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

Originally Published at Testset Media

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.

Todd Winniczek: The Justice Department settled before the states won at trial. Then we learned Michael Rapino had spoken with President Trump before the settlement. What are people supposed to make of that?

Omar Afra: They should make of it exactly what the known facts permit and not manufacture the rest. Rapino spoke with Trump about the antitrust lawsuit in February. Live Nation says they did not discuss substantive settlement terms. White House lawyers were also involved in some communications surrounding the negotiations. Then DOJ settled its case, while most of the states refused to go along and proceeded to trial. I am not going to invent a quid pro quo because I cannot prove one. I am perfectly comfortable saying the sequence deserves aggressive public scrutiny. More importantly, we have an unusually useful control experiment here. The federal government decided its settlement was sufficient. The states said it wasn’t, took the case to a jury and won. The DOJ settlement contains real concessions, including changes involving ticketing access and Live Nation amphitheaters, but it does not separate Ticketmaster from Live Nation. The states are now asking the judge to do precisely that.

Todd Winniczek: Will fans ever really divest from Live Nation or Ticketmaster if those companies still control access to their favorite band?

Omar Afra: That question exposes the bullshit hidden inside the phrase “vote with your wallet.” Vote for what? If your favorite artist is playing a Live Nation amphitheater, on a Live Nation-promoted tour, and Ticketmaster is the primary ticketing system, your alternative may be to not see your favorite artist. That is not robust consumer choice. It is abstinence. The court itself previously described allegations that artists seeking large amphitheater tours could be forced either to work with Live Nation or forgo those venues, which gets considerably closer to the structural problem than another internet argument about convenience fees. Fans can meaningfully divest when parallel infrastructure exists: independent venues, promoters, ticketing networks, settlement rails and artists willing to participate in them. You cannot boycott your way into a market that nobody has bothered to build.

Todd Winniczek: But aren’t artists responsible for some of these insane ticket prices too?

Omar Afra: Absolutely. The idea that Ticketmaster sits in a cave and personally chooses the face value of every big-box Beyoncé ticket is nonsense. Artists, agents, managers and promoters all participate in the economics. Guarantees have become enormous. Production expectations are enormous. That shit can change first. Some artists use dynamic pricing and premium inventory because the money is irresistible. We should be adults about this. What consolidation changes is the number of countervailing forces in the market. Competition is supposed to create friction. A competing promoter can make a better offer. A competing venue can make different demands. A competing ticketing company can charge differently. When those functions become vertically connected, the places where friction can occur begin disappearing. The jury’s findings matter because this argument is no longer merely a bunch of pissed-off fans calling a giant corporation a monopoly on Reddit; a federal jury found unlawful monopoly maintenance in major ticketing and large amphitheaters.

Todd Winniczek: Can independent promoters actually compete with that, or is “independent music” mostly nostalgia now?

Omar Afra: Independence only becomes nostalgia if independents insist on using nostalgic infrastructure. One promoter with a telephone and a stack of relationships is not going to defeat a multinational company with venue ownership, ticketing data, sponsorship operations, capital and touring infrastructure. The response cannot be performative social justice, cosplay entrepreneurship. Independents need shared technology, cooperative purchasing, portable fan data, common settlement infrastructure and alliances between promoters who spent the last forty years guarding their little territories from one another. The irony is that the live music business may need to become considerably more collectivist in order to preserve actual entrepreneurial independence. Shared infrastructure does not require shared ownership. Linux figured that shit out. Independent promoters eventually will too.

Todd Winniczek: You have been talking increasingly about fan ownership. What does a fan actually need to own?

Omar Afra: Start by recognizing what the fan already provides. Fans finance the event before it happens. They buy a ticket three or six months in advance. Their attention makes sponsorship valuable. Their posts provide marketing. Their presence creates the atmosphere that gets photographed and sold back to everybody next year. Then, after supplying the demand, capital and cultural energy, they arrive at the end of the chain as the object from which everyone extracts another eight dollars. That relationship is backwards.

Todd Winniczek: Does AI make the situation worse for musicians, or does it make live music more valuable?

Omar Afra: Both, but the second possibility is fascinating. Recorded culture is approaching infinite supply. We are going to have oceans of competent synthetic music, synthetic images, synthetic influencers and synthetic bullshit generated at almost no marginal cost. Scarcity moves somewhere else. A human being playing a room in front of other human beings suddenly becomes extraordinarily difficult to counterfeit. Live music contains sweat, failure, danger, presence and collective memory. You remember the night the PA blew up, the singer forgot a lyric, the thunderstorm came in or 5,000 people somehow sang the same line at the same time. Nobody is going to spend twenty years telling friends about the evening Spotify’s algorithm functioned flawlessly. If AI makes authentic human presence more valuable, the unbelievably stupid response would be pricing that experience beyond the reach of ordinary humans.

Todd Winniczek: So is the future of live music actually bleak?

Omar Afra: It is bleak if everybody accepts the existing machinery as natural law. It gets considerably more blessed if this moment produces competition rather than another round of cosmetic reform. The festival shakeout can produce stranger and more locally rooted events. The antitrust case can crack open infrastructure. Independent promoters can stop pretending independence means isolation. Artists can exercise more control over how their audiences are treated. Fans can become economic participants instead of ambulatory wallets. None of this requires abolishing capitalism or holding a séance for CBGB. It requires acknowledging that the existing live music economy was designed by human beings, largely in the interests of the people who own its pipes, and can therefore be redesigned by human beings. Live music existed before Live Nation. Music festivals existed before C3. Artists toured before Ticketmaster controlled primary ticketing at hundreds of major venues. The corporation is not the culture. We would do well to remember which one can survive without the other.

Omar Afra is a writer, cultural producer, and founder of Testset. His work focuses on culture, technology, power, war, and the infrastructure beneath public life. He also builds cedar pergolas.

https://testset.media/article/omar-afra-live-music-live-nation-ticketmaster-future

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