Omar Afra on Concert Pricing, Live Nation, Ticketmaster, and the Live Music Crisis

This is a short companion note to the Boston Courier article “Omar Afra on Live Music’s Corporate Death Spiral.

 A wide-ranging conversation about festivals, Live Nation, Ticketmaster, rising concert prices, promoter consolidation, independent music, artist economics, fan ownership and whether the live music business can still be rebuilt.

Interview by Todd Winniczek

READ THE WHOLE INTERVIEW AT THE BOSTON COURIER

Live music has rarely generated more money, which makes the number of people convinced the business is fucked worth examining. Live Nation reported $20.9 billion in 2025 revenue and 159 million fans across roughly 55,000 shows. Meanwhile, the average ticket price for the world’s top 100 tours reached $135.92 in 2024, up more than 41 percent from 2019. Smaller venues and independent festivals remain trapped between escalating talent, production and insurance costs and an audience whose disposable income has not been granted the same supernatural powers.

Then came April. After a five-week trial, a federal jury found Live Nation and Ticketmaster liable for illegally maintaining monopoly power in major concert ticketing and large amphitheaters. The jury also found that Ticketmaster’s conduct caused consumers in 22 states to pay an additional $1.72 per ticket. Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia are now asking U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian for remedies that include separating Ticketmaster from Live Nation and forcing Live Nation to divest major amphitheaters.

Independent promoter and perennial music biz critic Omar Afra sees all of this as a crucial inflection point for the industry. After two decades producing shows large and small, selling his festival business to Live Nation, starting over, weathering a string of controversies and returning with a strange mix of hard-earned perspective and a sizable chip on his shoulder, Afra has quietly set a number of new projects in motion, several of them well funded and deliberately under wraps. At the same time, his new live music dossier at Testset has become an increasingly aggressive examination of how the concert business actually works. Afra appears to be building toward something. The question is what.

We spoke with him about whether American festivals can have another golden age, whether consumers can realistically boycott a vertically integrated concert company, what Judge Subramanian might do to Live Nation, and why fixing live music may require something more ambitious than making Ticketmaster slightly less shitty.

Todd Winniczek: The headline calls this a corporate death spiral. Is live music actually in one?

Omar Afra: Music itself isn’t in a death spiral. To be clear, the music business has little or nothing to do with music itself. People still want and need plenty of music in their lives. Live Nation hosted 159 million people last year. The death spiral is in the logic we have wrapped around the experience; motherfuckers continually increasing extraction from an audience while consolidating the machinery through which that audience accesses artists. The top end is booming. Stadiums are booming. T Swift, Springsteen, and Olivia Rodrigo all have bright futures. The biggest artists can create insane demand. But those numbers can conceal what is happening downstream where the music itself is the driver. The industry can simultaneously generate record revenue while becoming less accessible, less diverse and more economically hostile to the people who actually create its culture. Live Nation itself says 75 percent of its U.S. tickets were available below $100 in 2025, and that matters. It is also true that the average ticket among the top 100 tours has climbed dramatically since 2019. Somewhere between those two statistics sits the actual consumer experience: ticket, fees, parking, drinks, transportation, maybe childcare, maybe a hotel. We turned the absolute cornerstone of counterculture into a discretionary luxury product and appear mystified that people are beginning to ration it.

Todd Winniczek: Do you think there will be another real U.S. festival resurgence?

Omar Afra: Yes, but hopefully not a resurgence of the same festival 75 times. The 2010s industrialized the American festival. At its worst, you could fly between cities and encounter essentially the same headliners, same stage infrastructure, same sponsorship village, same $17 beverage and same ‘fucking flower ‘live graffiti wall’. Somewhere in the midst of all that: Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. What comes next has to be more specific. Genre festivals, regional festivals, culturally rooted festivals, strange festivals, events with an actual point of view, asymmetric shit. The evidence already suggests that festivals themselves are not dying. This past summer was booming for festivals in Europe. Danny Wimmer Presents expects more than a million attendees across six core festivals this year, and some of those events are pulling roughly 200,000 motherfuckers over four days. At the same time, independent events are canceling at a rapid tick, straight up citing rapidly rising production costs. That tells me the audience hasn’t rejected festivals. It has become less willing to subsidize mediocre ones and have been priced out of the good ones. Great events are expensive.

Todd Winniczek: So what killed so many festivals?

Omar Afra: The spreadsheet eventually ate the mythology. A festival is supposed to be a temporary civilization. The lineup matters enormously, but people return because the event develops rituals, iconography, characters, geography, memories and a sense that they partially own the place. It is religious ceremony at its core. Corporate festival economics tend toward the opposite because efficiency rewards boring standardization. Talent gets more expensive, insurance gets more expensive, production gets more expensive, security gets more expensive, and eventually the promoter looks for anything repeatable across multiple properties. Pretty soon the festival has been optimized into an outdoor shopping mall where Lorde happens to be playing at nine. If the only meaningful distinction between your festival and six others is the ZIP code, you have already created the conditions for your audience to ask whether they really need you.

Todd Winniczek: A jury has now found Live Nation and Ticketmaster liable. What do you expect Judge Arun Subramanian to actually hand down?

Omar Afra: I think structural relief is now a very real possibility, and that would have sounded considerably more speculative before April 15. The states aren’t asking Subramanian to make Ticketmaster put a nicer font on the service-fee page. They are asking him to order Live Nation to divest Ticketmaster, divest major amphitheaters and restrict the company from recreating the same leverage through other arrangements. Their argument is especially strong because behavioral restrictions have already been tried. Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged in 2010 under a consent decree, and we are sitting here sixteen years later after a jury concluded that illegal monopolization nevertheless occurred. The states explicitly cite that history in arguing for structural remedies. My expectation is that Subramanian does something substantial. Whether every piece survives the appeals process is another question entirely. Live Nation has money, lawyers and time. Nobody should mistake a victorious verdict for the credits rolling.

Coverage summary and related live music writing: https://omarafra.com/press/omar-afra-live-music-corporate-death-spiral