Following the recent Live Nation / Ticketmaster merger announcement, executives from the companies gathered to address several issues with investors. TM Chairman Barry Diller was on hand, and responded to a question regarding the company’s recent Springsteen ticketing fiasco.
We put together a rough transcript of the question and response, where Diller explained what happened during the ticket launch, plus his feelings about a class-action consumer lawsuit filed in Canada involving a Smashing Pumpkins show and Sen. Charles Schumer’s call for a federal investigation.
Q: I was wondering if you can address some of the concerns that have popped up, and Barry, I think you’ve mentioned the secondary ticketing. There are some class action lawsuits that have come out. Related to that, I was wondering along those lines ways to improve the consumer experience on the ticketing going forward that might prevent these algorithms that sop up all the supply at once.
Diller: Well, first of all, the class action. What can I say about class action lawsuits that have no merit, chasing cars down the road? The situation that happened has been much misunderstood. What really happened was, there was an actual tech glitch in the system that had nothing to do with the availability of tickets. It had to do with, I think, VISA that couldn’t process the data. So it kind of froze the system for a bit. When it froze the system, essentially what Ticketmaster screens said was it couldn’t do anything. It couldn’t process tickets and another screen came up and said you could go back, try your thing again, you could modify, etcetera, and on the other side of the screen it said you could also go to TicketsNow, which is our reseller, sister company.
It was confusing. But it was confusion, though, not out of Ticketmaster saying tickets were not available and therefore pushing people to its reseller site. That was not Ticketmaster’s intention. But there were people who misunderstood. What we did is that anybody who bought tickets at a higher price, we’ll make them good for that. There was no real controversy here. The issue is, there is a secondary market. That has existed for a long time. Now it’s called secondary, usually even called scalpers. That is a reality. Has been a reality for a long time where all sorts of practices go on.
What Ticketmaster has done in entering the business is try and make it transparent and will continue to make it more transparent and to make it secure. Ticketmaster is not in the business of denying primary tickets to anyone in order to push them to the secondary marketplace. That is the policy of Ticketmaster. It will continue to make improvements so there is a ringing clarity between the two. But that’s the policy of the company. We don’t push people to the secondary market other than when the house is sold out, let’s say.
Again, I think this is just such a sexy issue. Ticketmaster is never perceived to be on the side of the angels because, in fact, there are only so many tickets. It’s got tickets to sell and when they’re finished selling, people get angry. That’s understandable. That’s just part of the life of being in that part of the service business. I do think the noise around this was wildly overdone. The timing was unfortunate. That’s what happens in life. You’re getting ready to finish a transaction and up comes a computer glitch that gets promoted, let’s say. In any event, that’s a fairly longwinded answer but I do want to get all of this on the record that we are going to explain and explain and explain, and make all of this clear to all constituencies.
We had a situation in New York where Congress, I think Sen. Schumer, went out and made statements that were factually untrue. In detail untrue, which is unfortunate but hardly unknown. And we’re going to keep setting the record straight. We’re going to be proactive here.