I do remember this episode. They go into it a bit at the 5 minute mark, but didn’t get into many specifics.

It looks like Hollywood accounting to me still. If we look at the statements from Ticketmaster’s site for answers, we get:

Who sets the ticket price? Artists, promoters, sports leagues, or teams decide how they want to sell their tickets on Ticketmaster. That includes setting the face value prices, determining how many tickets to sell, and when to put them on sale.

How much money does Ticketmaster make from a ticket? Ticketmaster doesn’t keep anything from the face value cost of a ticket. We take a portion of the fees added to the ticket. As a ticketing vendor selected by the venue, Ticketmaster’s portion covers the costs of the technology, people, and resources needed to provide a safe and secure ticket-buying experience. It also covers the equipment and support we provide venues with, helping them to manage their box office and seamlessly get everyone into the venue on event day.

What are service fees? Service fees are an essential cost of putting on a show. The venue sets the service fee rate card and keeps most of the service fees, sharing a portion with Ticketmaster, sports teams, leagues, promoters, and other parties who have a hand in making live events happen.

Can you tell me how many tickets have been sold for an event? For all inquiries on pricing and sales you must reach out to the event organizer directly.

And if we look at LiveNation:

As the world’s largest live entertainment company, Live Nation is the one-stop solution for all your event needs. From corporate events to private live concerts, to social gatherings, our event specialists provide seamless execution, including event planning, experiential marketing, state-of-the-art equipment, live entertainment and more.

And also:

With over 150 venues across North America, we offer unique event spaces, state-of-the-art production and branding capabilities, as well as an experienced staff ready to exceed your guests’ expectations.

So while plenty of money is leaving Ticketmaster, a very large chunk of that is likely going right back into several of their other pockets.

The LWT piece also goes into how only a minority of tickets actually go to sale to the public, leaving the rest up for resale, which they also have the potential to get a slice of as well, and they have seemingly done nothing to combat resllers or bots.

So LiveNation I can understand having slimmer margins since they seem to be providing actual services and have overhead on their physical ownings and staff, but Ticketmaster itself still seems to mainly by an app and marketing department.