Earlier we reported that Louis C.K. has already sold over 100,000 tickets and made over $4.5 million, so you’d think that Ticketmaster would be pissed to miss out on that sweet action. Apparently, the opposite is true. Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard tweeted, “We love what @LouisCK is doing and support it.†He then goes on to rag on StubHub. It seems like Ticketmaster supports Louis with a certain degree of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Here are is his tweets:
Not only are they cool with Louis’s doing, he wishes more artists would as well. Which seems odd but it must mean that Ticketmaster is not worried. And there can be a few reasons why: 1) What Louis is doing is hard. Setting up a ticketing system and monitoring it is more work than an artist and his team usually invests in a tour. 2) What Louis is doing is kind of scary to many artists. To do this tour, Louis had to seek out venues that didn’t use Ticketmaster. As a result, this puts himself at risk. There is no way to say for sure that any of the venues are not up to standards but at minimum he and his production people will be working in unfamiliar spaces. This was the main reason Pearl Jam dropped their protest of Ticketmaster in the 90s. 3) What Louis is doing is losing him money. $4.5 million is a lot of money, but as he’s said it is not all his money. Also, if you divide that by how many shows he’s doing, it starts looking more reasonable, about $80,000 a show. Once you subtract out the cost it takes to use this ticketing system, the money that goes to the promoters and/or venues, and the increased production cost, Louis is ending up with much less than he would normally make on a tour like this.
The end result is he’s making less money for much more work. He is making sacrifices for his fans, which is incredible admirable. So, of course Ticketmaster says they are cool with it because they know a lot of artists would never dream of doing something like this. That being said, thanks Louis for being so super cool.