms. Nascimento said, her pink box braids pulled away from her face. “When ‘Break My Soul’ came out, I was in a very dark place in my life,” she said, “and it was like Beyoncé wrote this thinking about me.”“She knows that I’m struggling, she knows what’s going on,” Ms. Nascimento added. “She was like, release your job, release your mind, you know, let down your hair.” More

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      Ticketmaster Called a ‘Monopoly’ at Senate Hearing Over Taylor Swift Debacle

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      The Judiciary Committee, responding to the bungled sale of Taylor Swift concert tickets, heard the company apologize and its critics trace the problem to the industry’s lack of competition.Live Nation Entertainment, the concert industry giant that owns Ticketmaster, came under withering attack during a Senate Judiciary hearing on Tuesday, with committee members from both parties criticizing it for the botched sale of tickets to Taylor Swift’s latest tour and calling the company a monopoly that hinders competition and harms consumers.Over nearly three hours, senators pilloried a top Live Nation executive, Joe Berchtold, over the handling of Ms. Swift’s tickets last November and over longstanding allegations that the company badgers its competitors to win new business. Such bullying would be a violation of a Justice Department agreement that set conditions on the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster in 2010.“This is all the definition of monopoly,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota. “Live Nation is so powerful that it doesn’t even need to exert pressure. It doesn’t need to threaten. Because people just fall in line.”Some at the hearing went so far as to question whether the two companies, whose agreement with the Justice Department expires in 2025, should be broken up.Mr. Berchtold, Live Nation’s president and chief financial officer, acknowledged the problems with a presale for Ms. Swift’s tour, and apologized to the singer and her fans. When those tickets went on sale, millions of people were turned away. Technical problems also caused tickets to disappear from the online baskets of customers — whom Ticketmaster had approved through its Verified Fan system — as they were trying to buy them.At the hearing, both Republican and Democratic senators expressed concern about Live Nation’s dominance in the ticketing industry. Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMr. Berchtold largely attributed Ticketmaster’s failings to an assault from online bots: automated programs, run by scalpers, that seek to snatch up tickets before they ever make their way to consumers. That drew a largely skeptical response from the senators.“This is unbelievable,” Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, said, with more than a hint of anger in her voice. “Why is it,” she added, “that you have not developed an algorithm to sort out what is a bot and what is a consumer?”Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, was even more blunt. “The way your company handled the ticket sales with Ms. Swift,” he said, “was a debacle.”The merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster united the world’s most powerful concert promoter and the biggest ticketing platform, creating a colossus without equal in the multibillion-dollar live music business.In 2019, the last full year unaffected by the Covid-19 pandemic for which Live Nation has reported data, the company put on more than 40,000 events around the world and sold 485 million tickets. It owns or otherwise controls more than 300 venues around the world, far more than any other player in the business.In part because of its bulk and global reach, Live Nation has long been the target of complaints from competitors, who contend that the company’s size, and its control of Ticketmaster, give it an unfair advantage.Jerry Mickelson, a longtime independent concert promoter in Chicago, told the senators that a common frustration among the market’s smaller players is that Live Nation can profit from concerts put on by rival promoters because it still makes money through its control of Ticketmaster. “Pepsi doesn’t earn money from Coke,” he said. “But our competitor, Live Nation, makes money from selling tickets to our concerts.”Objections to Live Nation’s business have grown louder since 2019, when the Justice Department said that the company had “repeatedly violated” the terms of its regulatory agreement, called a consent decree.Justice Department investigators said that Live Nation had threatened venues that it would withhold tours under the company’s control if those venues did not sign deals with Ticketmaster, in violation of a key provision in the decree. Live Nation did not admit any wrongdoing, but in early 2020 the Justice Department extended the decree by five years.Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, was among those at the hearing who raised the question of whether Live Nation’s merger with Ticketmaster should be undone.“If the Department of Justice establishes violations of the consent decree,” he said, “then unwinding the merger ought to be on the table.”Mr. Berchtold pushed back against many of the accusations, saying that Live Nation does not threaten venues; that those venues hold a great deal of leverage in negotiating ticketing contracts; and that new entrants like SeatGeek, a rival ticketing platform, have kept Ticketmaster on its toes. According to various estimates cited by the senators, Ticketmaster controls the ticketing at 70 to 80 percent of major concert venues in the United States. Mr. Berchtold said Live Nation’s estimate is 50 to 60 percent and he attributed its market share to the quality of its product.A small number of people demonstrated outside the Senate office building during the hearing, some holding signs referencing the Taylor Swift ticket debacle. Kenny Holston/The New York Times“We believe ticketing has never been more competitive,” he said.At the hearing, called “That’s the Ticket: Promoting Competition and Protecting Consumers in Live Entertainment,” witnesses included other players in the concert business who described great difficulties competing against Live Nation.Jack Groetzinger, the chief executive of SeatGeek, said that venues are afraid of losing Live Nation concert tours if they do not sign with Ticketmaster. He said that is an obstacle for smaller companies like his in winning new business — though SeatGeek has been one of the more successful upstarts in ticketing in recent years, signing major clients like the Dallas Cowboys and Jujamcyn Theaters, one of the major Broadway theater owners.The panel also included a musician, Clyde Lawrence, of a small New York band called Lawrence. Dressed in a black suit, and with a scruffy head of hair, he joked that he could only dream of the crushing ticket demand enjoyed by Ms. Swift. But he described frustrations in dealing with Live Nation, such as the backstage costs it charges musicians, and the opacity of ticket surcharges, for which his band gets nothing.He described a typical show, where the face value of the ticket was $30, plus $12 in fees. Yet out of that $42 paid by the consumer, $30 was eaten up by the venue, Live Nation and Ticketmaster, and another $6 went to the band’s touring expenses. “So that leaves us with $6 for an eight-piece band, pretax,” he said, “and we also have to pay our own health insurance.”In his questioning, Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, honed in on a facet of Ticketmaster’s business, the resale marketplace that exists seamlessly within its online ticket sales platform, “where you’re forcing everyone in the resale market to come into your ecosystem.”“This is how monopolies work,” Mr. Hawley added. “You leverage market power in one market to get market power in another market — and it looks like you’re doing that in, frankly, multiple markets.”Ms. Klobuchar, who called the hearing, said in a summation that some of the problems in ticketing, such as fighting bot traffic, could be dealt with through legislation. But she said that the larger question, of whether to take action against Live Nation as a monopoly, was best handled by the Justice Department. The near-unanimous criticism from lawmakers on Tuesday may put pressure on the Justice Department to act.The most remarkable aspect of the hearing may have been the display of consensus by a panel often split along partisan lines. Mr. Blumenthal summed that up with a mocking salute to Mr. Berchtold.“I want to congratulate and thank you for an absolutely stunning achievement,” he said. “You have brought together Republicans and Democrats in an absolutely unified cause.” More

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      Live Nation President Says Bot Attack Led to Taylor Swift Fiasco

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      Joe Berchtold, the president and chief financial officer of Live Nation Entertainment, used his testimony to dispute many of the central complaints that are commonly made against his company: that Live Nation does not face meaningful competition; that it squeezes too much money from venues and concertgoers, and that its size and dominance insulate it from the need to make technological innovations.In his testimony to the committee, Mr. Berchtold acknowledged problems with the Taylor Swift ticket sale. “In hindsight there are several things we could have done better,” he said. Mr. Berchtold argued that the biggest problem it faced with the Taylor Swift tour was an onslaught of bots that crowded out real fans and attacked Ticketmaster’s servers, forcing the company to pause its sales. “This is what led to a terrible consumer experience, which we deeply regret,” he said.Jerry Mickelson, chief executive officer of Jam Productions, responded to Mr. Berchtold’s assertion. “For the leading ticket company not to be able to handle bots is, for me, an unbelievable statement. You can’t blame bots for what happened to Taylor Swift, there’s more to that story that you’re not hearing,” he testified later. As to the larger questions of competition in the ticketing marketplace, Mr. Berchtold argued that it was greater than ever, and said that Ticketmaster had to fight to retain its business. While Ticketmaster had an estimated 80 percent of major concert venues at the time of its 2010 merger with Live Nation, the company has lost market share since then, Mr. Berchtold said. In the past, Live Nation has been accused — including by the Justice Department — of using the leverage of its control of concert tours to coerce venues to sign with Ticketmaster.“We hear people say that the ticketing markets are less competitive today than they were at the time of the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger,” Mr. Berchtold said. “That’s simply not true.”  He pointed to SeatGeek, Eventbrite and other players in the field, as well as to a robust resale market.In his testimony, Mr. Berchtold rebutted complaints that Ticketmaster had failed to upgrade its systems by saying that the company had invested over $1 billion to improve its technology.He also suggested that the biggest problems facing ticketing, like bots and scalping, were best tackled by Congress itself. “There are problems in the ticketing industry — problems that we believe can and should be addressed through legislation,” Mr. Berchtold said. More

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      Barclays Center Drops SeatGeek and Returns to Ticketmaster

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      The Brooklyn venue replaced Ticketmaster, the industry leader, in 2021 in favor of SeatGeek, a competitor. It is not clear why it changed direction again.In 2021, Barclays Center in Brooklyn made a surprising announcement about its business: After nearly a decade with Ticketmaster, the industry leader, as its ticketing vendor, the arena was switching to SeatGeek, an aggressive upstart.Now, barely a year into what had been a seven-year contract, BSE Global, the parent company of Barclays — the home of the Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty basketball teams, and a destination for major concert tours — is canceling its partnership with SeatGeek and returning to Ticketmaster.The change was revealed on Friday when Barclays announced a concert by the singer and producer Jackson Wang on May 11 with a link to Ticketmaster. SeatGeek, which remains the ticketer for many events already on Barclays’s calendar, will gradually be replaced by Ticketmaster in coming months as new concerts and sporting events go on sale.The abrupt switch, at a high-profile venue in one of the biggest markets in the world, is head-spinning news in the lucrative ticketing business, where Ticketmaster’s dominance has long been a matter of debate and scrutiny.“It’s very rare for such a cancellation,” said Larry Miller, the director of the music business program at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.“Ticketing platform deals with venue owners are not of short duration,” Mr. Miller added. “I can’t think of a time over the last decade where a major venue has dropped a ticketing platform early on in the deal cycle.”The reasons for the change at Barclays were not immediately clear. Neither BSE Global nor SeatGeek would comment about whether there were any problems with ticketing that may have prompted a switch.In a statement, a spokeswoman for BSE Global said that SeatGeek “provided our fans with a first-class game day ticketing experience, and we’re appreciative of the time and energy they put into our work together.”The president of SeatGeek, Danielle du Toit, expressed no upset at Barclays’ change of direction. “It’s never easy to part ways with a client,” she said in a statement, “but as we look to the future, SeatGeek is grounded in our strategy and road map that are geared towards solving the challenges that plague the live entertainment experience.”Since its founding in 2009, SeatGeek has positioned itself as an industry disrupter. Initially just a resale platform, it has sought to challenge Ticketmaster’s dominance in the so-called primary market — sales directly from a venue’s box office, on behalf of sports teams or performing artists. When BSE Global announced its SeatGeek deal, which took effect in October 2021, the venue company praised its new partner’s “best-in-class mobile platform.”SeatGeek’s clients include major sports franchises like the Dallas Cowboys and the New Orleans Saints, as well as Jujamcyn Theaters, one of Broadway’s major theater owners.But SeatGeek, and other ticketing companies, all still lag far behind Ticketmaster, which sold 485 million tickets in 2019, the last year of business unaffected by the Covid-19 pandemic, an amount that swamps its competitors. Regulators have been monitoring Ticketmaster’s market share since it merged in 2010 with the concert giant Live Nation in a deal that critics suggested would damage competition in the ticketing industry, a consequence that Live Nation has denied.As a condition for its approval of the merger, the Justice Department entered into a regulatory agreement with Live Nation that, among other things, prohibited it from retaliating against venues that do not sign with Ticketmaster by withholding shows it controlled. The agreement, known as a consent decree, was extended by five years in 2020 after federal regulators found that Live Nation had “repeatedly” violated it. At the time, Live Nation did not admit to any wrongdoing, and said that extending the decree was “the best outcome for our business, clients and shareholders.”In an interview, Joe Berchtold, the president of Live Nation, acknowledged that the company is always under scrutiny for its actions in the marketplace. In recent weeks, for example, lawmakers have expressed concern over Ticketmaster’s botched ticket sale for Taylor Swift’s latest tour, and the company was widely condemned for its mishandling of a Bad Bunny concert in Mexico City.But Mr. Berchtold was unequivocal in stating that the company did not break any of its regulatory guidelines with Barclays Center.“I can absolutely confirm,” he said, “that there was no retaliation at Barclays for not using Ticketmaster, in terms of the routing of any concerts.”Tracking the blips and dips in tour dates for concert venues can be an inexact science. But data from Pollstar, a trade publication that covers the live music business, shows that Barclays Center received 13 Live Nation-promoted tours in the year after SeatGeek took over the venue’s ticketing business — a drop for Barclays, which in the years before the pandemic had tended to get about two dozen Live Nation events annually.However during the same period, from 2016 through 2019, the data also indicates the venue hosted fewer shows from independent promoters — those not associated with Live Nation or its major competitor, AEG Presents — from an average of more than 50 a year to less than 20 in the year after SeatGeek took over.SeatGeek and BSE Global declined to comment on the data.Barclays Center competes with Madison Square Garden, as well as the Prudential Center in Newark and the new UBS Arena in Elmont, N.Y., for major concert tours to fill out its schedule. Since 2019, BSE Global has been owned by Joseph Tsai, a Taiwanese-born tech billionaire, who bought out its previous owner, the Russian mogul Mikhail Prokhorov. More

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      Taylor Swift Fans Sue Ticketmaster’s Parent Company

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      In a lawsuit filed on Friday in a California court, a group of 26 fans said Ticketmaster had engaged in anticompetitive conduct.A group of 26 fans of the singer-songwriter Taylor Swift filed a lawsuit on Friday accusing Ticketmaster’s parent company of anticompetitive conduct and fraud several weeks after a chaotic, glitch-filled sale of tickets for Ms. Swift’s upcoming tour left thousands of eager fans empty-handed and unhappy.The 33-page complaint, filed in the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles County, came after Ticketmaster canceled the public sale of tickets last month for Ms. Swift’s Eras Tour, 52 shows scheduled to begin in March. The resulting outcry from fans prompted calls from lawmakers to break up the 2010 merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation.The complaint accuses Ticketmaster of anticompetitive conduct, saying the company has long perpetuated a “scheme” by forcing fans to exclusively use it for presale and sale prices, which are higher than what a competitive market price would be.Ticketmaster also “forced attendees to exclusively use” the platform that it operates for the resale of tickets, called the Secondary Ticket Exchange, to obtain fees and profits above what it could earn in a competitive market, the complaint states. That “anticompetitive behavior,” according to the lawsuit, harms fans and the ticket market.Fans who tried to buy tickets during a presale in mid-November reported waiting in queues for hours or being locked out of online sales. They had to preregister on Ticketmaster and be designated Verified Fans, but, for many, that didn’t help. Ticketmaster ultimately canceled its planned public sale of tickets amid the high demand.The Cultural Impact of Taylor Swift’s MusicNew LP: “Midnights,” Taylor Swift’s 10th studio album, is a return to the pop pipeline, with production from her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff. Here is what our critic thought of it.Millennial Anti-Hero: On her latest album, Swift probes the realizations and reckonings of many 30-something women around relationships, motherhood and ambition.Fight for Her Masters: Revisit the origin story of Swift’s rerecordings of her older albums: a feud with the powerful manager Scooter Braun.Pandemic Records: In 2020, Swift released two new albums, “Folklore” and “Evermore.” In debuting a new sound, she turned to indie music.“Hundreds of thousands of people waited from four to eight hours and never got an opportunity to buy tickets, so they just want the system to change,” said Jennifer Kinder, a lawyer representing the fans.The lawsuit asks the court to stop Ticketmaster from engaging in similar conduct in the future and to fine the company $2,500 for each violation of a state code that governs unfair competition in California, where the parent company, Live Nation, is based.Even before the botched sale of Taylor Swift tickets, Live Nation, Ticketmaster’s parent company, had come under scrutiny for its power.Justin Lane/EPA, via Shutterstock“It has to be made fair,” said Ms. Kinder, who added that she and her 11-year-old daughter were Swift fans. “This is not a fair market. This is not supply and demand. This is a manipulated market that benefits Ticketmaster.”In 2010, Ticketmaster, a ticketing giant, merged with Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promotion company, becoming Live Nation Entertainment. The company, which says it processes 500 million tickets per year in more than 30 countries, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.Greg Maffei, the chairman of Live Nation Entertainment, said in an interview on CNBC last month that the company “could’ve filled 900 stadiums,” and he partly blamed Swift’s popularity for the problems. “The reality is, Taylor Swift hasn’t been on the road for three or four years, and that’s caused a huge issue,” he said.Ticketmaster apologized in November to Swift fans for the problems with its ticket sales for the Eras Tour.It said that more than two million tickets for the tour were sold on Nov. 15, the most for an artist in a single day. Ticketmaster said it had faced a “staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have codes” to buy tickets, resulting in 3.5 billion system requests, four times its previous peak.Even before the botched sale of the Swift concert tickets, Live Nation had come under scrutiny for its power and size. The Justice Department has in recent months been investigating its practices and whether the company maintains a monopoly over the multibillion-dollar live music industry, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.Ms. Swift called the situation “excruciating” in a sharply worded statement on Instagram last month that did not name Ticketmaster.Ms. Swift wrote that she was “extremely protective” of her fans and had brought “so many elements” of her career in house in order to improve fan experiences “by doing it myself with my team who care as much about my fans as I do.”“It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse,” Ms. Swift added. “There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets and I’m trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward. I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could.” More