Dating back to Metallica’s 2017 WorldWired North American tour, a secretly recorded phone call obtained by Billboard shows Live Nation president of U.S. concerts Bob Roux, Metallica ticketing consultant Tony DiCioccio, and a third-party promoter named Vaughn Millette arranging the sale of 4,400 tickets per show (88,000 total) directly to secondary retailers like Stubhub.
Furthermore, the revenue split would offer Metallica and LiveNation 40% of the resale profit each, with 20% set aside for DiCioccio and Millette.
According to Billboard, the parties involved also strategized how to cover their tracks. “When this happens, 4,600 tickets into a single account,” Roux allegedly says on the recording, “there may be some eyebrows that get raised.”
In the wake of the report, Live Nation admitted to Billboard that “the company has facilitated the quiet transfer of concert tickets directly into the hands of resellers through the years, though only at the request of the artists involved — who control where the tickets are initially sold.”
And while Live Nation says that between 2016 and 2017, “about a dozen artists out of the thousands we work with asked us to do this,” they claim “requests like these have declined virtually to zero as tools like dynamic pricing, platinum seats and VIP packages have proven to be more effective at recapturing value previously lost to the secondary market.”
Metallica, on the other hand, claim that while the band members were not personally aware of the ticket scheme, DiCoccio remains a member of their inner circle. “If there’s five seats on the jet flying home, it’s the band and Tony,” a source who has worked with DiCioccio, told Billboard.
18 Comments comments associated with this post
Direwolf
July 22, 2019 at 8:28 pmLive Nation=Organized Crime
Piat
July 22, 2019 at 4:02 pmLive Nation, Ticketmaster and Metallica…they’re a bunch of greedy pieces of s#%t! F$?k ‘em!
Bill graham cracker
July 22, 2019 at 3:15 pmKB and Richard both make good points. It has taken a lot of fun out of it and they do want to create false demand. In the last two years they have made it the norm to pay around $100 or more for a couple hour concert. That takes many people 5-10hrs of work to earn enough for one concert. Not fun then. I buy a lot of tickets and it’s amazing, I’ll use the map feature and see that sections are basically sold out minutes after onsale. I’ll buy “bad” seats and then see the entire section go from almost sold out to almost completely available and then buy a better pair. I see this A LOT at theaters especially. The worst thing they have done IMO though is the “dynamic” pricing. This has fucked me over really hard multiple times. For example U2. I very stupidly bought like $400 tickets (each). Turns out they were the worst seats in that price bracket. I then tried to sell them after I found cheaper seats that I liked the location of better. It got close to day of show and they had not sold but I was confident they would. Ticketmaster then dropped the price of their remaining stock in that price bracket (which miraculously included seats better than mine) by like $200. So to recover my money I had to sell a worse seat at double the price the venue was selling for. Obviously no one bought my tickets. So I was forced to try to drop my ticket price to match Ticketmaster’s price to just get some of out money back. THIS IS THE WORST PART!!!!…..Ticketmaster would NOT let me drop my price past a certain point. They dropped theirs like $200 but would only let me drop my price by like $50. They FUCKED me SO HARD it literally hurt. Not only is selling directly to third party/secondary market slimy and dirty and sleazy the other practices are even worse. It’s really sad this industry has been monopolized. It’s the last one that should have been but that big money is hard to turn away. 🙁
Half the seats now are “VIP” seats. VIP in the balcony? Blow me.
RichardsPoor
July 22, 2019 at 9:54 amAbsolutely, KB, absolutely. Its amazing what goes on and people are generally blind to it. “Presales”, VIP packages, holding back seats, Credit Card “special offers”, etc are designed to do one thing: Create an air of scarcity and false over demand and get you to buy anything to exploit the fear of missing out. With few exceptions. Its best to wait day of show and instant download. However for those traveling distances and naturally anxious…
KB
July 22, 2019 at 9:34 amNobody can be surprised by this load of shit. We’ve all known for a long time they’ve been doing it. Finally, somebody did the work to prove it. I stopped obsessively going to shows when Mike Houser passed away and I’m glad because of shit like this. I refuse to pay surge pricing or buying from their secondary sites (I’ve spent tons of time trying to get to the actual location of real tickets just to be constantly redirected to their secondary site and then quit trying). If I can’t buy a ticket from the source then I’m not going. They have taken a lot of the fun out of going to music when they attempt to suck every nickel out of your pockets.
cosmicbein
July 20, 2019 at 3:39 pmSo dig this.Last years 1st tour of Bob Weir and the Wolf Brothers, tix to the Santa Barbara show sold out in an hour i was shocked to see this,i mean i can see a sell out but in one hour? I placed a call to the box office at the Arlington Theatre they indeed said it was sold out.I told the lady that on Stub Hub there were already 100s of tix available at double face.She was and so was i smelling something fishy.Now i know the scam.Same thing happened at Fare Thee Well at Levi Stadium.Tix to the Santa Barbara show went as low as 15$ days before the show.Sad to see even Bob Weir involved in this rip off.And buy the way i bought 2 of those 15$ tix lol fuck them bitches.Dead Forever,Forever Dead
RICHARDSPOOR
July 21, 2019 at 12:18 pmOh, there is a lot of ticket game playing that goes on even outside of this latest scam. Got burned big time by $happy’s California FTW ticket “lottery”. They filled lottery requests with shitty and seats behind the stage seats then kept releasing much better ones as time went on, which I kept buying. Then I couldn’t give away the extras on site with tons of other people in the same boat. But I doubt “the 4” had anything to do with that.
todd
July 20, 2019 at 3:37 pmDead and Company does this. And that is true.
Exit Sandman
July 20, 2019 at 10:32 amI’m done with Metallica. This sucks. What a fuc#!n bag of s#!t move by all parties. Step up “government” and make a move to fix this monopoly mess.
RICHARDSPOOR
July 20, 2019 at 8:45 amDespicable, but no surprise here. “Resale” tickets show up and are available moments after tickets go on-sale. Humans can’t flip that many that fast. Clearly something was afoot.
ljm
July 19, 2019 at 10:43 pmWe must never forget that Bonnaroo (eh um Live Nation) booked these steaming turds…
Lars' Dad
July 20, 2019 at 10:19 amThe worst headliner of the 7 Bonnaroos Ive attended 03 – 09
hatle
July 19, 2019 at 10:37 pmSome kind of monster. Go shoot another hibernating bear, James…you human paraquat
Pill Mickelson
July 19, 2019 at 10:12 pmGet off my lawn.
Fanning
July 19, 2019 at 7:51 pmGreedy bitches. Shameful. They never got a dime from me, never will, Rot in hell, scum
Sean Parker
July 19, 2019 at 5:03 pmThe good news is I was never had. Wouldn’t go if free tix w/ backstage passes, but, gee, i just realized: Hmmmm, I could RE-SELL them perhaps. LOL
jaggerrich
July 19, 2019 at 4:57 pmWhat utter, and true shitty scumbags, Always knew there were, re: Napster and Bootlegs, etc.
Bud Fox::: “How much is enough, Gordon?,… How many yachts,….can you water-ski behind?”
Lars
July 19, 2019 at 4:35 pmFrom the guys who chased down Napster. Pot calling the kettle, t-shirt, and jeans black.