Comment by zer00eyz

> Taylor Swift is a nice-ish person and ...

Face value on tickets for her last tour started at 75.

All that money went to Taylor. ALL OF IT.

How do you pay for support staff, trucking how do you pay to move t-shrits from one venue to the next.

This is where all those fees come in... It's not the manager grabbing the money (that bit is later), it's the promoter covering the cost of the tour. Paying for staff to haul and set up a stage at every venue, paying for band members, dancers, people to run lights...

The Management (and the artist) will then "hold back" tickets. Most of the best seats are sold one of two ways. Fan club packages, where you pay 3000 bucks to meet the artist, get a photo and get a good seat. - OR - they go directly to the secondary market. This used to be scalpers (who "worked" for management) but now is secondary sales sites.

There are still two more bits: Consessions. Most artist get a pretty hefty kick back after covering venue staffing. These contracts can be weird, but artists, managers and promoters LIKE Ticketmaster being a one stop shop. It lets them negotiate a single deal (and one that is better for the artist) for the whole tour. Then there is merch, this is a gold mine for the artst and management too. Again there is a staffing component but that is covered by the concessions (mostly).

IN a lot of cases a venue will not sell out, and that is FINE. What happens is that the "fans" ran to the front of the line and paid too much for tickets, bought on the secondary market to get good seats. IN many cases there was so much money made at this stage that the monetary value of the rest of the tickets drops to zero....

At that point no one wants an half empty venue... So it gets papered over. They give away tons of free tickets, they "leak" a late box office hold being released... but it's now a fire sale. The nose bleed seats are selling for 5-10 bucks (even in today's market). Because assess in seats sells beer, t-shirts, and a full venue makes it an "experience"

This is the model that Bill Graham built and the vision of the industry he was going towards. TM is still, at its core, Bill Graham Presents.

I used to work in the industry, it's a hot mess and every one is greedy.