Mastering The Concert Ticket

String Cheese Incident, a Colorado jam band with a rabid fan base, just wanted to make sure its best fans got the best tickets to its concerts. So, it routinely set aside half its tickets for direct sales to fans through SCI Ticketing – until in 2002 Ticketmaster, citing its venue contracts, said no.

The band, pointing to similar arrangements made by bigger, more powerful artists like Dave Matthews Band, decided to sue. String Cheese Incident, with attorney Neil Glazer, succeeded where Pearl Jam failed almost a decade earlier and got what they wanted: an agreement allowing it to sell its own ticket allotment directly to fans.

The David vs. Goliath suit served as a catalyst for “Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How The Public Got Scalped” – a new book written by Relix editors Dean Budnick and Josh Baron.

The pair, admittedly fans of the band, reported on the suit and realized there was a larger story to be told. And since no one had yet told the story of how the concert industry – and ticketing in particular – developed, they decided to write the book themselves.

“We wanted [to write the book for] people who were curious about how we got to this point,” Budnick told Pollstar. “We didn’t write it necessarily in the broadest of strokes, but we wanted to develop some of the personalities and characters.”

“Ticket Masters” weaves the history of computerized ticketing and the technology behind it, the concert promoter rollups of the late 1990s, and the merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation. It’s bound together with sketches of the colorful characters behind the scenes, avoiding what could have been a mind-numbing business treatise with wry observations and humor.

Besides, it’s not written for the “inside baseball” set – it’s written for every music fan who has ever wondered how his last concert experience managed to cost almost $150 (including ancillaries) despite the ticket’s $30 face value. That said, there is still plenty of red meat in these pages for even the most seasoned industry veteran.

Budnick and Baron managed to talk to a broad cross-section of industry figures, yet those who declined to be interviewed are somewhat conspicuous by their silence. But the pair was pleasantly surprised by the level of cooperation they received – despite being warned by other journalists that “at some point there’s some leg-breaking involved.”

To the contrary, the authors believe that many wanted their stories told – even if they didn’t want to be quoted telling them.

“Once we dug in, particularly for the older promoters … that were sort of at the vanguard of computerized ticketing, they absolutely loved talking with us and sharing these stories. For a lot of them, no one had ever asked them about these stories. A lot of these guys are sort of out of the game, but there’s such a deep passion and a love for it,” Baron told Pollstar.

“I think Josh and I were intimidated because of what we had been told by a couple of people going into this but, as a practical matter, people could not have been more friendly,” Budnick said. “Even when they passed – even when they said ‘I can’t tell you everything.’ Some people would say, ‘So-and-so won’t talk to you,’ and then so-and-so would talk to us. Sometimes on the record, sometimes off.

“I think people have been waiting for a book like this to be written for a while, and no one had written it. We wrote the book we wanted to read. I think many people were interested to see where we were going to take the story, and where the story would take them,” Budnick continued. “And I think they were pretty happy.”

The authors scored notable coups with on-the-record interviews with some of the industry’s heaviest hitters of the last 40 years, including the usually tight-lipped Michael Cohl – who dishes fairly freely about his departure from Live Nation.

Former Ticketmaster CEOs Fred Rosen, John Pleasants and Sean Moriarty, ex-Clear Channel Entertainment CEO Brian Becker, legendary concert promoters Alex Cooley and Jack Boyle, and secondary market entrepreneurs Eric Baker and Greg Bettinelli are just a few of those who opted to tell their versions of controversies large and small over the years. Bankers talk about Robert Sillerman and Deadheads explain how Grateful Dead Ticketing Service started with a folding table and index cards.

The role of Deadheads – the entire jam band community, in fact – in the modern concert industry stands in stark contrast to what Budnick and Baron see as a “culture shift” that took place in the mid- to late-’90s: the rise of the MBA. And, in a way, those stories serve as symbols of the state of the concert industry.

And despite the title, Ticketmaster does not completely come off as “TicketBastard,” as former CEO Fred Rosen called it.

“It’s not a condemnation of Ticketmaster,” Budnick insists. “Yes, we’re hard on them in the last chapter but, by and large, we gave them a pretty fair shake. We really acknowledged the achievements that they made in ticketing and tried to underscore some of the technological developments that they made.

“The public misunderstands this company. And for years they wanted to be misunderstood. But now, at the turn of the century, they wanted to do an about face and become a consumer-facing company,” Budnick said. “I think [Rosen, Pleasants and Moriarty], at least indirectly, thought this is a chance to tell the story of a company they were really proud to be associated with.”

Though the book contains a glossary and extensive endnotes, the authors smartly omit an index – anyone looking for what’s said about them will have to actually read the book.

But, perhaps ironically, there are no quotations from the guys who started it all. The String Cheese Incident is still touring, and still selling their own tickets, but are bound by a confidentiality agreement with Ticketmaster.