John Oliver skewers Ticketmaster and Bob Lefsetz agrees [VIDEO]

“What kind of crazy, fucked-up world do we live in where John Oliver gets the Ticketmaster story exactly right,” industry pundit Bob Lefsetz wrote after watching comedian and HBO host John Oliver take on Ticketmaster and Live Nation in great detail.

“TICKETMASTER IS A FRONT FOR THE ACTS!” wrote Lefsetz echoing Oliver’s commentary. “That’s right, your favorite act is most probably a greedy capitalist whilst telling you they are not.”

“And it’s this way,” he continued, “BECAUSE THIS IS HOW THE BUSINESS WANTS IT! Entirely opaque, with Ticketmaster taking the heat instead of the acts.”

Lefsetz and Oliver both also went after ticket resellers who sometimes obtain tickets using fake accounts and other questionable practices and mark them up to whatever the market will bear – often many times face value.

“Their whole system is designed to be opaque especially when it comes to brokers selling tickets because all the
resale sites including Ticketmaster actively choose to provide anonymity to them,” said Oliver. “So when you buy a ticket on the secondary market there is no way to know the identity of who you’re buying from whether it is a fan whose babysitter just canceled or a broker who might have 500 other tickets on sale for that same event.”

Watch the full segment:

Bruce Houghton is Founder and Editor of Hypebot and MusicThinkTank and serves as a Senior Advisor to Bandsintown which acquired both publications in 2019. He is the Founder and President of the Skyline Artists Agency and a professor for the Berklee College Of Music.