What Happens To Hot Tickets

Secretly recorded phone calls offer an unprecedented look into how Live Nation helped Metallica and about a dozen other acts do business with online resale sites IN FEBRUARY 2017, DAYS before Metallica announced its WorldWired North American stadium tour, Live Nation president of U.S. concerts Bob Roux spoke by phone with a littleknown wealth adviser turned event promoter who had be зп tasked by an associate of the band to move 88,000 tickets straight onto resale sites like StubHub before fans had a chance to buy them at face value. The Department of Justice's antitrust division monitors competition in ticketing, and is tasked with enforcing a 2010 consent decree following Live Nation's merger with Ticketmaster that bans the company from retaliating against venues and promoters for not using its software But in a rare acknowledgment of an industry practice little known to the public, Live Nation now tells Billboard that the company has facilitated the quiet transfer of concert tickets directly into the hands of resellers through the years, though only at the request of the artists involved - who control the tickets. According to Live Nation, DiCioccio realized how much money could be made on the resale market after Metallica's 2016 concert for the opening of U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, where over 10,000 tickets were sold "on the secondary market without the band's participation," in part because the group initially priced the tickets too low. "After seeing the volume of secondary transactions for that show and the benefit being captured by brokers," Live Nation said in its statement, "the independent consultant [DiCioccio] worked with Live Nation on a unique distribution strategy that used the secondary market as a sales distribution channel for select high-end tickets."