Michael Coppel Responds to ABC’s Live Nation Expose: ‘I Feel Shabbily Done By’
Avis gave a masterclass in marketing back in 1962, with a slogan that resonates with everyone who climbed the corporate mountain, and never quite summited. “We’re no. 2, we try harder.” The leader in the rental car business, Hertz, had a target on its back.
Live Nation, the global leader in the concert promotion business, also wears a target.
In the US and UK, Live Nation, together with its sister company Ticketmaster, has been the subject of regulatory probes. And, on Monday night, ABC fired a shot with a Four Corners episode.
Earlier this year, an antitrust lawsuit was filed by the Department of Justice and 30 state attorneys general, accusing the live entertainment giant of achieving its dominant position in the world’s biggest market through abuses of market power and dubious exclusive ticketing contracts.
The DOJ alleged that Live Nation “controls” the live entertainment industry in the US “because it is breaking the law,” reckons Attorney General Merrick Garland. “It is time to break it up.”
More recently, public outrage over dynamic pricing applied to ‘Oasis Live ’25′ tour dates in the British Isles triggered a Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) investigation.
As SXSW Sydney got underway, music industry executives around the country tuned into ABC for its Four Corners episode, which, through various guests and host Avani Dias, accused the live entertainment giant of various dodgy tactics, from “sucking up profits” to the “misuse” of its market power, through to “ripping off fans” with hidden ticket fees, and exploiting artists.
The program, says a spokesperson for Live Nation, was “a biased and highly inaccurate report on Live Nation and our role in the Australian live music industry.”
On Tuesday morning, roughly 12 hours after the show aired, The Music Network caught up with Live Nation Australasia chairman Michael Coppel for his response on some of the corporation’s claims. The below interview has been edited for clarity.
Coppel’s thoughts on the documentary
I feel disappointed, I feel shabbily done by. I thought it was lazy journalism.
It was a lot of disaffected industry competitors given a platform to whinge.
I think it picked us out as the cause of everything that’s wrong with the industry.
As if we’ve got some aberrational business model when in fact, our two major competitors with similar market shares have got the same business model, vertically integrated companies with interests in different areas, agency, venues, merchandizing everything else.
And I just felt there was a lot of insinuation. They’re saying, “Oh, venues are closing and it must be due to Live Nation forcing them out of business.” The reality is we’re very supportive of venues.
The reason that there’s a crisis in the smaller venues scene is because of escalating insurance rates, escalating land tax costs, escalating security costs. People are drinking at home, rather than going to a bar and paying bar prices when they go to see a gig.
There’s certainly a crisis going on in.
It’s a post-COVID artifact. And a cost of living crisis.
It has nothing to do with what we’re doing. And we’re not forcing them out of business.
Michael Coppel, Pink and Roger Davies
How the Australian company differs from the US and UK businesses
I don’t put myself as an expert on the American scene or the UK scene, but I can observe from a distance certain things. In America, Live Nation has a bigger market share than anywhere else in the world pretty much. And therefore it is a big target.
The other is that the Biden administration has gone out, it sued Apple, it’s sued Microsoft, it’s sued Google, it’s sued Live Nation.
They’ve taken a bend of wanting to break up what they see as overly large commercial entities. I think we were just a target.
And when you get the sort of controversy that blew up around the Taylor Swift onsale when 10 million people wanted to buy a million tickets and nine million were disappointed, Congress jumps in.
It’s always fascinating to me that our industry gets ignored completely until there’s an opportunity for a politician to get a headline.
We look to support from government on a whole range of issues, particularly in relation to the resale of tickets, which is a cancer on the industry, with so many tickets going into the secondary market and people with no investment, no participation and virtually no risk, profiting off the devotion of music fans.
Yet governments somehow feel unable to help us.
And yet when Ticketmaster tries to do things to capture some of that value for the artist and the participants of the industry, we’re (said to be) doing the wrong thing.
On Arts Minister Tony Burke saying the industry was on notice if a vertically-integrated structure was used in an anti-competitive way
I think once again, it was a politician responding to a vacuum where he thought he could get coverage.
I understand concerns about anti-competitive behaviour, but I don’t actually understand how a vertically integrated system promotes anti-competitive behaviour.
I see the industry as more competitive than almost any other major industry in Australia.
We have two major airlines, we have two major supermarket chains, we have four banks, right?
And we have three promoters who compete very vigorously, and probably 10 or 12 secondary level players and emerging players.
So it’s a very competitive industry.
On comments that Bad // Dreems had fees taken on merch
They wouldn’t have paid any merch fees at The Triffid because they don’t charge merch fees. The show is under a certain capacity. So that’s incorrect.
If you sell merchandise, we have a policy of not charging merchandising fees for shows under a certain capacity.
And that was a policy that the US company rolled out and has come out internationally as well.
And that’s a recognition that a merchandise stream of revenue is important to bands up at a certain level.
Above (a certain) level, every venue you go to in Australia charges a merchandise fee.
The promoter was Love Police on that tour.
On the claim that several Live Nation festivals were strategically postponed
Coming out of COVID, there’s been a shake-up of the festival scene.
There have been a few factors coinciding that have had a big impact on the festival scene and it became evident that the level of support for some of our festivals did not exist. And that’s support in terms of access to a sufficient calibre and number of headliners.
There has been an emerging cost of living crisis over the last year and a half; that’s a big factor.
Because of the boom, the return to live music, the enthusiasm of our audiences, which is really unparalleled, many of the major acts are not playing festivals, they’re doing their own stadium shows because they have full control of the production.
They don’t share the merchandising revenues with anyone.
They have full control of the ticket money.
It’s become really hard to book festivals and find headliners.
If you haven’t got a strong headliner, you can’t attract an audience who’s sceptical about making the expenditure and times will change.
If you look at Australia’s history, there have been periods when we had a number of music festivals, then periods of five or 10 years where there were no music festivals, then the audience returned and embraced them.
So it’s cyclical and I think we’re at the bottom of the cycle in the last 12 months.
Dynamic pricing on Green Day and other tours
There’s certainly confusion about this.
There are different types of dynamic pricing.
One is what you’d call surge pricing, which is Uber.
Or the airlines where there’s a computer algorithm that says, OK, big demand for trips from Brisbane to Melbourne for the Grand Final, and prices go up automatically.
There’s no human intervention. It’s an algorithm. And that is, I think, surge pricing.
Dynamic pricing is a mechanism that Live Nation and Ticketmaster introduced in the States a few years ago to try and address the leakage of tickets into the secondary market where people are buying tickets, whether they use bots, whether they use any other method and marking them up and taking a margin that doesn’t go to any of the industry participants doesn’t go to the artist, doesn’t go to the promoter, doesn’t go to the venue.
It’s taken by StubHub, it’s taken by Viagogo etc.
So we went to our artist and say, let’s set a range of prices. Let’s set the starting price.
And if there’s a high demand event, let’s have a higher price that we can move to for a selection of the inventory that tries to prevent those tickets going into the secondary market and captures the value for the artist.
And that’s what applied in the case of Green Day, that’s what applied in the case of Oasis.
In America, 25% of tickets go onto the secondary market. With the program that Live Nation has done, we’ve been able to halve that down to about 11% on a number of major tours.
The so-called “Inside Charge”
The “Inside Charge” has been something that’s been in effect in Australian ticketing since 1989. And it’s just a generic industry term that refers to any charges that are included inside the face value of the ticket.
It’s any charge included inside the face value of the ticket and the “Outside Charge,” which is anything declared separately, which is a transaction fee nowadays, which is per transaction, not per ticket.
It covers the way the ticket’s delivered, whether they’re mailed, whether they’re emailed digital delivery, whatever it might be.
It’s actually nothing more than a shorthand way of saying those are charges included in the face value of the ticket.
On ABC’s claims that detailed questions were presented to Live Nation, and instead of a response, received a letter of complaint
No, it’s not accurate.
Essentially, we became aware that they were seeking out people with negative comments to make about Live Nation.
They never furnished us with an agenda.
We finally got a list of questions from them at lunchtime on Friday before a long weekend. It was 35 very detailed questions.
We responded earlier in the following week and 2.5 hours later, the promo went to air.
We had to make a very strong complaint to the CEO of the ABC that we felt was misleading and unfair reportage.
They started sussing out interest from the industry around early August.
They reached out to us only two weeks after they were at BIGSOUND to say they were working on a piece on the live music industry, not on Live Nation, when clearly all of those interviewees were primed to talk about Live Nation.
Will Live Nation pursue the ABC following the documentary?
I think we made very strong representation that our anticipation was that we weren’t given a chance to respond in advance of the program.
That moderated the impact to some degree.
I don’t think there was anything defamatory said.
I think it was inaccurate, sloppy journalism. It was clickbait journalism.
We really want to make it clear that Live Nation does, in fact, invest in Australian artists.
And in the last 12 months, we paid out $40 million to approximately 200 Australian artists.
They were trying to throw a hodgepodge of things together to make a case which I don’t think they made effectively.