Jack Antonoff has addressed the recent controversy around skyrocketing ticket prices at big-name shows.
There has been a particularly notable outcry surrounding the ticket prices on Bruce Springsteen‘s current world tour, with reports that some fans were being charged up to $5,000 (£4152) each thanks to Ticketmaster’s “dynamic pricing” model. Springsteen defended the pricing strategy, saying that he wanted to do “what everybody else is doing” and that it was better for the money from higher priced tickets to go to the artists rather than to touts.
In response, the long-running Springsteen fanzine Backstreets shut down after 43 years of operation, citing their disillusionment with the system.
Fans attempting to buy tickets in the pre-sale for Taylor Swift‘s ‘Eras’ tour also encountered hyper-inflated prices among numerous other issues with Ticketmaster, who ended up cancelling the general sale after the site buckled due to “historically unprecedented demand”. The issues with the wider ticketing industry were discussed in a recent hearing in the US congress, in which numerous senators quoted Swift’s lyrics.
Now Antonoff, who has worked with both artists, has weighed in on the controversy, saying that he believes the blame lies not with artists but with the industry itself.
Speaking at the Grammy Awards ceremony last night (February 5), where he won the award for Producer Of The Year, Non-Classical, Antonoff said: “The whole thing is incredibly tough. There’s no reason why – if I can go online and buy a car and have it delivered to my house, why can’t I buy a fucking ticket at the price that the artist wants it to be? So it’s that simple.
“And you know the reason why. It’s not ’cause of artists. So the one thing that I would say while holding a microphone is everybody’s got to chill on the artists. Because everyone’s trying to figure it out. We know who’s making it impossible.
“Look, I’ve asked very simple things of the industry. Let artists opt out of dynamic pricing. Stop taxing merch, and let artists sell tickets at a price that they actually believe. Don’t turn a live show into a free market. That’s really dirty.”
He continued: “Charge what you think is fair. But if for one person $50 is nothing, and one person $50 is more than they could ever spend, you’re creating a situation where a different group can come together at one price. The second everything fluctuates is the second that everything goes K-shaped and turns into a weird free market. That’s not what we do.”
The Bleachers frontman also touched on the way that artists, songwriters and performers get paid. “How many broke artists do you know? How many broke people who work in the industry do you know? So there’s problems all over the place. I came up in touring, and the touring industry, which I actually know best, is actually an interesting example of what’s wrong,” he said.
“When you play a show, you carry the shame that you decided to be an artist, so you’re just happy to do it because people tell you that you’re so lucky. You walk into a room, everybody in that room is being paid a decent wage besides you. You have to become so successful before you can turn out a living. The same for producers, same thing for writers, same thing for artists, same thing for everyone.”
Antonoff previously called out venues to “stop taxing” merch sales, saying it’s “literally the only way you make money when you start out touring.”
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