u/alienblue89 and u/rieh break down the entire vertical integration of Liberty Media, owner of Ticketmaster

alienblue89

It’s way worse than that.

WAY worse.

Ticketmaster and Livenation are both owned by the parent company Liberty Media. In addition to TM and LN, Liberty also owns/absorbed Pandora, iHeartRadio, ClearChannel, and SiriusXM. So not only do they own and control almost ALL live music, but also virtually ALL terrestrial radio, literally ALL satellite radio, and even a bit of streaming.

And it gets worse. The controlling share of Liberty Media is owned by ONE old man. Which means this one dude: A. Decides what new music you can hear on the radio or satellite radio, B. Decides which music gets ads (via ClearChannel advertising and the massive chunk of podcasts iHeartRadio & Pandora control), C. Decides who is allowed to play in the bulk of live venues across the entire nation controlled by LiveNation, and D. Forces you to use Ticketmaster to not only buy face tickets, but also controls any resale tickets.

Basically from the very first time you hear a new band until you see them live, Liberty Media is controlling and profiting from every single step.

(And that’s just music. Liberty Media owns a whole slew of other stuff too).

rieh

Yep. Liberty Media also owns Formula One, MotoGP, Quint (which provides ticket sales for F1, the NBA, MotoGP, Kentucky Derby / other major horse races, a few major NFL teams, NASCAR, and the NHL among others.) They have racing, horse racing and sports tickets basically cornered.

They also own SiriusXM, the Atlanta Braves, Charter Communications (Spectrum), TripAdvisor, and Qurate Retail (QVC, HSN, and a few other retail businesses).

Greg Maffei, the president / CEO / chairman of these companies, used to be CFO at Oracle and Microsoft. He's on record as having donated around $200k to various right-wing organizations during the 2016 election cycle (250k in the '14 cycle and another $150k from 2018-2020, no data on the latest cycle).

Dude basically owns entertainment for a big chunk of Americans.

Edited to add clarification to Charter