Antonoff slams Dwell Nation CEO’s ‘underpriced’ live performance declare

Acclaimed music producer Jack Antonoff is rejecting claims by Dwell Nation Leisure CEO Michael Rapino that live performance tickets are nonetheless “underpriced.”

The CEO’s feedback got here on the CNBC Sport and Boardroom Sport Plan convention final week, when he mentioned, “In sports activities, I joke it is like a badge of honor to spend [$70,000] for Knicks courtside. … Whenever you learn concerning the ticket costs going up, it is nonetheless a mean live performance value [of] $72. Strive going to a Laker sport for that, and there is 80 of them [in a season].”

Antonoff responded to these feedback in a submit on X Thursday saying, “this actually breaks my coronary heart and is a sick approach of .”

“Reply is easy: Promoting a ticket for greater than its face worth ought to be unlawful,” he wrote. “Then there is no such thing as a chaos, and also you give us again the management as a substitute of making a weird free market of confusion amongst the viewers who we love and take care of.”

Antonoff, well-known for working with celebrity Taylor Swift, additionally pointed to ticket resellers allegedly climbing costs on the Dwell Nation web site. He went on to say his staff tries to seek out “new concepts” to get round issues like dynamic pricing to make concert events extra reasonably priced for followers.

“It may all be really easy if the folks up high did not see the viewers as a faceless group to extort cash from,” Antonoff wrote.

Rapino’s feedback on the Sport Plan convention got here simply days earlier than the Federal Commerce Fee sued Dwell Nation and its subsidiary Ticketmaster for what it known as “unlawful” ticket resale techniques. Within the submitting, the FTC defined that the businesses “tacitly labored” with scalpers that enabled them to “unlawfully buy” tickets to extend earnings.

″[Ticketmaster and Live Nation’s] unlawful conduct frustrates artists’ need to take care of reasonably priced ticket costs that match the wants of abnormal American households, costing abnormal followers thousands and thousands of {dollars} yearly,” the lawsuit learn.

Dwell Nation didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark Thursday.

Dwell Nation can also be being sued by the U.S. Division of Justice to interrupt up the corporate over alleged antitrust violation.

“We allege that Dwell Nation depends on illegal, anticompetitive conduct to train its monopolistic management over the reside occasions trade in the US at the price of followers, artists, smaller promoters, and venue operators,” mentioned Lawyer Normal Merrick Garland in a Might 2024 assertion asserting the lawsuit.