Yes, Live Nation and Ticketmaster literally serve as "the bad guy" in the transaction. The truth is, due to market realities, ticket prices (MSRP, not reseller prices) need to be high so that everybody gets their cut. All those fees people lose their minds about? Those more or less pay out the promoters, because the artists are too chickenshit to roll the full costs into their bare ticket prices, and unrealistic ticket prices signal to fans that the artist "really has their best interests in mind". But it's all smoke and mirrors lol, if promoters don't get paid, no shows happen; if no shows happen, venues don't get paid. If there are no promoters or venues, shows are dead and artists don't get paid.
Considering all of that, everybody in the chain prefers and benefits from sold-out shows for myriad reasons, and all live performance is theatre at its core anyways, so IMO what's a little extra theatre on top to make sure the shows go on in this year of our Lord 2026, where very little is cheap and affordable?
This is not a reasonable take on what's actually happening. It's never been a reasonable take, but posting this today after Live Nation has literally just been found liable by a jury shows deep confusion.
The ticket prices are not high because of market realities. They're high because of illegal monopoly behavior that inflates costs and then steals the money and gives it to Michael Rapino and his friends. The behavior of Live Nation has been shown to be much closer to organized crime than what most people think of as standard business practice.
There's extensive on-the-record testimony and an official federal court verdict backing up my side of this argument.
Re: LN, I agree 100% with the evidence presented in, and outcome of, that trial; Live Nation absolutely deserves the verdict they received and it's amazing it took this long to get it. I just don't fully buy the idea that they (and they alone) are the reasons that tickets are priced the way that they are.
I guess I'm in the Lefsetz School of Thought [0][1] about it all (and I know, he's a polarizing personality, so I get it when people think he's full of shit), but I also think that two things can be right at the same time (Rapino and gang are criminals, ticket prices cost a lot because that's what they cost)
Maybe I'm wrong! I don't have much skin in this game man, I just personally find that his takes mirror what I see happening in real life to friends and colleagues who are artists, promoters and venue operators.
Page 31 of Livenation’s 2025 10-K shows $25B revenue, $19B direct operating expenses, and $4B selling, general, and admin expenses. I wonder how much of the expenses is not going to performers and the expenses of operating venues.
This is why they have gotten away with it for so long. It looks legit, until you realize they also OWN all those venue companies they are paying too. Not to mention Ticketmaster. The web is so deep that looking at just one entity makes it look like they have low margins and are just operating in this space, it’s not true at all.
They own StubHub so they’ll buy the tickets from themselves and “resell” them on StubHub for 5x-10x because people will pay it for a top line performer. It’s been well documented over the years if you do any kind of digging.
Shuffling money around between subsidiaries does not matter because it would still be reported on the same 10-K for the parent company (Livenation), and the revenues and expenses amongst itself cancel out.
For example, you don’t report revenue or expense from moving money from your right pocket to your left pocket.
That doesnt matter for the 10-k report. Its a fully consolidated financial statement. They have absolutely trash operating margins. If you look at their customers (artists and visitors) you see why
I don't think anyone is suggesting that Rapino is stealing from shareholders. We don't know how that money is spent or disbursed. What is clear from the case and settlement is that they were illegally maintaining a monopoly in the live entertainment industry that had stifled innovation and competition, and resulted in higher ticket prices for music fans.
The claim was that Livenation (or a few insiders) is benefiting from the higher prices. But the financials (low profit margins) don’t show that (absent fraud).
In which case, the benefit of the higher prices would be going to (some) performers. Which supports the claim that Livenation is useful as a punching bag for the most popular performers.
There's the occasional top performer that's in on it for sure. But yes, the few insiders are benefiting from higher prices.
I know these people personally. I'm telling you that it's true. I can think of one example where all the insiders created a startup in the ticketing space that had no reason to exist, really, and nothing worth buying solely so that they could acquire it and all the insiders could profit off of it. Lo and behold, COVID came along and made it so their plan made even less sense, and they just ran with it anyways. Money went straight from the stock market into their pockets.
There's a million examples, but again, a lot of the stuff is on the record. I'm sure Rapino is giving money to shareholders for the most part (being one is a pretty relevant part of that for him obviously) but he's doing it via illegal actions. He has made himself a billionaire in the process.
You can hedge however you want on that, but it's horrible and bad and your posts sound like they're defending it or acting like it's natural or normal in some way. It's not mitigated by the fact that someone like Ari Emanuel or a few guys in Nashville had their hand in the cookie jar too. Victims are millions of normal Americans, like me and you, and basically every working musician, except for a few special people at the top.
> Livenation’s profit margins are not very impressive for a business that supposedly has pricing power.
Being skeptical of reported profit is a prerequisite for any conversation about entertainment industry accounting.
> Are you suggesting Livenation’s leaders (Rapino, etc) are stealing from the other shareholders?
Of course I am. These guys are basically mobsters.
> Page 31 of Livenation’s 2025 10-K shows $25B revenue, $19B direct operating expenses, and $4B selling, general, and admin expenses. I wonder how much of the expenses is not going to performers and the expenses of operating venues.
Lots. There is on-the-record testimony and hard evidence in the docket. They inflated prices and faked costs. They shuffled money between entities.
There's tons and tons of reporting, testimony and an official record of the federal courts of the United States of America, all covering these issues. You don't have to read that stuff, but if you haven't got any actual understanding of this issue, there's no reason to post about it.
This organization has been a willful, blatant lawbreaker for decades and a leech on an entire industry. I've seen it first hand. But again, you don't have to believe me. It's proven in a court.
They quite literally bribed their way out of this federal case but they somehow managed to get blindsided by the state AG's sticking around. It's only this miscalculation that's caused them to suffer any consequences at all for basically the first time in history.
> Being skeptical of reported profit is a prerequisite for any conversation about entertainment industry accounting.
If you are referring to Hollywood accounting, that has nothing to do with audited figured in SEC filings. Hollywood accounting is just poorly written contracts litigated in civil court.
Misstated financials in SEC filings are a criminal offense, which obviously could be happening, but I have yet to see any evidence.
> There's tons and tons of reporting, testimony and an official record of the federal courts of the United States of America, all covering these issues. You don't have to read that stuff, but if you haven't got any actual understanding of this issue, there's no reason to post about it.
So you are alleging the federal courts and prosecutors know about all of this fraud, provably, and are not indicting anyone. Which, of course, could be true due to corruption. I just haven’t seen a reputable article connecting all the dots, which is odd because it seems like the type of thing journalists like to publish.
Also, seems like the other Livenation shareholders would not like to be defrauded, so wouldn’t they be at least suing Livenation for their missing profits?
30% of livenation is owned by another publicly listed company, with majority voting shares held by this guy:
Has anyone not noticed that the Justice Department has literally been for sale? That we have stopped prosecuting white-collar crime in this country for a generation or two?
There's always a way. They hire the former prosecutor, they employ the children of congressmen. The money permeates everybody and everything. It's a criminal organization. It's obvious to anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention.
The idea that you can tell that people aren't committing white-collar crime because they haven't been prosecuted is a hilarious assumption.
It's not a conspiracy theory. It's right out in the open. They think they won't ever face real actual personal consequences. They're probably right.
lol yes. At least in agency world, a common approach in the last X years has been that designers create entire pixel-perfect, component-based sources-of-truth in Figma (which evolve! they aren't delivered static and complete) -- these are also what the client sees and approves, or at the very least they see branded deck slides that incorporate the Figma designs. Anyways, front end then re-implements from Figma into CSS, except it's usually best-approximation (not pixel-perfect) partially because, despite Figma allowing you to "copy CSS" for an element, it's unusable, almost inline CSS (and usually not aware of its ascendents and descendents, or any variables you're maintaining in CSS, or any class hierarchies, etc), and partially because the units of measurement aren't always identical on either side. You'll also often have multiple FE devs recreating components independently of each other (as a team effort), which can lead to drift and different implementations, which is fun. Then, depending upon the tech stack, FE might be building these components in something like Storybook [0] as a "front end source of truth", which then are either directly injected into a React or NextJS app or whatever, or sometimes they're partially or fully re-implemented again into BE components in the CMS (ex. Sitefinity). Then people ask which one is the source of truth, but really it's a chain of sources of truth that looks more like the telephone game than a canonical "brand bible". Then throw in any out-of-the-box future client efforts (say, a promotional landing page hosted outside of the main project) and you may have yet another reimplementation of part of the same design, but in a completely different system.
It used to be worse, these days you can at least link between storybook and figma and have similar component naming and figma mostly uses css mental model. Before we had invision and sketch and designers and developers lived in their own worlds that were just completely disjoined.
Don’t hire anyone that is a front end designer and doesn’t implement their own CSS. This applied 15 years ago when it was photoshop people faking design skills.
Architects draft buildings on computer because building in the real world is time consuming, expensive, and cannot be undone.
It's says something about the way things are now that we no longer go straight to building the digital interface, but instead make a fake digital interface first.
Yah you get this inner platform effect where designers start unwittingly creating their own version of css using Figma and it gets really bespoke really fast.
I've been using Claude and Codex in tandem ($100 CC, $20 Codex), and have made heavy use of claude-co-commands [0] to make them talk. Outside of the last 1-2 weeks (which we now have confirmation YET AGAIN that Claude shits the fucking bed in the run-up to a new model release), I usually will put Claude on max + /plan to gin up a fever dream to implement. When the plan is presented, I tell it to /co-validate with Codex, which tends to fill in many implementation gaps. Claude then codes the amended plan and commits, then I have a Codex skill that reviews the commit for gaps, missed edge cases, incorrect implementation, missed optimizations, etc, and fix them. This had been working quite well up until the beginning of the month, Claude more or less got CTE, and after a week of that I swapped to $100 Codex, $20 CC plans. Now I'm using co-validation a lot less and just driving primarily via Codex. When Claude works, it provides some good collaborative insights and counter-points, but Codex at the very least is consistently predictable (for text-oriented, data-oriented stuff -- I don't use either for designing or implementing frontend / UI / etc).
You should not get dependent on one black box. Companies will exploit that dependency.
My version of this is having CC Pro, Cursor Pro, and OpenCode (with $10 to Codex/GLM 5.1) --> total $50. My work doesn't stop if one of these is having overloaded servers, etc. And it's definitely useful to have them cross-checking each other's plans and work.
This more or less mimics a flow that I had fairly good results from -- but I'm unwilling to pay for both right now unless I had a client or employer willing to foot the bill.
Claude Code as "author" and a $20 Codex as reviewer/planner/tester has worked for me to squeeze better value out of the CC plan. But with the new $100 codex plan, and with the way Anthropic seemed to nerf their own $100 plan, I'm not doing this anymore.
They should be forced to stay at a Holiday Inn Express and meet at a Detroit Denny's to discuss the future of the world. Maybe get some perspective in the process!
I do use worktrees occasionally (especially during times where I'll have a very sticky problem that I make the LLM run in a loop on until it satisfies acceptance criteria, and want to isolate the potential fallout of Claudes Gone Wild), and I run Claude and Codex side by side, but I rarely have them work on truly-different tasks simultaneously.
The main reason is because if there's a significant bug or large optimization going on, that shit needs to be done, tested and merged before building more stuff on top, otherwise you run the risk of wasted time, tokens and effort having a bunch of parallel work running that may not end up compatible at the end.
Lately I've had a lot more success having Claude generate a plan, send the plan to Codex for co-validation/amendments, have Claude implement the plan, then have Codex PR review the commit (and likely make some edits of its own), then I test out the code/changes.
Meanwhile, my actual management of what I'm asking them to do is just a text file in Notepad where I'll write like BUG: xyz thing does abc or IDEA: let's change this to that as I'm testing in-app, with the actual code opened in Notepad++ tabs (lol feel free to roast me, I'm in front of 2 screens, one Windows (primary), one Mac (to the right), sharing keyboard and mouse -- LLMs are 99% on the Mac, planning/testing/verification/manual coding/graphic design on Windows, committing and pushing to a repo both machines have checked out)
I haven't yet found a scenario where many Claudes and many Codexes running simultaneously on 35 concurrent features makes any sense, but I'd definitely encourage people to try multi-model cooperation since they all seem to have different sensibilities. I haven't made much use of Gemini in this context though because two's company, three's a crowd. YMMV.
I’m on the $100 Claude and $20 GPT plans. I almost never run out of weekly usage on Claude and occasionally blow my Codex allowance, but OpenAI lets you buy credits ad-hoc (either $40 per 1000, or just turn on and monitor the “top-off” and set it to buy like $5 at a time. The one or two times I’ve run out, by the time the week resets, I’ve only spent an extra 5 or 10 bucks.
Using somebody's stuff is different than hot-linking directly to a hosted version of it, even just from the perspective that dude could delete it at any time and break the whole app.
Are you aware that common libraries like Bootstrap, FontAwesome, and HTMX walk developers through linking to their CDNs directly? In fact, FontAwesome recommends it for CDN performance.
I think you're dangerously mistaken if you believe that it "literally never" happens. It literally does happen all the damned time. And, for your own safety and others', you should assume that when you use any app for which you don't have the source code.
Linking to a CDN is for development only. Once the app is build you build your dependencies into the app. You don't fetch them at runtime and run them. Not only for security, but also for performance.
There's also a difference between using a CDN for, say, React and a random github project hosted by some dude.
Assuming everything physical gets tokenized (as occasionally gets predicted), people could soon literally lose their house on a bet! Maybe even a bet placed by their swarm of agents. The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades!
Worse: It won't even be your own bet that does the damage.
It'll be bets collected (or "lost" bets which are actually payments) by other parties that have an interest in an outcome which involves whether you lose your house.
Hence why we drastically reduced the number of wagers/addictive risk taking because of its cost on society.
The libertarians here will say "oh yay, we've won". Then a few years later they'll cry about your mom losing her house to a gambling scam with no recourse. Then they'll cry again when the voters finally rid themselves of the gambling scourge years later.
I don’t even know what to say here -- you’re entitled to your opinion obviously, and I disagree with it deeply, and the spirit of HN is to avoid personal attacks and reply with curiosity, but you kinda laid it out very plainly above. Where’s your imagination gone? Your connection to child-like wonder? Empathy for your fellow man?
Project Hail Mary isn’t Arrival, it’s ET mixed with Castaway. It’s about friendship and loneliness and the fragility of the human experience and the triumph of the human spirit!
Normally I’d just say “you didn’t get it, it wasn’t for you” but given the insufferable and total dismissal above, I’d wager it actually IS for you LOL but you chose not to receive the message.
Anyways, everybody’s a critic these days, I get that. I’d just encourage people to soften a bit and appreciate things for what they are (not what we want them to be)
>> It’s about friendship and loneliness and the fragility of the human experience and the triumph of the human spirit!
So is every Disney movie and that is what this but with the crappy Amazon Studios take on it.
>> Anyways, everybody’s a critic these days,
Do you believe a movie can objectively be considered good or bad? If you do you then believe some are better critics than others, the same some way some are better Coders than others or better Basketball players than others?
You're asking the wrong person lol. I can give you a list of "objectively bad" movies that I think are incredible for a variety of defensible reasons.
Just off the top of my head as I briefly scan shit sitting on the shelves of my office:
- Joe Dirt
- Death Wish 3
- Thrashin
- Hackers
- Mortal Kombat
- Uncle Buck
- The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
- Tapeheads
- Prayer of the Rollerboys
- Weekend at Bernie's
Not exactly Fellini, and some are barely even Andy Sidaris if we're being honest, but every movie in that list is amazing for different reasons. An objective critique of any of them (especially in context with "film", as a shapeless, vague concept) misses the point and the spirit of each and every one. But I am an uncultured heathen, so ...
Devil's advocate (because honestly I do agree with you, but..) -- help/encouragement often ends up turning into far more time and effort than it sounds like up front.
~18 months ago a friend of mine had a very viable, good idea for a physical product, but very fuzzy on the details of where to begin. My skillset backfilled everything he was missing to go from idea to reality to in-market.
I began at arm's length with just advice and validation, then slowly got involved with CAD and prototyping to make sure it kept moving forward, then infrastructure/admin, graphic design, digital marketing and support, etc, while he worked on manufacturing, physical marketing, networking, fulfillment, sales, etc.
Long story short, because I both deeply believe in the vision and know that teamwork makes the dream work, I am fully, completely, inextricably involved LOL -- and I don't have a single complaint about it either, but man, watch out, because if you don't believe in the vision but do have skills/expertise they're lacking, and opt out, friends and family will be the quickest and most aggrieved people you'll ever meet that think you're gatekeeping them from success.
Considering all of that, everybody in the chain prefers and benefits from sold-out shows for myriad reasons, and all live performance is theatre at its core anyways, so IMO what's a little extra theatre on top to make sure the shows go on in this year of our Lord 2026, where very little is cheap and affordable?
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