Live Nation has already sold 100m tickets in 2025 so far – compared to 98m sold in all of 2019

It’s no secret that the live concerts business has exploded in recent years.

After being stuck at home during the pandemic, fans were eager to get out and experience live music. At the same time, the shift to streaming globalized demand for concerts at a time when consumers in many developing countries have been growing wealthier.

All that has meant boom times for Live Nation, the world’s largest concert and ticketing company, which has been capitalizing on the boom through international acquisitions, dynamic pricing at its Ticketmaster division, and Venue Nation, the company division building stadiums, arenas and amphitheatres worldwide.

And this week, at an appearance at JPMorgan Chase’s Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference in Boston, Live Nation CFO Joe Berchtold highlighted a statistic that illustrates just how much of an impact that strategy has had for Live Nation.

Berchtold revealed that as of mid-May, Live Nation had sold 100 million tickets for 2025 – up from the 95 million the company reported just a few weeks ago on its most recent earnings call.

“Just for context, in 2019, we sold 98 million tickets in the full year,” Berchtold said. “So we’re sitting here now, mid-May, and we’ve already surpassed that.”

Despite an almost-universal expectation that the world will see an economic slowdown this year, amid tariff wars and other pressures, Berchtold stressed that Live Nation isn’t seeing any slowdown in live music demand.

He gave the example of Bad Bunny, who recently started selling tickets to a 30-stadium tour in Asia and Europe. The Latin music superstar sold more than 1 million tickets with a 98% sell-through rate in the first two days, Berchtold said.

“The majority of our growth has come from international in the past several years,” he said. “The majority of growth will come from international this year. [We] keep reminding ourselves there’s a big world out there.”

Here are five other things we learned from Berchtold at the JPMorgan conference:

1) Amid a shortage of space, Live Nation is getting innovative with venues

Venue Nation is racing to build or buy and renovate venues all throughout the world, but projects like that take time; meanwhile, opportunities are being lost due to a shortage of venues.

So Live Nation is taking matters into its own hands and coming up with solutions. One notable example that Berchtold offered was Rogers Stadium, a temporary, seasonal stadium-class venue in Toronto’s north end built on lands that formerly housed an airport. The space has seating for 50,000.

“We didn’t have the availability in Toronto for the volume of stadium shows – the Coldplays, Oasis and others – that we knew were coming through,” Berchtold explained.

“So we built a temporary stadium there. We’ll do 15 shows, 700,000 fans. That’s an opportunity for us next year.”

Berchtold added that Live Nation is looking at other markets for similar opportunities, and noted that, due to a lack of venues, many big stars are engaging in “semi-residency” – doing large numbers of shows at a small number of stadiums in order to meet fan demand.

“We’ll probably see a bit more similar semi-residency even at the stadium level, similar to what Beyoncé is doing – pick a few cities, do a large number of stadiums. So we’ll see some more of that activity.”

2) This is not the year to raise ticket prices – even though prices are rising slower than inflation

Asked how Live Nation plans to weather a potential economic downturn, Berchtold said the company’s “first lever” is pricing.

“We’ve been very conscious this year,” he said. “If you look at the stadiums, you look at the arenas, you’re not seeing in aggregate big pricing increases.”

Indeed, Live Nation’s latest earnings report showed that the average get-in price for stadium shows in the US so far this year is 8% below last year’s levels, at $60.

“I would say we’re still in the early innings of the industry becoming better at pricing, smarter at it,” Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino said on the earnings call, adding that it’s “somewhere between a science and an art right now.”

“If you look at the stadiums, you look at the arenas, you’re not seeing in aggregate big pricing increases.”

Joe Berchtold, Live Nation

At the JPMorgan conference, Berchtold added that, even if prices for back-of-the-house seats come down, Live Nation can still maximize revenue with better pricing for the most in-demand seats.

“How do you make sure the back of the house, the pricing on the back of the house, your get-in price, stays very accessible to all your fans…? Because that’s where you’re going to see the risk,” Berchtold said.

“On the other hand, [artists are] saying, ‘but I’ll take some more money in the front of the house because I know it’s there.’ I look at the secondary [ticket resale] market. I know I can get a bit more money there. So… I’ll still get as much money, but I’m going to be more specific in terms of how I price the house.”

Berchtold noted that the average get-in price at Live Nation shows today is “in the mid- to high $30s” (for all venues). That number “has grown slower than inflation since 2019,” he added.

3) Dynamic pricing actually mostly means lower prices, not higher ones

Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing model – which adjusts ticket prices in real time based on demand – has proven to be controversial among fans, as it has occasionally resulted in extreme price increases that have generated negative headline for the company.

One notable example: The 2022 sale of tickets for Bruce Springsteen’s tour, in which some tickets soared to around $5,000 a pop.

But Berchtold says this is not actually how dynamic pricing works most of the time – the practice largely means lower prices for seats that are selling slowly.

“Most of our so-called dynamic pricing is actually – I’m reducing the price of tickets that haven’t sold yet, because I see that the market clearing price, I’m not quite there,” he said.

“By definition, you can never raise the price of a ticket you’ve already sold. So… that’s why most of your dynamic pricing is actually lowering the price.”

4) Live Nation has a clever advance signal for a slowdown in demand

One last note on pricing: Berchtold revealed how Live Nation sees the first signs of a slowdown in demand for tickets: A narrowing of the difference between what Ticketmaster is charging, and what resellers are getting on the secondary market.

That’s “the first wall in any slowdown,” Berchtold said. “You’ll see the compression between the secondary and the primary [ticket markets].”

So how does that indicator look today? “We know that we are reasonably priced today because secondary continues to be priced – for the best seats – well above what the primary pricing is,” Berchtold said.

“That’s our first line of defense – one of the many things that we look at to gauge [if] demand [is] coming down or being affected at all. We haven’t seen that play out in pricing on the secondary.”

5) Transparency is the key to solving Live Nation’s public-relations strategy

Inevitably, the conversation at the conference turned to Live Nation’s public relations challenges – the above-mentioned controversies over pricing – and the US Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against the company that no doubt stems, at least in part, from those PR issues.

So how can Live Nation address the perception that it’s gouging music fans? For Berchtold, the answer has to do with transparency – that is, being open with customers about pricing.

“I don’t have a front row that’s a mile wide at $25 a ticket,” he said. “So the best thing that we can do is… just create a lot of transparency.”

To that end, Live Nation has been advocating for reforms of the ticketing for instance through its support of the TICKET Act, which is making its way through Congress and mandates “all-in” pricing for tickets sold online. The bill would also crack down on “speculative” ticket resellers, i.e. resellers who offer tickets they haven’t yet purchased themselves.

“I don’t have a front row that’s a mile wide at $25 a ticket. So the best thing that we can do is… just create a lot of transparency.”

Joe Berchtold, Live Nation

But Live Nation hasn’t been waiting for legislation: A few years ago it introduced all-in pricing at its owned-and-operated venues in the US.

Berchtold added that the company is also “doing a lot more communication” through the online ticket queue.

“You come to a high-demand on-sale, we’re going to tell you where you are in the queue. And it may suck to be 60,000, but it’s better than me not telling you and making you wait three hours and then you find out. We’re telling you what’s the range of prices that you’re going to pay while you’re in the queue, so you’re not surprised.”

The aim is to “give the fans as good of an experience as possible, recognizing the inherent limits on how many tickets there are and the fact that those tickets are going to be priced to represent the value they have,” Berchtold added.

He said he hopes that eventually Ticketmaster will be seen “as a utility, as a service that is provided efficiently and doesn’t have an agenda and is not trying to do anything nefarious.“Music Business Worldwide

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