Photo: Pearl Jam | By Nate Rogers, The Ringer | The biggest act in the country wants to sell tickets for a major tour, and Ticketmaster is standing in the way. It’s June 1994, and Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament are in front of Congress, providing testimony for a House Government Operations subcommittee hearing regarding Ticketmaster’s potential monopoly in the concert industry.
A few months prior, in October 1993, Pearl Jam had released their second album, Vs., and subsequently set the record for most copies of an album sold in its first week. A few months after that, in April 1994, Kurt Cobain died by suicide. Whether they liked it or not, Pearl Jam were now leading whatever the future of the music industry was, and instead of capitalizing on this, extending their tour of arenas and amphitheaters into the summer, they submit a measured protest to a handful of politicians. Gossard and Ament, two of the band’s founding members, grin as they’re sworn in. They’re wearing shorts. Vs., indeed.
What led to this moment was simpler than one might think. Pearl Jam wanted to cap the service-fee charge for their shows at $1.80, and Ticketmaster refused. (Usual service fees in this era were between $4 and $8.) Catching wind of the disagreement, the Justice Department prompted Pearl Jam to submit an antitrust complaint; by this point, Ticketmaster controlled around 90 percent of the ticketing market in the country, based on certain accounts. There was, briefly, the sense that some real antitrust repercussions might come of this. But none did.
“The whole thing was a joke,” Ament recalled to Spin in 2001. “The Department of Justice used us to look hip.” In the same article, singer Eddie Vedder summed up his feelings: “It was really amazing to be right up close and get absolutely stomped on by a huge corporate entity.”
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Nate Rogers is a writer in Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, GQ, and elsewhere.
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Go here to read the lengthy but very informative article:
https://www.theringer.com/music/2022/12/21/23519063/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-tours-canceled-live-nation-concert-industry?
Photo: Pearl Jam
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