One night in August, 2024, I sat on my bed in Los Angeles with three laptops and an iPhone, hoping to buy tickets for the Oasis reunion tour—the band’s first live venture since it abruptly broke up, in 2009. As it neared 1 A.M., I got in position, hovering my fingers over track pads. I’d selected a different tour date on every device, thinking I’d have better luck if I spread out the requests across several cities. When Ticketmaster’s website spit back my place in the queues, two of them (Manchester’s Heaton Park and London’s Wembley Stadium) appeared unquestionably hopeless, judging from the tens of thousands of people ahead of me. The queues inched along in the course of a few anguished minutes. Then seat maps miraculously popped up on two devices: I had somehow wriggled my way through thousands-strong lines for the tour opener in Cardiff, Wales, and the then final date in Edinburgh, Scotland. Desperate, I attempted to snap up four reasonably priced seats in either stadium, barely registering where I was clicking. I’d select seats and hit “checkout,” as fast, it seemed, as humanly possible, only for the site to tell me that they were no longer available. With every second that elapsed, my chances of securing anything tanked further.

Emotional whiplash is a feature, not a bug, of the modern ticket-buying experience. In recent years, purchasing concert, theatre, and sporting-event tickets has morphed into a byzantine humiliation ritual, with opaque fees—“service,” “order processing”—often tacking on up to twenty per cent more to base ticket prices. As the cost of living and inflation have surged, these types of live events have increasingly become playgrounds for élite V.I.P. experiences, with ordinary people shelling out the equivalent of a rent payment to catch a glimpse of their favorite artist.

Exasperated fans have long directed their ire at the ticketing platforms themselves, particularly Ticketmaster and Live Nation, two live-entertainment-industry behemoths that merged in 2010, when Live Nation, a concert promoter, artist manager, and venue owner bought the ticket-sales site Ticketmaster. The corporation’s management arm represents hundreds of artists, including some of the biggest stars on earth, and offers musicians incentives which include performing at the venues it owns. Reports indicate that it also commands exclusive contracts at fifty-three out of sixty-eight of the largest arenas in the U.S., which, in 2022, raked in eighty-three per cent of gross revenue across all arenas in the country (more than $2.4 billion). Every road, it seems, leads back to Live Nation-Ticketmaster.

Last Wednesday, the jury in a federal antitrust case found that Live Nation and Ticketmaster had operated as a monopoly, a decision that vindicated long-suffering ticket buyers. “I can’t wait for the judge to get hit with a $45 ‘Verdict Convenience Fee,’ a $30 ‘Gavel Processing Fee,’ and an $80 ‘Digital Print-at-Home Ruling Surcharge,” a Reddit user cracked. (After the verdict, Live Nation said in a statement, “The jury’s verdict is not the last word on this matter. Pending motions will determine whether the liability and damages rulings stand.”) But the verdict also confirmed something that fans were already intimately acquainted with: dysfunctional ticketing systems exploiting their passion. Therein lies the paradox: these maddeningly bureaucratic platforms have tapped into a business so lucrative—the creation of high-profile communal rites—that it literally has no bottom.

Surprisingly, even as consumers are made to jump through more and more hoops by ticketing platforms, they appear willing to further open up their wallets. The sadism of this dynamic surfaced during a shocking moment in trial proceedings last month, when attorneys presented exchanges between Live Nation employees: ticketing workers boasted about how live-entertainment fans were “so stupid” to pay the astronomical fees that the corporation had set for events. “Robbing them blind baby,” one wrote in an internal Slack message. “That’s how we do.” (In the trial, Live Nation argued that these were private, “irrelevant” remarks and thus should be excluded as evidence in the proceedings.) Last year, Live Nation raked in $25.2 billion in total revenue—as much as a nine-per-cent jump from 2024.

Ticketmaster was founded, in the mid-nineteen-seventies, as a computerized seat-locater and ticket generator, and went on later to share a cut of its discretionary “service fees” with regional venue promoters, as a way to secure their business. In 1991, Ticketmaster had become a big enough player that it acquired Ticketron, then its fiercest competitor. Ten years later, it hashed out a ticketing deal with the broadcasting company Clear Channel; in 2005, Clear Channel’s entertainment unit spun off as Live Nation. (The Wall Street Journal described how Live Nation was “widely viewed as a drag on the parent company’s performance.”) Ticketmaster’s contract with Live Nation expired in 2008. But, rather than competing with each other, the two joined forces. The Department of Justice cleared the way for the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger the following year.

In 2010, during one of the heavyweight speeches that the SXSW music conference, in Austin, Texas, often presents as part of the festival, Christine A. Varney, the former Assistant Attorney General for the D.O.J.’s antitrust division, stressed that the government had rigorously investigated the Ticketmaster-Live Nation deal before green-lighting it. “I understand that people view Ticketmaster’s charges, and perhaps all ticketing fees in general, as unfair, too high, inescapable, and confusing,” she said. “I also understand that consolidation has been going on in the industry for some time, and the resultant economic pressures facing local management companies and promoters. Those are meaningful concerns, but many of them are not antitrust concerns. If they come from a lack of effective competition, then we hope to treat them as symptoms as we seek to cure the underlying disease.”

In 2017, the BBC program “Backstage Pass” followed the former Oasis band member Liam Gallagher around at a few of his solo shows. One video clip showed Gallagher—a shaggy Gen X-er known for his crotch-forward gait and penchant for wearing parkas zipped up practically to his eyeballs—preparing himself a cup of tea backstage. In Oasis’s nineties heyday, Gallagher explained, he had four people to make his pre-show tea, including “a little geezer doing the kettle.” Not so much anymore. “No one buys records these days,” he said. “Now you gotta do it yourself . . . ’cause these fucking little smartasses download fucking tunes for nish,” meaning zilch. Pausing briefly to continue stirring his drink, he added, “Then they wonder why there’s no real rock-and-roll stars around.”

Gallagher’s profane monologue went viral on account of its absurdity—four people on payroll to brew a single cup of tea? But the rocker’s screed contained a truth, one that has substantially shaped the contemporary ticket-buying panopticon. After listeners drifted away from buying physical releases such as CDs and vinyl, starting in the two-thousands, touring has become a critical means for artists to earn their incomes.

A sobering Citi report noted that in 2017, the same year that Gallagher raged about his tea, the music industry generated forty-three billion dollars in revenue, of which artists saw only twelve per cent, mostly from touring. Citing a Billboard report, Business Insider noted that U2, the most handsomely paid group that year, saw about ninety-five per cent of their income come from touring in 2017. Present-day streaming giants such as Spotify pay cents per stream—a pro-rata system that overwhelmingly benefits the artists raking in the highest number of total listens. The rise of streaming has compounded the importance of touring for artists—if groups can afford to tour at all.

The iridescent glare of social media has further turbocharged the concert industry’s dominance. In general, fans posting online, in 2026, has become a smorgasbord of aspirational boasting, in a turn away from a more modest form of life-style exhibitionism once derided as “humblebragging.” And the ubiquity of posts that take viewers on experiential journeys—such as “come with me” videos popularized by influencers on TikTok—has accelerated the feeling that one doesn’t exist in the world, digitally speaking, if one isn’t physically present at Justin Bieber’s Coachella set and documenting it on one’s phone.

We are living in a post-COVID culture, and since the world began reopening for mass gatherings in 2021, fans’ desire to partake in experience-driven travel has fuelled the demand for live events. In turn, the live-music industry has rocketed to revenues greater than anyone had imagined.

Back in my West Coast bedroom in August, 2024, I continued wrestling with the Ticketmaster seating charts. Why was I willing to go to such lengths for a concert lasting two hours? Yes, I yearned to be walloped by Oasis’s meaty nineties riffs, but that didn’t explain my demented inclination to put myself through this stress. Rather, I had become possessed by the impossibility of this cultural landmark—in which the two feuding Gallagher brothers had decided to finally quash their rivalry and perform shimmering music together again. The chance to witness the reunion had stoked my worst impulses: an irrational fear of missing out, a willingness to overextend myself financially, a penchant for annoying my then fiancé, now husband by adopting the band’s familiar turns of phrase (i.e., “maybeh,” “Biblical”).

Suddenly, Ticketmaster prompted me to enter my credit-card information. I had less than five minutes to choose the Oasis gig in Cardiff or Edinburgh. Considering the Gallagher brothers’ infamous history of holding grudges, I wasn’t entirely optimistic that the band would be able to stay together through Edinburgh, but they could probably keep it together for the début. Cardiff it was. Five hundred and thirty-four dollars later, four tickets for the inaugural show at Principality Stadium landed in my inbox. I dashed off a text to my brother, a fellow Oasis head, that I’d secured us and our partners four tickets to see them in a year’s time: “We’re going to the first gig lads!!!!!!”

I had bested truly dubious statistics: fourteen million people worldwide had tried to snag tickets for this tour. This outsized interest in Oasis had prompted Ticketmaster to employ “dynamic pricing,” which increases fees commensurate to real-time demand. (Oasis later said that they hadn’t consciously opted into dynamic pricing, and that it created an “unacceptable experience” for fans; when they announced dates in the U.S., South America, and Asia, the band’s team said that dynamic pricing would not be employed for those shows.) I was struck by a variable response to gouging: dynamic pricing had sparked a far bigger outcry abroad than in the U.S. If anything, other Americans I spoke with seemed pleasantly surprised with the cost of Oasis tickets across the pond versus what they’d pay closer to home, not unlike Swifties travelling for the European leg of the Eras Tour for a fraction of the price. Navigating extortionate ticketing systems in the name of experience has, apparently, become routine.

Efforts to curb Ticketmaster extend back to the nineties, when the grunge band Pearl Jam took on the ticketing platform in an effort to keep service fees down to ten per cent, on tickets costing no more than eighteen dollars. Ticketmaster, wanting to charge more, refused; Pearl Jam, then one of the highest-grossing bands in the U.S., cancelled their tour, a partnership with Ticketmaster. The band filed a complaint with the Justice Department alleging that Ticketmaster had acted as a monopoly, with little recourse for those trying to operate outside of it. Pearl Jam did not win the fight, but their case illuminated Ticketmaster’s behind-the-scenes tactics, particularly the exclusive contracts that make up the backbone of its business model.

Other artists, including Bruce Springsteen, have tussled with the concert leviathan. In 2010, Ticketmaster settled a Federal Trade Commission complaint alleging that the platform had used “deceptive bait-and-switch tactics” to drive Springsteen fans away from Ticketmaster’s face-value offerings and instead to its resale site, TicketsNow, which sold tickets at up to four times the original price. (Customers were refunded these inflated surcharges, and its secondary-resale sites were disbanded.) In 2022, several Swifties filed lawsuits against Live Nation, including one alleging that the company had allowed bots to crowd the general ticket sale for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, thus prohibiting fans from buying face-value tickets. (Ticketmaster cited a “staggering number of bot attacks” and unprecedented demand as the reasons for the snafu.)

The U.S. government then opened an investigation into the Swift ticket disaster, efforts which, in part, set the stage for the present-day antitrust trial. Thirty-nine states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government joined a lawsuit claiming that Live Nation had elbowed out practically all its competitors and stuck consumers with higher fees, going on to command eighty-six per cent of the total market for live entertainment. Live Nation disputed these charges, but conditionally settled with the D.O.J. in March, agreeing to pull back on service fees and pay a fine of two hundred and eighty million dollars. But the states decided to move forward with the trial, thus resulting in last week’s verdict.

Music-industry advocates and the public reacted with elation. “This is incredible legitimacy added to what I think a lot of people have thought are just a bunch of hippies and hipsters shouting about the corporation for the past year,” Scott Mohler, the executive director of the Maine Music Alliance, said in an interview with NPR. What comes next is murkier. Assuming the verdict stands, the parent company will likely have to pay damages, and perhaps divest from exclusive ticketing contracts at various venues. Yet the states’ ultimate goal—to dissolve Live Nation and Ticketmaster altogether—feels like a steep ask in a regulatory climate that’s historically friendly to such giants. The company has said that it intends to contest the decision. The pending March settlement, which would also involve the company divesting from up to thirteen U.S. amphitheatres, was described by Stephen Parker, the executive director of the National Independent Venue Association, in an interview with Rolling Stone, as not “even significant enough to call it a slap on the wrist.”

Moreover, it seems doubtful that the resolution will meaningfully bring down ticket prices, at least in the short term. Nothing about touring is becoming less expensive, and numerous past victories have not led to long-standing structural reform. In late March, the Guardian reported that, after a December, 2024, crackdown from the Federal Trade Commission stipulating more transparency behind unexpected “junk fees,” tacked onto hotel and live-event ticket charges—like Live Nation’s processing fees—Live Nation instead adjusted other fees to “offset the revenue loss,” according to a 2025 e-mail that Ticketmaster sent to an arena in Arizona. Yet scores of working- and middle-class people, perhaps spreading out payments across various credit cards and “buy now, pay later” services, continue to buy tickets.

For my part, I saved for nearly a year to travel abroad for the Oasis show. The more responsible move would have been to go down to the record store and pick up, say, Oasis’s LP “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory,” going for a small percentage of what I paid for a ticket. Then again, I wasn’t thinking of that in Wales, my voice cracking as I howled along with thousands of other fans to the rapturous anthem “Supersonic”: “I’m feeling supersonic, give me gin-and-tonic / You can have it all, but how much do you want it?” ♦