Concerts & Covid-19: You’ve Got a Ticket, But You Haven’t Got a Friend

Okay, it’s not fair to say you’d like to vaporize the entire music industry.

But sometimes it’s almost impossible to say anything else.

Take the current ticket situation.

Millions of music fans hold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tickets to “postponed” concerts that could happen in three months, could happen in two years or might never happen at all.

Meantime, with a small handful of exceptions, they can’t get their money back.

It’s not the concert industry’s fault that the coronavirus crashed in and shut down thousands of concerts to which tickets had already been sold.

It’s not the concert industry’s fault that even if all the logistics of schedules and venues could be quickly resolved, those concerts can’t be rescheduled until we have some assurance audiences will feel comfortable in large crowded places.

The problem is the decision to hang onto hundreds of millions of someone else’s dollars while all that gets sorted out.

True, it’s legal. True, that’s how it’s usually been handled in the past when, say, an artist literally broke a leg.

This is not that situation. This is an extraordinary situation with so many unknowables that it seems to demand a different response.

Let all ticketholders who want to hold their tickets pending a new date do so. That would be a substantial number. Give everyone else the option of getting a refund now and treating any rescheduled show as a do-over, with a chance to repurchase. Maybe, as an incentive, offer priority access.

Truth is, a lot of fans could use that money right now for important other things, like food and rent.

That argument, so far, has not resonated with an industry where a $500 ticket, for instance, is really a $600 ticket, because of a $100 “handling fee” or “service charge.”

Now yes, the ticket company provides a service. It’s brokering the ticket, which often means what we used to call scalping the ticket.

Beyond that, the “service” and “handling” usually works like this. The customer goes online, picks a seat, puts in payment information and downloads the ticket.

If the fee is based on who does the work, maybe the customer should get it.

As for what this has to do with the music industry in general, oh, maybe nothing except maybe consider a few random examples like these.

It’s an industry that for decades systematically underpaid the artists who actually created the music, at times not paying even the modest royalties they did earn.

It’s an industry that has consistently pushed new artists to sign away valuable assets like publishing rights, often suggesting they wouldn’t get a recording deal unless they did.

It’s an industry that introduced the new technology of compact discs by charging almost twice what it charged for vinyl albums, even though CDs cost less to manufacture.

Now sure, the music industry spends money on which it gets no return. There are valid reasons for copyright laws. Most artists who signed bad deals did it of their own free will, because they wanted their shot.

But too much of what has happened in the music industry over the years has looked like plain old greed, which unfortunately has cast a shadow over the record labels and producers and club owners and promoters who knew and loved the music, the ones who discovered and presented wonderful artists whose work enriches our lives.

Right up until the Internet, the music industry was the middleman between artists and audiences, and middlemen always walk a tightrope. Say you’re a concert promoter who wants to pay the artist fairly and also wants to make the show affordable for fans. Odds are both sides will grumble about your solution.

But there’s also the part of the industry that doesn’t care about any of that, because it sees music as “product,” like canned green beans. In Johnny Lee’s marvelous phrase, “music sold by lawyers.”

When the ticket biz sits on hundreds of millions of someone else’s dollars, it’s hard not to feel like it’s using the fans’ love of music to feed its own love of money.

[Update 4/23: Under public and congressional pressure, plus the threat of lawsuits, Ticketmaster has modified its policy for postponed events. Once an event has been rescheduled, Ticketmaster says, the ticketholder as of May 1 will have the option of 1) keeping the ticket, 2) getting a refund, 3) taking a credit toward a future purchase or 4) donating the ticket to a health care worker. This does represent a concession, but it leaves the money in Ticketmaster’s hands until there is a decision on rescheduling, which could take, in some cases, many months.]