Live Nation’s leadership team has noticed a noticeable difference between sports fans and music fans when it comes to purchasing tickets and the CEO Michael Rapino neatly summarized this in the company’s third-quarter earnings call.

“We’re always a little amused that sports is some kind of badge of honor — how expensive those tickets (are) — but music, which is much lower priced than sports, seems to get more of an emotional response,” Rapino told analysts. Monday (November 11).

That price difference has been around for a while. Courtside tickets for an LA Lakers game are running between $200 And $600 each, while about three-quarters of the concert tickets Ticketmaster sells go for less $100according to a comment Rapino made on a Goldman Sachs conference earlier this year.

Yet it was generally music audiences who complained about prices, with Ticketmaster feeling the backlash, as in the case of expensive tickets for Bruce Springsteen’s 2023 tour, or, more recently, complaints about rising ticket prices for Oasis’ tour in 2025 in Great Britain. .

Fans angry to see Oasis ticket prices rise in real time – the result of Ticketmaster’s ‘dynamic pricing model’, which responds to demand – criticized the ticket company online, prompting an investigation into dynamic pricing by the UK Competition and Markets Authority.

“We’re always a little amused that sports is some kind of badge of honor – how expensive those tickets (are) – but music, which is much lower priced than sports, seems to get more of an emotional response.”

Michael Rapino, Live Nation

Apparently stung by the criticism, Oasis announced that they would not be using dynamic pricing in sales for the North American leg of their tour.

Live Nation has argued in the past that dynamic pricing is a way to intervene in the secondary ticket market (i.e., scalpers and resellers) who take advantage of high demand for shows without actually investing anything in making those shows happen.

Rapino has previously argued that dynamic pricing allows artists to capture a greater share of revenue from fans willing to pay, rather than letting that money go to secondary sellers.

During the earnings call Monday, Rapino reiterated Live Nation’s hopes for stricter regulation of the secondary ticket market, especially as “America appears to be a market where secondary tickets can run freely.”

Rapino said he would like to see stricter regulation of the bots used by resellers to buy large numbers of tickets from regular consumers, as well as speculative selling — the practice of secondary sellers offering tickets that they have yet to purchase themselves.

“We hope that over time there will be better regulations to help consumers,” Rapino said.

Rapino’s comments came as the company reported stronger-than-expected earnings for the quarter ended September 30. $1.66 per share, compared to Wall Street estimates of $1.59.

However, the company’s revenue took a hit during the quarter and fell 6% annually Unpleasant $7.65 billion. That was largely due to weakness in stadiums this summer, an issue Live Nation had noted in previous earnings calls. The company says it is on track for another strong stadium year in 2025, which Live Nation expects will look more like 2023, the year of blockbuster tours from Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteenand others.

Here are three other things we learned on Live Nation’s latest earnings call:

1. Live Nation is ‘hopeful’ about its antitrust fight under the Trump administration

Live Nation is “hopeful” that the incoming Trump administration will go easier on the company in its ongoing battle against a government antitrust lawsuit.

The U.S. Department of Justice sued Live Nation last May for “monopolization and other unlawful conduct anticompetitive in the live entertainment industry markets.” The DoJ is seeking a split of Live Nation and its ticketing division, Ticketmaster. The attorneys general of 39 US states and the District of Columbia have joined the lawsuit.

When Asked By Analyst If A Donald Trump Presidency ‘Will Be A Very Good Thing For You,’ Says Live Nation President And Chief Financial Officer Joe Berchtold said the company is “hesitant” to say much on the matter as “it is still very early in the transition process.”

Still, the company is “hopeful that we will see a return to the more traditional antitrust approach, where agencies have generally tried to find ways to solve the problems they encounter with targeted solutions that minimize government intervention in the marketplace.”

“Targeted solutions” are generally solutions to anti-competitive practices that fail to break up a company. Such a targeted solution was introduced in 2010 as a condition for government approval of Live Nation’s acquisition of Ticketmaster.

It prohibited Live Nation from doing things such as “retaliating” against concert venues for using other ticketing companies, or threatening venues. That agreement was set to expire in 2020, but was extended for another five years after the DoJ concluded that Live Nation had violated certain aspects of the agreement.

This year’s lawsuit goes much further and asks a federal court to order Live Nation to divest itself of Ticketmaster, a move that Live Nation strongly opposed even before the lawsuit. The company has repeatedly argued that the issues that are frustrating consumers and policymakers are out of Ticketmaster’s hands. The company has said, among other things, that prices are determined by artists and sports teams, and not by Ticketmaster.

The lawsuit “accuses Live Nation and Ticketmaster of high service fees, but ignores that Ticketmaster only keeps a modest portion of those fees. In fact, primary ticket sales are among the least expensive digital distributions in the economy,” Live Nation said in response to the lawsuit.

During the company’s Q3 call on Monday (Nov. 11), Berchtold said the lawsuit reflects a “much more interventionist philosophy today than you would expect from a Republican administration.”

He added that Live Nation will be ready to engage with the new government as soon as the government itself is ready.

“They have to get through the agreements and get things to a successful conclusion, but we are certainly hopeful that we can start discussions with them early next year,” Berchtold said.

2. Live Nation predicts that 20% of concert capacity will ultimately go to superfans

Many music companies are talking the talk these days when it comes to better monetizing superfans, but Live Nation claims the company has been walking in the same vein for a long time.

“We’ve been selling to the superfan for a while,” Rapino said, noting that at Live Nation, this segment of customers willing to pay for a better experience is called “the premium fan.”

“That’s kind of an ongoing skill set that we’ve always had,” Rapino said.

And he believes much more can be done to expand superfans’ market share in live events. He noted that many of the renovations at Live Nation-owned venues include an increase in the proportion of VIP seating. Rapino believes he can grow the premium segment of concert tickets 20% of all sales.

“We always sell from the boxes, first from the premium stock. We never have a problem selling that,” he says.

“That’s a big part of our CapEx and our (site renovation) and our new buildings as we build them. We’re starting with this mandate that they have a certain higher percentage of premium seats, lounges and experiences. These locations therefore start with a much better return.”

3. ‘Ticketmaster is a technology company’

One of the arguments made by the US Department of Justice in the antitrust case against Live Nation/Ticketmaster is that the collaboration between these two companies means that “music fans in the United States are deprived of ticket innovation and are forced to use outdated technology, while paying more for tickets than fans in other countries.”

Live Nation couldn’t see it any other way. In fact, company leadership has argued that Ticketmaster has become the dominant player in ticketing by developing better technologies than the competition. That technology allows Ticketmaster to “sell tickets at a volume that others can’t handle,” Rapino said during the earnings call.

He may have been referring to recent ticket sales for Oasis’ world tour next year, which Rapino described last month as “the biggest sellout in history” with “the most demand in history.”

“Ticketmaster is a technology company. So (we’re going to) continue to develop products on both an enterprise and market basis.”

Michael Rapino, Live Nation

At a recent Bloomberg conference, Rapino said Oasis ticket sales were being hit by “several billions” of bots trying to get tickets for the secondary market.

“We have the best platform in the world. It’s very difficult when 10 billion bots raid your system at the start of sales to steal your tickets… I’m so glad the system didn’t go down. We stopped them. We made it happen.”

During the earnings call Monday, Rapino said investments in Ticketmaster’s technology — both on the backend and consumer-facing side — will continue.

“We are devoting tens of millions of dollars of capital to Ticketmaster,” he said. “We continue to innovate the products we offer – on the business side – to our venues, to promoters and others who use the platform… that includes a lot of pricing technology to help everyone understand the market value of the content they provide.

“It’s certainly on the marketing side as well, developing great marketing science capabilities to help people market their shows, and having made major investments in recent years in continuing to improve our ability to meet that high demand on sale to comply.”

He added: “Ticketmaster is a technology company. So (we’re going to) continue to develop products on both an enterprise and market basis.”Music stores worldwide