Watch John Oliver Go After Ticketmaster On Last Week Tonight
Nobody likes Ticketmaster. This was true long before Pearl Jam attempted to launch legal battle against the live-music giant in the mid-’90s, and it’s even more true now. Ticketmaster remains a necessary evil for just about anyone attempting to enjoy live music, and the company has been getting even worse at getting people into shows. The service charges, always infuriating, have just been getting worse, and the rising ticket costs and secondary-market bullshit have turned the whole ticket-buying process into a total hellscape. John Oliver has noticed.
On the most recent episode of his HBO show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver has turned his withering spotlight on the whole Ticketmaster enterprise, getting into the company’s sordid history and the effects of its merger with Live Nation. He also discussed the phenomenon of instant sellouts. As described by Oliver, that often happens because Ticketmaster and venues often hold back most of its tickets for the secondary market and for the bots who run it. Not great!
As with most John Oliver rants, this anti-Ticketmaster segment is both funny and genuinely aggravating, and it ably describes many of the reasons that Ticketmaster is such a nasty, powerful, rapacious institution. He’s right! Ticketmaster sucks! If you’ve been following Ticketmaster’s many scandals, there’s little new information in this segment, but it’s still cathartic to see Oliver put it all out there. Watch the segment below.
Remember when the Justice Department was going to go after Ticketmaster? Let’s get that going again.