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If you’ve ever been to a live event in the past few decades, you probably have a low opinion of Live Nation — or for that matter Ticketmaster, its subsidiary it merged with to form a sprawling entertainment monopoly.
Rest assured that the feeling is mutual.
Explosive internal messages, revealed in a lawsuit, show two Live Nation directors mocking its “stupid” customers for paying the service’s jacked-up fees, and openly gloating about “robbing them blind,” per new reporting from Bloomberg and The New York Times.
The messages come from a series of Slack exchanges in 2022 between Ben Baker and Jeff Weinhold, two regional directors of ticketing for Live Nation. Baker is head of ticketing for Venue Nation, and Weinhold is senior ticketing director for the DMV area around Washington, DC.
Across the exchanges, the pair bragged about shamelessly jacking up the cost of “ancillary fees” that include parking, lawn chair rentals, and VIP passes, and getting concertgoers to pay them anyway.
For a show at a Virginia venue, Weinhold preened himself for raising “VIP parking up to $250 lol.”
“These people are so stupid,” Baker said amid Weinhold’s boast. “I almost feel bad taking advantage of them.”
The pair also bragged about making money hand over fist through “premier parking” fees, generating $666,000 at a single venue from those fees alone in 2021. Baker said he was charging “$50 to park in the grass” and “$60 for closer grass.”
“Robbing them blind baby,” Baker wrote. “That’s how we do.”
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