The concert behemoth in the backyard

Reconciling a global monopoly with a locally grown subsidiary is a challenge, and that’s understandable.

The federal Department of Justice is planning to file a new antitrust suit against Live Nation. The Wall Street Journal broke the story on April 15, but at the time wasn’t able to uncover any details about what specific claims the DOJ might make against the company, the world’s largest concert promoter and the parent company of Ticketmaster. Live Nation also owns a stake in Madison-based concert promoter Frank Productions/FPC Live, which dominates Madison’s touring-music landscape, operating the Sylvee, High Noon Saloon, the Majestic, and Orpheum, and booking concerts at Breese Stevens Field. FPC Live also operates venues in Charleston, South Carolina, and Columbia, Missouri, in addition to booking at the larger venues on Milwaukee’s Summerfest grounds.

Ticketmaster is easy to demonize as a big faceless evil, because it is a big shitty website that wants to take your money. When Ticketmaster screws up, it can anger massive and passionate fan bases, like those of Taylor Swift or Bruce Springsteen, in a snap. But if you live in Madison and pay any attention to shows, FPC has a lot of faces. A lot of people in FPC’s office or behind the bars at its venues are our neighbors and friends, often people who’ve spent a lot of years playing in bands, setting up DIY events, and/or attending a truly gobsmacking amount of shows because they love it. Like any problem, it’s messier up-close.

Earlier this month, Madison musician Kevin Willmott II announced his plans to open a new independent venue, Gamma Ray Bar, in the old Frequency spot on West Main Street. Andy Moore, reporting on the story for Tone Madison, pointed out the irony that Willmott will be drawing on his extensive experience doing all sorts of different work at FPC venues in addition to smaller bars and venues around town. That’s what people do in just about every industry: Learn the business while working at a larger company before striking out on their own. Something tells me Willmott would be a capable and well-liked person under just about any circumstances, but it’s certainly worth chewing over how the worlds of big corporate promoters and small venues can overlap. 

As the political and legal climate around Live Nation and Ticketmaster flares up once again on account of the big Taylor Swift presale going kablooey, it’s hard to miss a glaring political contrast. Politicians will talk a big game about the ills of Live Nation and Ticketmaster writ large, less so about the localities of Live Nation’s dominance. 

The disconnect matters, because you can’t understand (or break up) Live Nation’s monopoly without understanding its acquisitions of promoters and venues from Des Moines to Hong Kong to Chile to the Philippines to Los Angeles to South Africa to Spain to Salt Lake City. It’s continually growing and seeking out new markets, because that’s what a big multinational company does. The more of a foothold it has in concert markets of various sizes—and in other areas of the events business, like artist management, advertising, and ticketing—the more leverage it has to set terms and gouge people with fees. If calls to break up Live Nation ever came to anything, what would the resulting pieces look like? Maybe like Frank Productions before Live Nation bought in: A promoter with a big regional and national footprint in its own right, but not nearly big enough to put a stranglehold on an entire industry. 

When it comes to those Ticketmaster fees, Madison concertgoers are paying up along with the rest of the world. Take, for instance, Alvvays’ April 24 show at the Sylvee. The base price for one general-admission ticket was $30. The total at checkout came to $44.44. Of that, $2.19 was sales tax. Ticketmaster charged a “service fee” of $9.75 and an “order processing fee” of $2.50. Those fees add up to $12.25, or about 41 percent of the base ticket price. (As of this writing I haven’t decided what to do! I love this band. Fuck!) You can explain to me all day why this makes sense in the context of Live Nation’s business model. You can’t convince me that it’s not a rip-off. The fees aren’t that steep every single show, which just turns the checkout process into an incredibly irritating roll of the dice.

The big talking point in response to these concerns is usually: Madison still has a variety of independent music venues where local bands can play, so the FPC/Live Nation footprint isn’t a problem and people needn’t be concerned. This has always struck me as a bit of a straw man, and the overall tone of “relax, nothing will change” has always been condescending in the extreme. Even when things got heated, I haven’t heard many people in Madison flat-out predict that these changes would wipe all our small venues off the map. It certainly wasn’t the main concern people in the music community brought up during 2017, as Frank Productions consolidated with other promoters and venues and started building the Sylvee, or even in 2018, after Live Nation and Frank Productions announced their partnership. If you go back and read reporting from the time in local publications, the concerns local musicians and small venue owners brought up were more nuanced. In fact, quite a few of them had kind words for Frank Productions, or expressed optimism. 

When small Madison venues have closed up over the past seven years, it has largely come down to factors that would exist with or without Live Nation—rising commercial rents, the struggle to bring in enough ticket and drink sales, business partnerships breaking down, burnout from taking on a big challenge with finite resources. Even if you’ve cornered the market, it’s way better to operate venues in a town that has a lively mix of options. Sure, on a basic level, small venues might compete with large ones for people’s attention and dollars, but on a given night they are usually all catering to different audiences at different price points. It’s a niche world! And right now, FPC doesn’t have much competition in town when it comes to shows over a certain size. The smallest venue it books in Madison is the 400-capacity High Noon. An array of 100-capacity (give or take) venues, most of them focused on artists and genre niches that aren’t a huge priority for FPC, doesn’t fundamentally challenge the business model.

Let’s also remind ourselves where the baseline is. Things weren’t great for small venues or independent musicians in town before all this, and they aren’t now. Madison’s business and civic leaders are largely invested in the narrative that we have a “vibrant” music and arts scene, but don’t give a shit about putting real infrastructure behind it. They take it for granted that people will keep making music and art even under lousy conditions, all of it available as a sort of vague garnish for the city’s self-image. People are still seeking off-the-map spaces to play shows, because all of our venues small and large don’t add up to enough to meet their needs. 

A secondary talking point, when Madison concert-goers complain about fees, is that people can avoid most of Ticketmaster’s fees by getting their tickets at one of FPC Live’s in-person box offices. This is a particularly weak and disingenuous counter-argument from a company that trades on the convenience (such as it is) of the world’s largest online ticketing platform. The hours for said box offices are pretty limited, probably because it doesn’t make sense to staff them more than that. This also doesn’t really account for the needs of people who will be traveling long distances to catch a show. Which is why it makes sense for people to buy tickets online, and  why it’s annoying and unconscionable to charge exorbitant fees for buying a ticket online in the year 20-goddamn-24. 

Rather than ask whether Live Nation has brought about a cataclysm that no one really even claimed was coming, we could frame this conversation around all sorts of other questions. How much competition does it have for larger shows and in-demand touring artists? Has going to shows in town become more expensive? Are we really going to buy into the idea that the expanded footprint of a company with Live Nation’s record just doesn’t matter, or is purely beneficial? How does this all relate to gentrification? Should tickets for a concert at a public park be 1) expensive and 2) stratified into ridiculous VIP zones? What incentives do venues/promoters have to take chances with adventurous or lesser-known artists? Just a few places to start. Unpacking the impact of all these changes is a complicated, long-term thing. While we’re doing that, we should acknowledge the plus sides and the worst-case scenarios that didn’t come to pass. We can also acknowledge how this connects to larger problems, even when the local picture seems comparatively benign.

At the federal level, Congressional Democrats and Republicans alike, along with President Joe Biden’s Administration, are beating their chests about Live Nation’s monopolistic power and Ticketmaster’s infamous fees. The Senate Judiciary Committee hauled in Live Nation executives for a January 2023 hearing. Biden even secured some concessions from the company on fee transparency. Now, OK, don’t hold your breath for the DOJ to bring the company to heel. Decades of lawsuits, regulatory action, Congressional gas pains, and outcry from various corners of the music industry have not stopped Live Nation from continuing to grow. The last time we had a Democratic administration, it signed off on Live Nation’s 2010 merger with Ticketmaster. If you’d like a primer on the feds’ failures to rein in Live Nation since then, try starting with this January 2024 policy brief from the American Economic Liberties Project, an anti-monopoly think tank.

But at the state and local levels, elected officials have shown little appetite for criticizing the presence Live Nation has in Wisconsin, and in some cases have been supportive of its activities here. (Not a unique dynamic to Wisconsin or Madison, and Democratic politicians in Chicago have shown that it can get way more gross.) As FPC Live pursued plans to build two new venues in Milwaukee’s Deer District in 2022 (since whittled down to one), that city’s Democratic Mayor, Cavalier Johnson, voiced his support for the project and spoke at a press conference touting it. Milwaukee’s Common Council unanimously approved proposals for previous and current versions of the Deer District project. In Madison, FPC Live books several concerts per year at Breese Stevens Field, which is a City of Madison park that a private company operates under a contract with the city. When Democratic politicians need to throw an event in town, they sometimes end up at FPC Live venues—for instance, Bernie Sanders rallying voters at the Orpheum or Tammy Baldwin throwing a fundraiser concert at the Sylvee. 

When Democratic Governor Tony Evers’ administration disbursed $15 million in federal COVID-19 relief dollars to venues in late 2020, a lot of it went to FPC and other Live Nation subsidiaries, though the program soon followed up with a second round that provided more relief to small venues. And that was before FPC Live received $10 million through the federal Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG) program. The Washington Post reported in May 2022 that Live Nation subsidiaries received a total of $19 million from SVOG, despite efforts in Congress to keep Live Nation from getting that money. 

In all fairness, none of these state- or local-level officials have the authority to bust up a global conglomerate (that’s the job of federal regulators and judges, should they ever choose to do it), and the decisions they have to make are far messier than a referendum on Live Nation writ large. For someone in Cavalier Johnson’s position, it’s about economic development in a city that constantly gets short shrift from the legislature. For Milwaukee’s Common Council, it’s basically about zoning. (The opposition to the project in Milwaukee has also been a real mixed bag: Great local venues like the Cactus Club have made their case alongside absolutely wretched venues like The Rave, and NIMBY-ish groups have engaged in gross fearmongering about crime and noise.) For Madison’s electeds and parks officials, it’s about making better use of a space that’s undoubtedly better off with more concerts, a soccer team, and other events. For someone throwing a campaign rally, it’s about finding a space that works. For state agencies handing out COVID-19 relief dollars, it’s about shoring up jobs and livelihoods. Understandable! 

There has to be some room in the conversation for the big picture, for an understanding how our more localized decisions relate to the larger ill of one company having far too much power. What that looks like, I’m not exactly sure. It can’t come down to dire predictions, which I don’t think many people in Madison are even making. We just have to start acting like all of this has something to do with us.

Update: The initially published version of this article stated that FPC Live was the exclusive concert booker for Breese Stevens Field. This information came from the homepage of Frank Productions’ website (PDF capture from April 26). Conor Caloia, COO of Forward Madison FC, clarifies that “FPC Live is not the exclusive booking partner at Breese Stevens Field.“

Correction: The initially published version of this article stated that fees for an Alvvays ticket added up to $12.50. The correct figure is $12.25.