Can you provide a source that Ticketmaster keeps extra money? I would find that unlikely.
2. the concerts are held in almost exclusively TM venues, leading to #1
3. the concerts are produced by LiveNation, which is TM, leading to #2
4. the bands are more and more often signed to LN for their tours, leading to #3
if you need more info you can do your own research.
TicketMaster can extort the performer for a bigger cut because if the performer takes no action, TicketMaster gets the resale, and the performer gets nothing. TicketMaster owns the data, so they can negotiate the dynamic royalty more efficiently and get a yield better than resale.
The funny thing is, LYV, having achieved a near monopoly over ticketing, venues, and performers, loses money.
I dislike Ticketmaster as much as the next person, but no one is holding a gun to Blink-182 to come out and perform in a nationwide tour with TM taking all the upside. I just can't fathom that negotiation taking place, unless TM was also guaranteeing revenue to the band, i.e. taking downside risk. Theres no point to that. Also, yes, LiveNation controls an impressive number of venues, but they dont control all the venues, not be a long shot. If the TM deal was such a raw deal for artists, nothing prevents artists from just hosting their own concerts in publicly owned venues, setting up longer term performance residences in interesting locations, or expanding the fan experience from the tired formula of "opener act, 2x 1-hour sets, and an encore" to something better like a collaborative fan experience over a whole weekend. Plenty of opportunity for creativity on the artist's part that would make the artist less money in a night but yield a potentially waaaay better lifestyle and creative process.
At the end of it, Live Nation is a publicly traded company, but not a very attractive one. Lots of debt, rapidly increasing labor costs on the event hosting side, household budgets getting a major squeeze which will impact entertainment spend.
Of course Ticketmaster isn't just keeping all the extra money. They're probably splitting that with the performer as well.
We don't know what the details are on how the money is divvied up, but I do know that artists must be getting upside on this dynamic pricing.
Listen, that's exactly what they have. The music business mostly exists to screw artists out of money made from their work, probably more now than ever.
The artist signs a contract to pay for X dollars, that's what they get and they have no leverage whatsoever to go after that upside. Ticketmaster would have to share the data about the dynamic pricing in the first place and they are NOT doing that.
Granted the band probably negotiated minimums and a cut. Remember, you also have the venue, security, traffic, marketing, etc. There's a lot involved with these kind of events.
Because TicketMaster/LiveNation own most of the large music venues in the country. And if you don't use them in a "vertical stack" you don't get to play those venues.
And even at $50/ticket, you make money a lot faster in a 25,000 seat arena than you do trying to play 15 nights at an "intimate" theater (hey, guess what, TM/LN own a huge swathe of those too).
We complain on HN about tech "monopolies" (or debate their existence, at least). TM/LN is a much larger effective monopoly that, to my knowledge, has not had any real investigation.
Blink-182 is not in this category.
Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen will tell you a similar story.
Springsteen's team is defending dynamic pricing [1], with Ticketmaster claiming "promoters and artist representatives set pricing strategy and price range parameters on all tickets, including dynamic and fixed price points."
[1] https://www.ticketnews.com/2022/07/springsteen-manager-fires...