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Touring company Live Nation has admitted selling tickets to Metallica and several other concerts directly on resale platforms.
A report by Billboard uncovered a phone call from 2017 in which Live Nation President of US Concerts Bob Roux was heard to explain a plan to put tickets straight onto resale sites needed to be kept secret.
The report confirms long-held suspicions by many, and may go some way to explaining why big name gigs sell out in seconds.
The phone call was with an event promoter who was tasked with selling 88,000 tickets directly on sites like StubHub.
“Ticketmaster will not do it,” says Roux. “…either a Live Nation employee or a venue box office basically take these and sell them into a singular account.
“When this happens, 4,600 tickets into a single accoun… there may be some eyebrows that get raised.”
Live Nation then told Billboard directly that the practice was in place in 2016 and 2017, and that several artists request that the tickets go straight to resale.
“About a dozen artists out of the thousands we work with asked us to do this,” they said.
Live Nation said it “does not distribute tickets on any platform without an artist’s explicit approval,” however reps for Metallica said band members were not aware that the practice had taken place for tickets to their shows.
Read the report in full here.
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