Live Nation Australia boss lifts lid on loathed dynamic ticket pricing

Michael Coppel, chairman and 20 per cent owner of Live Nation Australia, has offered a rare glimpse into the controversial practice of dynamic ticket pricing, while defending the company against “misguided statements” in recent “adverse media coverage”.

Coppel, whose company was acquired by US parent Live Nation Entertainment in 2012, appeared before the Inquiry into the Challenges and Opportunities within the Australian Live Music Industry in Canberra on Monday.

Michael Coppel appearing before the Canberra inquiry on Monday.Credit: Screengrab

He presented dynamic ticket pricing – in which highly desirable tickets are sold for a multiple of their ostensible face value – as a necessary response to a growing challenge.

“The music industry has a very threatening trend, and that is the secondary ticketing market and the scalping market,” he said.

“There is a very substantial outside industry that ... uses bots and other illicit means to acquire tickets to in-demand performances and sell them at a very inflated mark-up. And none of that money comes back into the industry. There’s no investment, there’s no risk-taking, there’s purely arbitrage.”

The new approach, which was recently trialled in Britain for Oasis’ coming reunion tour but has been ruled out locally, was an attempt to “capture as much of the value as we can for the artist”, he said.

Live Nation Australia sold all 270,000 tickets to Oasis’ five 2025 Australian stadium shows within 36 hours of them going on sale.Credit:

He added that “dynamic ticket pricing” was a misnomer because prices were not determined by an algorithm responding to demand, as with Uber’s surge pricing.

“We speak to the artist before every tour and say, ‘We think this will be a high-demand performance. Do you want to consider setting aside a percentage of the house [seats] at a higher price that we can release if the demand turns out to be there, but that will capture some of the value that will otherwise go to scalpers?’

“And the artists will say, ‘OK, we’ll do 10 per cent of the house, or 5 per cent of the house, or X thousand tickets.’ And we’ll cap the increased price at two times or three times the face value of the ticket.

“So we’ll nominate those tickets in advance, and we’ll put them on hold … If the demand is not what is expected, those tickets will be marked back to the standard price... If there is a high demand, we’ll release those pre-nominated higher-price tickets to capture some of the value.”

Some states in Australia have laws against hyperinflated ticket reselling. In Victoria, the mark-up for tickets for declared major events is capped at 10 per cent above face value. In South Australia, it applies to all events for which a resale restriction is in place. In NSW, the cap applies to all events.

Live Nation Australia has been in the spotlight for a couple of years, as Australia’s live music sector has struggled after the pandemic amid cost-of-living crises and after two of the major music festivals it owns, Falls and Splendour in the Grass, were cancelled. A Four Corners report recently accused the company of charging consumers hidden fees, “robbing” artists and “misusing” its market power.

“We wanted to hear from Live Nation,” said committee chair Brian Mitchell as he welcomed Coppel to the hearing. “You’ve come up a fair bit throughout the inquiry, both good and bad.”

While Coppel presented secondary ticketing as a threat to artists’ incomes, it is, in fact, a crucial part of Live Nation’s business model.

The parent company’s most recent annual report states its intention to “grow the volume of secondary tickets sold”.

Emerging or emerged?: Tones and I.Credit: Richard Clifford

Asked what the company was doing to promote emerging Australian artists, Coppel referenced its Ones to Watch initiative, in which the company claims it has “promoted over 900 shows for developing artists” in smaller venues (below 1500 capacity) since 2016.

He then gave an example of an Australian artist who had benefited from the company’s support.

“We put Tones and I out with Pink on Pink’s 20-stadium tour earlier this year, put her in front of an audience of nearly a million ticket buyers,” Coppel said. “She has now toured and done 22 shows as a headliner in arenas around Australia.

“I look at that and I see the progression of an Australian artist who started out busking and has ended up as an arena headliner. And I see the potential for any Australian emerging artist who is given the opportunity to have a similar success path.”

It’s unlikely, though, that many struggling musicians will accept the characterisation of Tones and I as an emerging artist.

Frankston-raised Toni Watson’s 2019 breakout hit Dance Monkey has been viewed more than 2.1 billion times on YouTube and won ARIA song of the year in 2020. She owns several properties on the Mornington Peninsula and was included on the Australian Financial Review’s Young Rich List in 2023 with an estimated fortune of $35 million.