So TM is just the stooge doing terrible things that the artist wants to do, but would prefer someone else take the heat for it? All while the artist engages fans as their parasocial friend, who would never do them wrong?

That's cynical enough for me to want to believe it.

Believe it lol [0]

"The acts are responsible for all of it. They set the ticket prices. They created the large fees. Ticketmaster is paid to take the heat. Because the acts don’t want their fans to hate them. Even worse, the fans don’t hate them even when they’re told the acts are at fault, they just don’t believe it!"

For more insight into ticket pricing, see [1]

That said, up until I read this Ars article, I understood what Ticketmaster was and why they exist and kind of had few problems with it or moral compunctions about it; the concert business is cut-throat and it's very hard to turn a profit without some of these tactics in place. I find this new revelation about protecting revenue by actively supporting + enabling the corrupt reseller market to be quite fucking distasteful though!

[0] https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2022/11/17/ticketmaster-swift-...

[1] https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2024/03/01/the-truth-about-tic...

There's an episode of Your Favorite Band Sucks that details a lot of how this works, and that's the picture they paint.

Unsure how accurate it is, but the guys who do the show have a lot of experience in the music industry.

You can find it on YouTube: Ticketmaster Sucks - Your Favorite Band Sucks Podcast