It’s Hard to Avoid Paying Excessive Ticketing and Reseller Fees

If you want to buy a ticket or have it emailed to you, there’s a fee for that. The average event ticket fee on a primary sale is 27 percent of its face value. Want to sell your ticket? There are fees for that, too. StubHub charges around 30% for each sale. Reports indicate that nearly half of Ticketmaster and Live Nation’s revenue comes from excessive fees – nearly $6 billion!

Example: You purchase a concert ticket for $100. Ticketmaster charges $27 in fees, so the total cost is $127. Later, you sell it on StubHub for $110, but only walk away with $85 after fees. In other words, you lost $42 on the sale, but Ticketmaster made $27 and StubHub made $25.

Why Are Ticketing and Reseller Fees So High?

The advent of online ticketing has not led to lower fees. A major reason is that Ticketmaster does not face serious competition, as it controls 80% of the ticket market, and because Live Nation manages over 500 major music artists, they can force venues to use Ticketmaster exclusively. Live Nation controls “nearly every aspect” of the ticket business, producing record-high ticket prices and large fees, according to an investigation published last month by the New York Times. In August 2019, two U.S. Senators asked the Department of Justice to investigate Ticketmaster and Live Nation. The Federal Trade Commission is also investigating.