What do you think? I mean, is this a possibility? And what would you think of an Apple or Amazon link to Ticketmaster? Yeah.

Yeah.

So, you know, Amazon obviously went hard trying to do tickets a couple of years ago and it didn't work out.

But I don't like I've always thought, you know, the on the nose, you know, one of those companies would acquire them if there was the right scenario.

But the more I think about it over the last year or two, it's.

Who are the companies that could get through regulatory easily, that could present a new story and bring additional value to the asset of Ticketmaster too? Because those other deals, it's just those things will support the existing businesses, but it's not going to grow the ticketing business.

Right.

Do you think this represents a typical broker? Is this an outlier?

But what's your read on that story?

Yeah.

So I've just learned more than I'd ever like to learn about the government over the process of this bill.

And there's lobbyists that people pay simply to work attorney general.

And they spent a ton of money to miseducate and pressure Attorney General Bonta on.

on this issue, and he stated this $1.5 million that you brought up is $1.5 million just to study how this bill would be implemented and whether it would work or not.

And that's StubHub, who's spending millions of dollars to get in the way of everything, is basically saying, we're going to spend a ton more money to cause problems.

I think that one of the things we kind of learned on this, though, is that, you know, look, Rob Bonta is very invested in the antitrust victory over Alive Nation, right? He's not as invested in this case, right? And I think perhaps, you know, that was maybe, do you think it was an oversight not to bring him in earlier on this? Or, I mean, what's your kind of postmortem on the lessons learned here?

Was that the ruling? Clarify the ruling, and were you surprised by it?

Yeah, so...

You know, it's such a tough question to say surprised because Live Nation owns such a significant part of the market.

So they are quite likely a vertical monopoly.

That's not necessarily what they were found to be, but they were found to be a monopoly.

So, you know, as we kind of touched on earlier, the court system quite often isn't perfect.

But it used information that, you know, became interesting to a jury.

are

Randy, what are the main conflicts here that you see for StubHub? What do you think is going on?

Yeah, so there's a huge conflict here in a CEO's fiduciary responsibility to shareholders when, you know, whether I like it or not, StubHub has sellers on their platform, that's their customers, that is currently legal in the majority of the U.S., Now you have a CEO of that company that is listing tickets on the platform and highly likely to be giving himself preferential deal terms based on what we can see from the company's own filings, which means that he pays less money in fees on a ticket he sells versus a customer.

Then you also have the issue that StubHub doesn't display every ticket that is for sale on the platform.

It has some filters to pick and choose which ones are listed so that it creates more FOMO from the fans.

And who do you think is going to get the preferred listings? The CEO or their registered sellers? So you start to get into this scenario.

While I hate these scalpers who are reselling on the platform, These guys are now getting pushed below what the CEO is getting.

And then you go a step further.

Right.

What does that, what does that mean, um-

Yeah.

So basically what that means is there's a lot of powerful people who've done everything in their power to stop both these bills from moving forward.

Normally, a bill, it's heard by one committee, maybe two committees in the Senate and the l- uh, the Assembly in a state.

The scalpers had spent literally close to $2 million in California so far this year to get everybody to raise their hand and say there's a problem with it, which makes you go into another committee.

Each committee that you're in, they vet you and then go, "Oh, you are actually okay.

These people we spoke to were full of it," and they let us proceed.

Crazy

[laughs] But what, but, but what's, what's the, what's, what's the real mechanics of it all?

Yeah, so the, the best way to explain this is everybody thinks that as a fan they're the customer of Ticketmaster or Access, and at the end of the day, the customer is the venue who signs a contract with them.

These venues actually get paid a huge advance by the ticketing company to be their partners.

Then that ticket fee that we all pay, which is some exorbitant fee where we're angry we're paying to Ticketmaster, three-quarters of that is going to the venue even though it says Ticketmaster fee.

And through all of that, it's, it's an entire system built to make Ticketmaster the bad guy.

And not that I'm trying to defend them, it's just how the system's been developed.

They're the bad guy.

... people that are buy- as consumers as well? Like, what, what, what's the answer here?