At Senate hearing, new evidence of Ticketmaster's power: SeatGeek CEO says Barclays Center sought to retain contract for Nets games, not concerts.

An explosive Senate Judiciary Committee hearing (video) yesterday, was summarized by The American Prospect as Senators Berate the Ticketmaster Monopoly, with some suggesting that "it was time to unwind the disastrous 2010 merger between [concert promoter] Live Nation and Ticketmaster." Live Nation is already under investigation by the Justice Department.

Though the hearing, That’s the Ticket: Promoting Competition and Protecting Consumers in Live Entertainment, was triggered in part by a high-profile snafu involving Taylor Swift ticketing, news that Barclays Center had abruptly canceled its contract with SeatGeek to return to Ticketmaster--reported by the New York Times ten days earlier--got an important cameo.

While Barclays operators eschewed comment to the Times, SeatGeek CEO Jack Groetzinger revealed yesterday that Barclays had sought to keep SeatGeek--an upstart company that prides itself on innovations like 3-D views from seats and a mobile-first approach--to ticket Brooklyn Nets games while returning to Ticketmaster for concerts, a strong suggestion that they believed restoring the connection was needed to book shows.

The exchange

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) asked Groetzinger: "You had an experience at Barclays [Center], did you not, in terms of an  opportunity for your company to take over a venue that had been controlled by Ticketmaster. How did that work?"

Groetzinger responded, "The New York Times reported a few weeks ago how, once we took over ticketing for the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, the Barclays Center saw a marked decrease in the number of concerts from Live Nation that were sent to that venue, versus historical averages. So earlier last year, the Barclays Center management came to us and said, 'We'd like to keep using you for ticketing for basketball, but we want to be able to use Ticketmaster to ticket concerts.' And we looked into it and couldn't get the economics to work. So we said to them, 'Listen, let's just part ways amicably and we did.'"

Note that, as Groetzinger told a podcast in December 2021, "We were recently thrilled to sign the Barclays Center" and that SeatGeek's "deals typically pay back in one to two years. After that, they're profitable." So this one likely was not profitable.

The evidence

Durbin followed up: "So they used their power of the marketplace to diminish the number of acts at that venue. And the venue decided they had to go back to Ticketmaster."

The SeatGeek CEO cited Pollstar data, as cited in the Times. That, actually, was a little murky:

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.

Ticket News added evidence:

Instead, some very high-profile shows were routed through UBS Arena, which does use Ticketmaster. That building, despite being located much further from the city center of New York (though still in the very populous Nassau County further out on Long Island) was chosen for shows including Daddy Yankee, The Who, Post Malone, Twenty One Pilots, Journey, Tool, Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish and a “one-night-only” performance by Harry Styles in May of 2022 that preceded his major “Harry’s House” run in another Ticketmaster client NYC venue, Madison Square Garden.

So Ticket News called Groetzinger's claims "plausible." 

Challenging Ticketmaster

Durbin then turned to Ticketmaster President Joe Berchtold, asking "Is that true?"

"I believe Senator," he responded, "that what the New York Times indicated, was that another venue opened in the marketplace. So you now had two venues vying for the shows that weren't going to Madison Square Garden, and that the number of shows going to Barclays from all the major promoters went down as a result of that increased competition. I have not heard of any allegations that we changed in any way are are booking of concerts for that venue. It's a matter that I watch very closely, given the profile of the New York market. I understand every decision about every show, where it was placed and why. We have records determining that in no cases was there any retaliation against Barclays in the placement of shows."

The American Prospect's David Dayen commented on Twitter that Berchtold "deflects." Dayen also noted: "Groetzinger says SeatGeek has trouble in meetings with venues, who get excited about their ticketing tech, and then they shy away because they know they'll lose concerts." 

The bottom line

Durbin gave Groetzinger the last word regarding Barclays.

"I don't have more to add specifically on retaliation there," the SeatGeek CEO said. "I would note that the DOJ [Department of Justice] report in 2018 found numerous instances of Live Nation threatening and retaliating against venues once they had moved away from Ticketmaster. In one case, the Live Nation President told the venue that they would quote-unquote go nuclear if they left. So the threat is real. It's been documented. It happens across many venues."

As I observed, there may have also been non-Ticketmaster reasons for concert tours to choose UBS Arena, given the typical honeymoon period for new arenas--which Barclays once enjoyed--and the possibility of far easier (and thus less expensive) load-in for major tours.

But there's certainly smoke, if not fire.