Fred Rosen

My firm was us. We had a small firm, and we were in a suite of attorneys, and a lawyer called me who was on the other end of the floor, and he said, there's a guy who wants to go into ticketing. Why don't you come talk him out of it? And I went and met him. Oh, I met We we met on the phone and he said, gee, you know more about this than I do. Are you open to coming to Chicago? And that gentleman's name was Bert Canner.

And as a result of that, I became special counsel to Ticketmaster and six or seven or eight other companies because he would make investments between three and five million dollars in these various companies. And this was early night. I couldn't tell you the month, whether it was February or March. And then in the spring of eight two, company was running out of money A little bit slower, A little bit slower. So you were based in New York and then you moved to Chicago. No, I never

moved to Chicago. I was I lived in New York and I had clients all over the country and Bert was a client in Chicago. Okay, where did Burke get his money? Bert was a very successful attorney who represented a lot of people, um wealthy people, and invented tax shelters, and he was a pretty smart guy, was a tax attorney. So he put together a group who invested probably in at least ten companies more than I represented. And he would put in seed money or venture capital money in

the late seventies and early eighties. And how many of these companies other than Ticketmaster were in the entertainment sphere. None. Okay, So now it's the spring of eighty two, he's running out of money. Pick up the narrative. He says he's going to close it and he doesn't want to fund it anymore. And I said to him, um, I don't think you should do that. Let me see if I can go raise the money UH and buy it UM

and put together a group to buy it UM. And subsequently we talked to a bunch of venture capital people and we were going to raise four million dollars and we had commitments for three and we had met j Pritzker who said, if you can raise the other three, I'll put in the last million. And then at I Double AM in Milwaukee and two, which was July, I believe I was in Milwaukee, and he said to me, UM, why don't you come down and spend the afternoon with me?

He lived in Winnetka, Okay. For those who were not savvy, the I double a F Is that a union? I presume? No? No, The I double AM was the industry where you'd have UM. It was a convention, sorry about that, where UM people who did seating, food service, ticketing. It was basically the industry around arenas and stadiums. Okay, just one step before we go there, we'll continue. What was the status of ticket Master when it was seemed to be running out of money. UM it owns losing a couple of million

a year. It owned UM small pieces of different operating systems, and in March or April of that year, I signed a letter of intent with the Chicago White Sox that basically required three things Bob, One that we'd have a data center up in Chicago by the fall of eighty two. Two as we tell him who the outlets would be, and three as we get the company financed. So let's go back to Milwaukee. You're trying to raise the three to get the one from Pritsker. Continue, I have commitments

for the three, and Pritsker says, come see me. So I go see him, and we spend four hours together and he says to me, why don't I just do this myself? And that's how it stored it. Okay, So the other people who assembled the three, they were fine to walk away because it was a long shot in their minds. We paid him a fee, as I recall, we paid them a walk away fee. No papers were signed. These were all verbal commitments. Okay. So when does he invest is for? And what ownership position do you get

when he invests for? Um, we've never discussed that publicly, and I'm not gonna do that now what the ownership position was, but um, he invested it, I believe in September of eighty two. And you did get an ownership piece, Yes, I did. There were only two owners of the company, he and I. Okay, so now you're running again. Tell me what happens. That'll take two hours. Um. We right a business plan that's gonna be Chicago in New York, and we opened in Chicago in the fall of that year.

We have outlets. Said, of course, for those of you who don't remember, there were outlets before the internet. Those stores physical locations and a phone room. And the outlets were in sports Mark, which was a sporting goods store, Rose Records, and Carson Perry Scott. And we had both baseball teams, the White Sox and Cubs. And we had a deal with the big concert promoter, which was jam Um. And we were talking to everybody, okay, just before that,

who were they using previously, Well, everybody was using ticket Tron. Okay. Ticket Tron was was the you know, main player at the time. And our business plan was to open in New York and there was six major clients in New York. There was Madison Square Garden, the Meadowlands, Nassau Coliseum, one of the theater group's legitimate theater, and then both baseball teams, uh, the Yankees and the Mets. And and to open you would need four of the six if you had any

chance of making money. And interestingly enough, although we never got them as a client, then we could have gotten the Mets. We did have NASA Coliseum, Uh, but we didn't weren't making much headway in the fall of a D two and into the winter of a D two. So um I would say at that time we had a foothold in Chicago, difficult to get arrested in New York, and we just kept knocking on doors. Okay, just to be clear for the other many people who were not alive unlike you and me in that era, what was

your pitch to these companies? What differentiated Ticketmaster from ticket toront or any other service you'll find the shocking. My basic theory for going into this was ticket Mester had an operating system that was basically an inventory control system.

It was season tickets, group tickets, single tickets on one integrated system ticketsry and had two boxes one boxers the season tickets, one box was for single tickets, and as hard as that is to believe Bob, the boxes didn't talk to each other, so you end up having to manually put stuff together for the teams. And what started all this is when I was talking to this gentleman at the Chicago White Sox. I said, how many tickets

did you sell last night? And he said, well, we can give you an estimate, he said, because he said, because it doesn't always tie out, and you know, not being computer literate and not being sophisticated in terms of how things work, I assumed that people would say, Wow, I have this computer system that can now do this integration of all everything under one roof, and that would be meaningful. And I was only wrong. That was not That was not exactly what happened. It was okay for

the baseball teams, but not necessarily for the arenas. So okay, you're talking. We're still in eighty two, and you're telling me what happens right now, we're losing money. And I get a call in December um from I can't remember exactly who called me, but they said Steve Wozniak. As you may recall who was Steve Jobs partner when they

started Apple. This was this is pretty close to the conversation. Um, Steve, Steve Wozniak hates tike Atron because there were a lot of counterfeits last year at a thing called the US Festival. I'm not sure you even remember that. Believe me, I

remember it, do you? It was San Bernardino in that Glenn Helen and Helen Reginald Park, right, okay, And so there was gonna be three days at Glenn Helen Regional Park and then the following weekend was gonna be like Country and so it's sort of like the fore runner coach for for Coachella, but it had nothing to do with coach, not not even the slightest. So they called me up in New York and they go, um, Wasniak

hates ticketron. They want you to do the ticketing. And then I talking to a guy named John Ruby, who you may remember work for Barry Faye, and Barry Faye was getting the acts, uh, none of which I knew. Um, and they said you gotta come to California and I went, uh, that would be a no. Um. You know, I don't know anybody in California. I don't even know what California is all about. And um, they said, no, you gotta come.

So they kept calling and then Jerry Seltzer, who you may remember from Bass, was somebody who we had started talking to. And Jerry said, look, we could go to California. We could we could open in l A. I can send some people down from UM northern California. And there was a phone room in New York called charge It, which we initially took out the California and then throughout UM.

But you know, they kept pushing me to come, and so I flew out to California in January of and knew nobody, and I'm meeting these different people and I'm totally confused, and I'm showing up in three piece suits and smoking, so you know, it's the New York thing, New York cigars, you know, cigars and the whole silliness of that. And they say to me, look, will you guarantee the drop count if we give you the tickets, And, not knowing what the drop count was, I said sure

because I had no idea what that meant. But the drop count was basically, if the tickets at the floor, you pay for them, okay. And then they kept pushing on me to come, and I met Um Terry Bassett and Bob Gettys and um you know some other people. But I was gonna basically outsource the whole thing. I personally was not going to come to California. Uh. We were gonna bring people down from northern California and from New York. And what I figured is this UM wasn

was gonna spend a million dollars advertising on this. It was a free play. And they said, can you set up fifty hard ticket outlets? So this is what happened. In the months of January and February. We found a space in Korea Town in a company that a company named Rexon went out of business. It's amazing how I remember all this stuff. And they had a data center and we signed two leases, one for six months and one for five years because we didn't know if it

would work. And I put up fifty grand for six months, and I could have walked if it didn't work. And I figured, if they spend a million dollars advertising, maybe we can get a foothold. I wouldn't know one client from another at all. In in uh in l A. Now middle of February, I meet Terry Bassett and Getty's and Dad that people run an avalon which you well know. And and this was even before I met Brian Murphy, and basically, um, I tell him what we're gonna do.

And we we had a meeting at the Old Holiday Inn on the four oh five. We had breakfast, and I go back to New York and I've got everybody coming to l A. And Terry Bassett, who should rest in peace. I met him once. This is what I mean about serendipity in life. And Terry calls me. I've got lud dick Stein coming from Dallas. I've got Jerry and his people coming from Northern California. I've got guys coming from New York. We're gonna have it had to

go on sale April one. The guys at sport Mark agreed to do this from Chicago to l A. And then the guys from sport Mart introduced me to Music Plus, and Lou Fogelman at Music Plus said, okay, I'll become hard at ticket outlets for you. And I set up fifty hard ticket outlets, which, when you think about that, is semi insane. And Terry Bastard calls me up and says, listen, this will not work unless you come to California. Now I'm a New York I I go, what are you

talking about? He said, you need to come to California. I go, Terry, I met you once I got all these people coming. He said, Fred, if you don't come, this will fail. I'm getting killed everywhere else. I'm losing money in Chicago. I can't get arrested in New York.

And I figured what the hell? And I rent the house for six months and bring my family out to California in late March of eighty three and walk into the office April one and sit down with some of the people who were there and promptly fire them and say you'll be leaving. And um, that was the beginning. So how did it play out with US Festival? Well, the U S Festival plays out as follows. There's a

lot of advertisement going on. You've got Avalon. I proceed to sign contracts with Irvy Meadows, Avalon, Long Beach Arena, a couple of small venues, and then this is what happens. That's totally strange. Oh, we also put Return of the Jedi on sale um in advance and wind up selling fifty tickets. That was a Jerry Seltzer idea, and I said, who's gonna buy movie tickets? I mean, I'm from New York. I never thought of any of that as real as real. And we wind up and and Fox gets man at

us because we announced were selling movie tickets. You know, they have their home market. And anyway, it was sort of a camp. It was a mess on some level, but interesting. And so the Forum, UM, the l A Forum has a contract with Tigatron, which was an exclusive contract, and that's gonna come up UM in September one of and I meet Lou Bamister, who was the president of the Forum UM, and we start to negotiate, and candidly, Bob, I thought we were a stalking horse. So when you

think you're not, you have no shot. And I've said this before, when you think you have no shot to win, you kind of negotiate a certain way. And you know,

my view was they had a long term relationship. UM. At that time, I did not have Claire Claire Rothman, who was really a brilliant woman and the first really strong woman who ran in arena in America, UM, who was not too anxious to see us, And UM, I never thought we had a shot and one of the things I said to lou was, look, you need to let me know by June whether or not, um we can do this now. Part of what you want to

know is where did the economics come from. Early on, I learned that people were not gonna switch just on the basis you had a better system. But they all wanted to charge your dollar, and I said, I'm not doing that. All you do is complain that you don't have new equipment. You complain the equipment doesn't work, You complain you don't have the software you need. It has to be that I can make a profit. And then they go, well, if you do that, then I should

get this. And then finally it came to me where I staid, look, I need this to make money. If you want a quarter of fifty cents that gets added to what I make. And that was the negotiation. And then on June Louke called me and I take bad news better standing up. So I had just come back from a meeting and my assistant says Mr Bammis is on the phone, and I pick up the phone and I'm standing and lu says, we're close, but we're not there. And I went, you need to hold on because now

like my heart is coming. I mean, you can't see this in terms of how you knew me when we got bigger. This was the beginning. This was something where you knew if this happened, this was going to change the world. And I don't say that lightly. I meant it seriously. Because the Forum was one of the two or three what I call even though it was local building, had a national presence. So Lou says to me, look, we're close, but we're not there. I need a sweetener.

And and we were both going to a charity event that night, and I was going back to New York the next day, and I said, I tell you what, why don't you think about what you want and if that makes sense, will make a deal. Because I'm out of ideas. My my brain is gone. I don't have anything I can tell you. And while I'm driving home to change that for that night, it throwns on me, that's a pretty stupid way to handle that. You better come up with this solution, because this solution could be

he'd like the whole company. So I um came up with a solution and we I got to the charity event and I take him up on the side and we're having a cocktail and I say to him, what do you think about this? And he says, well, that sounds interesting. Let me think about it. Now. Picture this the next morning. This will tell you more about Lou bound, this gentleman, than anything I could say. I get on a plane in the morning, I fly to New York. I have a car picked me up and take me

out to a home in West Hampton. I'm not in the house. Ten minutes in the phone rings. It's Lou fred. I just want you to know you got the deal. Have a great July fourth weekend. I wanted to make you feel good about this. That was Lou. Now. A couple of days later after the holiday, wait wait wait wait wait wait wait, you left out a couple of things. Hey, what was Ticketran's deal? Be what was the sweetener? Money? Money in the money in the form of what it was rebates. But then also I agreed to do a

lot of software programming to him for no money. I would just do all the software programming. And then what what what? What? What was Ticketron's usual deal? You want to know the truth. Ticketron was so stupid. I looked at some of their contracts. They would give a rebate of a penny or two pennies after you reach a certain him. They saw themselves as a utility, not as a marketing company. All the checks came out of New York. There was no regional banking um. They they they saw

themselves basically as a utility. And I saw us I as a marketing company. Because if you go back to some of the history, which you probably remember, ticket Tron would get allocations. They didn't get the whole house now for him. They had the whole house, but there so you'd go to a baseball game and there'd be empty sections and then a ticket Trons section. And I remember walking into one baseball team with with the new owners, and the ticket manager said to me, oh, you're with

the ticket company. I'm working on ticket trans allocation. They pissed me off, so I'm gonna give them bad seats. I didn't say a word, and I walked out of the room with the two guys, and I go I thought the object was to sell tickets to the fans, not whether or not you pissed them off. Right, say said, don't worry about it. Were firing him, and they did. The end of the year. But the point was that ticket tron never saw themselves as a business. It was

owned by Control Data UM. The people who owned it didn't understand the business they were in UM. And I remember when I'd be in a meeting in Houston where we owned like seven or eight percent of the company, and it was a partnership of the Summit, the Astrodome Pace, Angelo Dross who owned the Spurs, and Ticketmaster, five partners, all of whom at that time hated each other and required unanimous consent to do anything, which means, of course

nothing got done. So I'm sitting in the room and they had a dent in the inventory, and within a year they had six because they started giving ticket try on allocations because they everybody was mad at Ticketmaster for whatever the reason. I had nothing to do with that. I didn't run it. And this was the thing that was really interesting to me. I said to them, why is there a dollar service charge on afforded dollar ticket?

And they said, because we have five dollar tickets And I said, yeah, but a afforded dollar ticket could have a two dollar service charge and a five dollar ticket could have a dollar And they said, you can't do that, and that was my famous line was that like one of the tablets, Moses dropped. And some of them found it funny and some of them didn't. But the point was, as I subsequently learned, the way the system was written, you could only have one service charge on an event,

couldn't have multiple service charges. You couldn't have multiple service charges in the marketplace. And in a world of self deprecation, this was common sense to me. I didn't understand why this thing happened. And then on top of everything else, I'm looking at their numbers. They've lost the inventory in those His prime was so they borrowed the money at twenty two and they're cash flowing money and they're complaining, and I'm sitting there thinking, you know, there's a business here.

Nobody wants to look at this as a business, but there's a business. And the thing it needs follows is One, you need multiple service charges to you need to have multiple service charges on the same event. Three, it's not a democracy. You have to make this where you have total control of sitting in a room, and you've got to be an All good negotiations are driven by if you can't leave the table, don't sit at the table. Okay, so you make the deal with the Forum. Pick up there.

Here's what happens the following week. I get a call on Monday. This is the week after he's told me we're going to do the deal, and a guy calls me from our office and says, we have a problem. And I said, what's a problem. He said, Lou wants to talk to you. That could mean anything. So I call up Blue and Lu says, Tikatron is not giving us the sixty day cancelation provision. They're gonna be out of here in ten days. They're not gonna honor it.

Can you put me up in ten days? And being the moron I am, and went, of course, without truly understanding what that means. And um, he said, Look, and I'll never forget what he said. He said, if I had any doubt before, I have no doubt. Now, no one's gonna muscle me and tell me what to do. Take a tron did a real New York in your face move. Nobody knows this, Bob, I've never told this story publicly. That's really true. So now I called my guys and go, okay, we need a phone line into

the Forum. So they called me back and say, okay, they're gonna put him in on Thursday. On on Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday morning, I get a call going they said they can't put it in for two months now. I'm sure you know I've occasionally raised my voice and let's just say I blew a fit at peg Bell and they agreed to put in one line on Friday. And I had a guy who was really smart who built a black box and we ran the whole Forum

box office of one line, one telephone line. And I said to Lou, look, I'm coming back this week, and Luke said, no, you're not. You have you a vacation. You need to come back Monday, which is like the tenth of the eleven And on the sevent the Journey sale was going on sale. A Journey concert was going on sale. And so I fly back on Monday. On Tuesday, I mean, we send them the contract. On on Wednesday,

I mean the offices of the Forum, which is down stairs. Upstairs, they're moving in equipment and training people and Lou and I, because we don't have time, I'm marking up the contract I gave them. And that's the contract we signed and then here's the best part. Because they were all chicken scratches and we didn't know what they meant. Louis this, lou is a total gentleman. So Louid called me up and go what does this mean? I go, I don't know. He says, what what do you think it means? I said,

it means whatever you wanted to meet. He said, well that might be fair, and I go, Loo, listen to me. Whatever you needed to mean. It means let's not waste time with contracts. Just tell me what you need, will take care of it. And then, of course I never lost the Forum as a client, obviously, because if you've

you've built those kinds of relationships. So the concert goes on sale on Monday, and then the whole country finds out that Tikatron pulled out, you know, in ten days, you know, and didn't give them on at the sixty day notice, and obviously that became a marketing um benefit um. And then about two months later, there was a regional convention on the West coast, like the I Double Lamb

and which was national that I went to. This was local, This was the whole West coast, and I figured take a tron would get up and they would apologize for their behavior and say, the industry is important. We're not going anywhere. We made a mistake because they bet. We couldn't put them up, and they didn't say a word. And I said to my guys, we own this industry. Or when I say we own it, we will. We will put them out of business. They're too stupid for words.

And I said it will take time. But what they should have stood up with this group of people is we're sorry, we care about you. We did the wrong thing. We should have stepped up, and they didn't do that. And it went around the country. And then what it also did is it gave me name recognition for people to talk to me. And that's the beginning. That was really the beginning. Okay, so from the very big the big differentiator from the consumer end was the Ticketmaster. You

could choose your seat. Was that a feature from day one? Yes? Best available seat. I mean one of the things we said is we have ticket centers, not remote outlets. And a remote outlet men a remote seat. Listen. We made all this stuff up as we went along, but the point was you had the whole inventory of what went on sale, whatever, the building gave you. So an exclusive is not what everybody thinks. And exclusive is the buildings

decide what they're gonna put on sale. Ticketmaster doesn't decide that. The buildings decide that. So in the forum, where it was twenty seats US Senate Terrorists, senate Terrorists was equivalent to season tickets because they didn't have suites. So you'd get anyway from ten to twelve thousand tickets on a concert, not twenty. And when people would talk about exclusives, and it was one of the things that I think, um

as people learned, it was not what it meant. Exclusive in the world meant wow, you got every ticket, Well you don't. And the truth is that everything in an arena is exclusive, whether it's food service, whether it's parking, whether it's you're a concessionaire in the building. And the way I saw the business was it was no different than a food concession. The public paid for that. If you're going to create outlets and phones that make it easy for the public not to go, you're entitled to

get paid. And to me, that's why we called it a convenience charge. And what people never understood is the public was never our client, our client with the arenas and theaters and stadiums, and you serve the public because underneath it was this, because this is something you need to know in the sense of the way you you've written over the list forty years. Every arena manage is concerned about the team. Every arena manager is concerned about

family shows. You know what. Arena managers were never concerned about rock and roll orphans. People would come in and trash the buildings or they would come in and it wasn't a business the way it was. And here's the part. When I got into business, sev of all tickets for shows was sold at the box office. And my bet was, if I can create an outlet system that you can put in logo slicks with a with a phone number,

that nobody would go to the box office. That in the end, because no box office is near where anybody else is, and who the hell wants to camp out. So the perspective was that was the bet I made. I could have been wrong. I mean, there was no

guarantee I was right. Was that. Look, if you create an outlets system where everybody has access to the same inventory when it goes on sale, including what's at the box office because take Atron in some instances would all their outlets weren't open, all their alice weren't open store hours, all their outlets weren't open on the day's shows, one on sale. I can take you through ten things take Atron didn't do, and I wasn't gonna do any of them.

And at the beginning, when we were losing money, and people said, well, we'll give you an allocation, and I went, no, No, it has to be best available seat, because if I can't sell best available seat, I'm another version of them, and I'd rather go down with the ship than than build a business on the wrong level. They failed at this, and I can't tell you how many times I sat it at at in a in a negotiation where people said, we'll give you an allocation and I go find it. Well,

that's very nice, We're not taking it. We're just not gonna take it. Okay. At this point in time, is Ticketmaster your full time job? Are you still practicing law in other areas with other clients? No? No, No. In two in September, when he funded, I left my practice and became CEO of the company. That's what I did, right, Okay, So you get the Forum. That's the first turning point, and that of course is mostly concerts. Whatever did you get the sports teams at the everything? Everything? Okay? So

how did you ultimately gain market share? Well, you started talking to people. So we started talking to Universal, we started talking to the Hollywood Bawl, we started talking to I have to tell you, to be fair, a lot of those brain cells died. But we started talking to everybody. And Jerry Seltza had a theory because I only wanted to deal with the big venues, and he said, no,

you gotta deal with the clubs too. So we dealt with the small clubs, we dealt with the medium sized clubs, and we dealt with and Be and he was right. And then we dealt with the arenas, and uh, you know, Universal came, the Hollywood Bowl came, Irvine Meadows was already along for the ride. And then you have to understand something. I didn't know anything. I'm a lawyer, what do I know about running a business. So you wake up one morning and you took yourself into this, right, I mean

you're there. And to be clear, because you asked the question about Jay Jay was j Prisker was both a mentor and like a second day to me, it's important that I say that. So when we when when he was gonna put up the money, I served up the employment contract that UM I was gonna do with these um UM venture capitalists. And then his lawyers get involved, and I called him up because they, you know, they looked it tough and I don't want to deal with that. And I called J up and I said, you know

what I feel like. I'm sitting in a closet with no windows. The fact that you think I could use an employment contract against you when I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to make money UM and make this company work. I can't wrap my head around. So I'll make you the following deal. You know what it says. I know what it says. And we lived on a handshake for twelve years. There was never a piece of paper. Wow, So so you know, so the dynamic was that we

were we became very close. He wouldn't fire me, I wouldn't quit. We had some interesting moments, but the truth was it was a handshake. And if Jay was not my partner and he owned more than I did. To be clear, UM the company would have failed because private equity guys worried too much. Jay only cared about one thing. As long as you were honest. He didn't care. And you know, people would call him up and go, you know, Frit's pissing me off, and go, well, you have to

talk to Fred. That was the kind of owner he was, and that was the kind of partner he was. It's even better way to put it. And so in eight three, I'm I'm, you know, doing stuff you know, and I don't know anything. So I think, you know, I got an interesting idea. I'm gonna have a meeting every day at eight o'clock and everybody's gonna tell me what they did the day before. And people would come in at eight o'clock and I would tell everybody, look, even if

you're installing machines, you're in marketing. Because they don't meet me, they meet you. You have to think about who what you are and then come back and tell me what they say. And during that year I learned everything that was to learn. Well, let's put it like this, the basis of the business, where the money was, how everything I did, every job, how everything worked, what I was asking people to do, what counted what didn't count. And

you'll find the shocking because I never wrote anything. Everybody knows that was a big joke with me. Every morning I woke up, took out a yellow pad, wrote fifty forty to fifty things I wanted to do, and ripped up the sheet, and then in my mind during the day I crossed things off and the next day I would start again. I worked from the time I woke up until I couldn't see anymore. But I'm useless after eight thirty or nine o'clock at night. So it was

like you had to have dinner, but I was. I knew every place way to get breakfast at five thirty in the morning. That's what I learned. And look, you pay a price for that. And you know, Bob, because in the early years, as we started to grow, we took a lot of criticism, and a lot of it was directed at me. But it was okay for the following reason. Nobody cares about a computerized ticketing company. Why

would you care? And I made a real decision at the beginning that I would take the heat for everybody and make it personal because then if you put a face to it, right, what it does is people start to pay attention. And you know in the end there were acquisitions. UM. You know, UM. I'll answer the questions

you want to ask. But the point was it was all strategic and if I had not learned to do every job in the company, we would have failed because you can't scale, you can't grow, you can't evolve unless you understand when you're taking a start up. And I knew changing the rules, changing the economics was different. And the other thing that everybody wanted to do is this. These are two things I did in contracts that nobody pays any attention to. One is, UM, I wouldn't sign

a one year deal. I had no interest in signing a one year deal. Waste of time because then you're always under the gun. The second thing is on three and five year contracts, I mostly wanted five, and I took three. In some cases, raisors were built into the contract see Tickettron in their contracts said raises are mutual. And in talking to a lot of the building managers, they would go about a month before we would have

to have this discussion. I would pick a fight and then tell them they couldn't raise it, and they'd laugh. They thought it was funny, and I went, that's stupid. So when when I started to build in raises, they said, well, you can't have a raise every year. I said, what if you're sharing it? Well, that's different. And so so all the stuff that you used to rail about or that people would write about, it was all organized and so they have well Ticketmaster can do what they want. No,

we can't. Everything was in a contract. The thing is what I took out of it was that we don't have to go back and negotiate every year. And because it was automatic, there was no discussion. It was just easy. You got it done and people were like wow. And then they go, well it's not my fault, it's his, and they call you over, well how do you feel about that? And you're going, okay, fine, next you know.

I mean, at the height of all these controversies, they had me setting the price of every ticket in the country. Damn me setting the price of every service. Everything was in a contract, Everything was negotiated. Everything was there in black and white, and I went, why are we different than a food service? And then I realized one thing really early on. No arena is open three sixty five days a year. No stadium is open three sixty five

days a year. Do you know the only vendor that operates three and sixty five days a year the ticket company. When you're home at Christmas watching a show or a sporting event, there's someone in the box office. That means someone's in the data center. So the whole dynamic of how you were looking at this business, and I will tell you this, the systems didn't work. This was the

Forum's definition of default. You need to be down for more than an hour, and then you needed to be down for more than an hour twice, and that counted one event of default. And yet to have four events of default in a quarter to be in default, so that was eight hours. So they go, well, you're only down for fifteen minutes. That doesn't count. By the end of the third year, if we went down twenty minutes

in a year, people were nuts. And part of the reason, and I'll say this later, you know when you ask in the last you know, um Taylor Swift, mess Siki had five shows at the Brooklyn Arena and they blew up and you know that they lost that contract. Here's the reason why Ticketmaster continues to be dominant more than any other reason and why no one can scale, no one will give them the ability to make the mistakes

we did. In the first three years, people compared us to ticket Tron and ticket Trunk was terrible, outages, couldn't find them, difficult, difficult, systems slow, not connected. During that period, we made a lot of mistakes, make no bones about it. We blew up. I can't tell you how many times. But here's the difference. When people left ticket Tron to

go to ticket Master was walking off a curb. For people to leave Ticketmaster today, you gotta jump out of a third of what stirring window because no system can scale and no one will give them the opportunity to make the mistakes Ticketmaster hat. In other words, we we had that freedom because the competition was awful. It was terrible. And then what happened is we got bigger and you kept evolving your system. And I'm talking about the sixteen years I was there, not I can't talk about what

came afterwards. Every time we made major system up grades, we'd go to a C market or a B market and say, listen, we've got these new um improvements, but we you know, we gotta debug it, and so we debug it in some region, and we'd pay the buildings, or we'd give them certain benefits that other buildings wouldn't have. Well, we had a chance to test it. So when people sit in the room and go, I don't understand why I take a master's dominant the dominant because it works

better than anybody else. And nobody's got the freedom to scale because nobody, nobody's willing to take the mistakes that we made that we had between eighty two and eight five and eighties six. You follow what I'm saying, Let me just ask you a question. The modern ney Uh paradigm of giving of paying the arena or venue for an exclusive contract, how did that come about? At the beginning, I wouldn't do it unless I could take an exclusive that That was the first contract I own. No, the

reverse where the ticket company pays the venue. From the beginning, it came from me. It came because I watched the food concession has pay the building. I watched the parking concession has pay the building. I watched everybody paying the building. Well, just because I know, so if the food concession or wants to the food concession, they pay X amount of

dollars right up front. Well, they do two things. They put in all the equipment right and and they either well, we didn't pay anybody up front for five or six years. That that's a misnomer. That may have been even longer than that. People got revenue streams from day one. But but but advances we didn't make. But the food companies started making advances. And you're a concessionaire in the building. So I didn't invent that. I just took it from

another pot and said, okay, we can do that. Um. One of the things that we did it was, um, people always came to us for money because we were the bank. I mean fundamentally were the bank. We had the ticket money. But but before I go there, let me let me add the follow it. Of all the criticisms you've heard of Ticketmaster and anybody more wired than you are, I don't know they hear anybody ever say they didn't get an order that was honest. Anybody say

they didn't get all their money. See, nobody wants to talk. Nobody wants to talk about that. They had a real manifest I had one broke. One promoter in Europe said I'll never use your system. It's too accurate actually said that. I mean, you know, we cleaned up an industry that nobody wants to pay attention to rose, that that didn't exist on manifests, orders, that that people didn't get paid on. We would never There are two things to know of how I looked at the business. One two things people

have sense of humor about. One is money. The second is systems. You can't be a day later a dollar short and you're some better work. Everything else is marketing. Everything everything else is marketing. And so the impact of what what we did was we would give people money and you know, and pay them weekly. And then somewhere along the line, I can't I don't even remember the building we did it with, somebody said I need money.

What else was new? And by the way, the music business, you well know is what's mine is mine and what yours was we're going to negotiate for. And one of the early negotiations was, well, if you charge three dollars on my twenty dollar ticket, then I should charge twenty three. And I go, well, in charge twenty three, and they go, what are you going to charge? I said three. I said. What you need to understand is this The system works you don't complain about getting paid, you don't complain about

the audience, you don't complain. You're looking for the money. You're not getting the money from New Jersey because I had regional banks in five or six places. And here's what nobody pays attention to, which will get too later with Tikotron. From day one being a lawyer, there were two kinds of accounts I had. So if I took in a hundred and ten dollars that went into a client account, ten dollars went into my account and the

hundred dollars stayed in the client account. And as we got bigger and became a borrowing company, the banks could not have access to our client accounts. But every company I bought, including ticket Tron, was in the client accounts. And on closing on Tikatron, they wrote us a check, not the other way around, because they were using everybody's money to operate. We didn't do that, and I didn't do that from day one, even when I was losing money. So in the in the world of people not knowing

and paying attention, that was real. We we ran our business clean. And the reason that over the years under my watch, why the government never did anything. And I always respect the fact that government could do anything they want. Is no company. It was like going to the practologists. Everyone looked at us and they went through the company

and they went through how we did our business. And you know what, you're not a clean business, a totally clean, absolute, you know, honest business, where the money was, how the money was handled, who got paid. There isn't one promoter who can sit in the room and go, oh, I didn't get my money, or Fred took my We didn't do any of that. And nobody wants to pay any

attention to that when they write it. And you think of all those little ticket companies that weren't broke, and the reason we bought Tickettron is they were in the client accounts to the tune of north to fourteen million dollars. And the reason I bought them was if they went broke, every single governmental agency would talk about how you're gonna handle the money, and I didn't want that. It was cheaper to buy it and just you know, let them pay it and make everything right. And here's the thing

that was interesting. We paid the little guys because right away because live hand to mouth. But the big arenas. The numbers were so screwed up. I didn't pay anybody in America for four weeks on the big arenas. And they called me up and said, Fred, are we good? Are you good for the money? I said, I give you my word, we're good for the money. You cannot

comprehend how screwed up these books are. And when we make the settlement, if you think there's any discrepancy, you know how to find me, pick up the phone and we'll solve anything. No one's gonna take one dollar from you or one penny from you that doesn't belong. And everybody waited four weeks until we could put the numbers together. Nobody screamed and yelled. Nobody went. I would get calls. Do I have your word? I you got my word?

And you know none of that got written. But the point is that's what having integrity and honesty and being open about with the industry. And you know, okay, just to be very clear, you took four weeks to pay. As years went by, it wasn't four weeks. No, you got paid every week. Okay, next thing, because the public is always concerned about this, especially today when gigs are put on sale, a year in advance. You take the money and you pay the buildings once a week. You

don't hold the money. Money goes to the money goes to the arenas once a week. And we had a rule. We had I had a rule. So when I didn't pay the buildings for four weeks, it was because I couldn't put the numbers together. And then they went back to being paid on a weekly basis. The point is this, even ticket trans clients knew how screwed up they were. It wasn't only us. They knew how screwed up they were. And the way we would do our business is this.

You'd get paid for Monday through Sunday, you get a wire transfer on Wednesday at Thursday of the following week, and buildings like the Forum in the meadow Lands and United States, all those buildings got paid. And today you know, Live Nation puts stuff on sale a year in advance, they get paid. I mean it's you're not you're not holding on to that money. The day of holding on money for float is gone. But that was gone under

my watch. Okay. And a little bit slower, why exactly did you buy ticket tron Because if they if they closed and filed bankruptcy. The public would have been stuck for eighteen million dollars, and that meant that would have been investigations that would have meant, how do you hold the money? How do you do this? And I chose to say, better we buy them and make everybody right, then spend time in forty states explaining to people what's

going on. I did it to protect the industry. I really did it to protect the industry and protect myself, totally clear. Let's jump forward to Pearl Jam in nineties. I knew you were going to do that. Wait wait, wait, wait, give me your side of the story. There is no side. What happened was this? The Pearl Jam's story started with a guy whose name you know, but I'm not gonna do that. Who the Sting called me up and said, Sting is gonna do one show at the will Turn Theater.

Do you remember that? Does that even doing? And okay, so how are we going to do that? I said, Well, the fairest way to do it is to do phones only. Um, you know, I forget what he was going to charge a ticket? Will do three dollars and we'll do We'll make sure no one gets two tickets. It will be two tickets. I'll make sure that we cross reference credit cards, addresses and all the stuff that goes with that, and

we'll do it that way. Because the demand was twenty of those, you know, the will turn was eighteen hundred seats. I can't even remember whatever, and so so we agreed and that's how it worked. And then the same person called me on Pearl Jam he was gonna do the show at the Orpheum Theater in Boston. I said, well, we can't do the show with the outlets. That's gonna be a war. I mean, you could sell ten of those. I said, are you open to doing the same thing

we did? Was sting, and he said yes, And so it was like an eighteen dollar ticket and three dollars on the phone and the next thing I know, and I know you'll find the shocking as I was blindsided. No one talked to me, no one said a word to me, and then this whole ship storm started and I was caught unaware, and I was amazed that the band got involved. I mean, I didn't even know three quarters of the stuff that subsequently came out later for real, and I mean, it's none of it made any sense.

And I found out that the guy who was behind all that I was trying to get himself into the ticket business and he had a willing group of guys who look I think Pearl Jam's a really great band, and I think they walked into a controversy they didn't understand. And I would say for six months we got our head handed to us. They were uh. And it led to a Department of Justice investigation and twenty eight attorney generals.

And the only thing I've ever said about that is I was glad the system work because everybody left we signed nothing. The more facts they found, um, the more they understood that what they were told with two different things. And then um, um, Sherry Washerman and maybe it was pearl Off, I can't remember, asked us, asked me to have a meeting with um Kelly Curtis at the old Nico Hotel in Los Angeles, you know the one on less Jennaga. Of course that's a manager of Pearl Jam

for those who don't know. Yeah, And and I meet Kelly, and Kelly was the Pearl Jam was was in in of Washington, d C. The month before doing a benefit concert for Gloria steinhum and she gets on stage and says, you know, I'm all full lower tickets. I called her because I've given her money. And I go, Gloria, before you walk into this, why don't you know the facts. And I said, you know what you're being told is not true. And I sat with Kelly and I said, look,

I give myself a D minus vow. I handled it last year. This was a I was blindsided. I was defensive, and I didn't understand a lot. I couldn't understand where it came from. I mean, I was shocked. And I said, but look, it's time to move on. Do a benefit concert. What you want to do is going to be a nightmare and a disaster. I will give a hunt represented the service charge to any charity you want, but this ends now. And he said to me, we're gonna change

the whole concert business. And I said to him, let me explain the reality. I'm a lot smarter this year than I was last year. You've got four kids who are millionaires. I got five thousand people who worked for me phone rooms, who are minorities, who welfare mothers, who you know, need the gig. And we do a lot of work in the inner cities and we take care of a lot of different people. You're not gonna win. I know what the game is now, You're not gonna win.

Go your tour is going to be a disaster. Don't do it. He's no, We're gonna change the world. It blew up. I've read pieces that I helped blow it up. I had as much to blowing to. I had as much to do blowing it up as you did. We stayed away from it intentionally because it would fall back on us. And you know, in the end, they never should have done what they did. And here's the part that was crazy, because you will appreciate this. No other group joined them. And it wasn't because we had power.

It was because people talk to us. So you know Ian McKellan and Fugazi. Fugazi had five dollar tickets. A year before the Pearl Jam thing. He placed some building in Chicago and they put a three dollar service charge on it, and he blew a fit. And I read it about it one of the trade magazines and I said, he's right. So I said to one of the guys

that golden voice, can you connect me with him? I spoke to him and I said First of all, let me apologize, because if you're doing five dollar tickets, you care about your craft and you care about your fans. So you tell me what's a fast service charge? He said, A dollar? I said, line, you got it on all your shows. I'll let everybody know. And what about the phones? He says, I don't care about that. You can judge two or three dollars because nobody buys my phone. Fine.

Three months later he blows another fit because you know buildings, you know if it's five dollars in advance and seven dollars at the door. And he blames us for the two dollars. And I call him up and I go I he said, I know it wasn't you. It wasn't you. You've been a really straight up guy. It will not happen again. Fine, stunt Temple pilots, I made a deal um rage against the machine. I mean deals with everybody

who talked to me. You know when they when they when they talk to us about stunt temble polish, is I got an I've got an elevator of of of prices. Can you move some of the stuff to the higher prices and reduced the lower prices of course, common sense did it for all these acts, which is why no one joined them, and they're sitting there by themselves. And there's one I want to get in. Tim Collins, as you know, testified at the hearings, manager VERYL. Smith, Manager

Arrass Smith. And a year later he comes to see me and he apologizes because he won't admit it. He said, I was just trying to be cool. I know you won't hold it against me, and I go, life moves on. Look, no one showed up for this except them, and I think they would take an advantage of I think they didn't quite understand what they were walking into, and they self destructed on their own. It's nothing I'm particularly feel

good about or bad about, um. But in the end everybody left, the government left, the Attorney General's left, and the class action lossuits a roll bullshit anyway. So the dynamic for all of that is that's the truth. Okay, okay, let's move on from there. How does Prince tur decide to get out? No, he didn't decide. I decided. We were sitting in a room it was and I said, Jay, we're doing really great, and you know I love you. But there are two choices you know, I want to

put some money away and or go public. And Jay didn't want to go public. And he said, what do you think the company's worth? And I told him and he said, you'll never get that. And in the space of thirty days we had five bids for more than I said. And then it took a year, and then Paul Allen ultimately bought the company for the company forty million dollars. But it was really Jay would never have sold it, Bob, But you know, Jay, it was a

billionaire before they were billionaires. And I had always worked since I was sixteen, and I wanted to put away a chunk of money, which I think is fair. I'm entitled to it. I did it. And and when when Paul bought the company, he said and and and j said to me, look, I don't want you to negotiate you a deal until I have our deal, which is basically the price of the company. So they agree on a price, and then Paul comes to me and I tell him what I want and he basically says, you're

out of your mind. And I go, fine, then I'll give you a one year deal and I'll leave. I was happy to go. I mean I've been working since I was a kid. My dad died at fifty two. That always sits in the back of your mind. Um, I was sixty years old. And I said, I'll give you a one year transition, okay, um, whatever you want. You can fill in a number. I don't care. And he came back to me and said, no, I want to I want you to stay. And then he went to Jay and said, I understand you're the only person

who has moral suasion on Fred. And Jay said that's true. I do. Went very close, and he said I need your help, and Jay said, Paul, let me explain this. I can't help you. Fred said he'd stay out of the deal for us, and I told him I'd stay out of the deal for him, So I can't help you with that. You're gonna have to figure it out.

And Paul did call me a couple of days later and he and he goes like this, Okay, you can have your deal, and I said, and he was not happy about it, and I said, well, I gotta think about it now because I didn't think you were going to do it. But I'll call you back in a couple of days. And he said, well, I'm not giving you more. I said, I didn't ask for more. I actually thought I was getting out those are you know, those are stories that aren't written anywhere, Bob Okay. So

what was it like working for Paul Allen? Paul was a strange guy. Um, I didn't understand client relationships. Um. For the most part, he did not engage. UM. You know, we had the controversies with Microsoft at the time. He left me alone to a great extent. Um. But when we were when we were going from information on the internet to doing transactions, my level of concerning with some kid in Peoria, We've got seven thousand tickets for you too, and I wanted to make sure we had all the

firewalls appropriate. And I think he took it as a level of disobedience, like, you know, you need to do what I want. And I go, well, I can't do what you want if I put clients in jeopardy. These these are people I have relationships with, These are people that I have obligations too. He didn't understand any of that. He just thought I was being difficult. And I acknowledge I'm difficult, but it wasn't difficult without a reason. And then I said finally, Okay, we'll do it in the Northwest.

And the first guy who used the service was a guy from Tumwa to Washington. I still remember this. So somebody comes, somebody O and go. Somebody brought one ticket for a baseball game. I said, we'll call him up and ask him why they did it. And the guy said, I don't like talking to people and I don't like talking to you. I should have put that up on the wall. I mean, because that was the beginning. And

then we took it across the country. And you know, when we we were probably the first company to make money on the internet for real. Okay, how does uh it transfer to Barry Diller? When Barry came? Uh? Barry, it's very smart. Barry is a really smart financial engineer. And my contract had a year left. Well, let's talk about the sale first. How I went from Paul Allen to Barry Diller. He he did that deal and he didn't consult me truth just because you know the numbers

did did Was it a good investment for Paul Allen? Um? It was close. I think Paul was frustrated on some levels on this UM and so when he sold it to Diller, you know, a lot of people try to get me to say you can stay, and I really, Barry's the guy wants total control and he's entitled to it. Um. And I never worked for anybody, so I knew at some point I was going to leave. And then once um he came to the rest of the company, I

basically left. Um. You know, we had a what I would call a purely professional, at times strained relationship, but he never interfered with what I was doing. But look, it's his company, and when it was his company, it wasn't my company anymore. And UM, you know, where I had had ultimate freedom to do what I want, I didn't have that any you know, even though he said, you know, he said, we're being very careful about your contract. We want to make sure we don't because we know

you have total control. But in the end, Barry's Barry is a brilliant financial engineer. Aaron looked, the guys made a billion dollars. You gotta give him credit. And he he knows how to buy these companies. And I'm not gonna say anything negative about him, even though you know, he's not somebody that he and I became friends. UM, and the I have great respect for him, and you gotta make your It was my journey, and I figured the journey ended. So just to be clear, how long

did you work with Barry? Maybe a year, maybe less? Okay, Now I realize you leave there in the nineties and there's been evolution since then. But you are certainly a student of the game. So we have fees, whatever we label them, forget it. When you were involved, how were the fees created in terms of the amount and how were they divvied up. That's a question with no answer because it was a case by a spasis. Okay, then let me ask you this. So you're getting fees. Some

goes to the building, some goes to ticket master. How long was it before someone to the promoter on at the beginning, See here's how it worked. The promoters often took you into the building, no matter where you are in the country, So you'd make you deal with the building, and then they'd say, listen, we got to take care of the promoter, and we'd add that on. And then one of the things that changing the phones. This is

really interesting. None of the acts wanted to pay the credit card charge, so that got added to the phone to start with, which everybody got confused about. Okay, just to be very interesting, you're doing incredible volume. What percentage you paying for the credit card MX was in the threes. The the into into bank rate was really less than two. You know, you could figure out the margins between point

and a half and a point eight. But you also had to recognize that you also ate all the chargebacks. And there was one of your growth volume was fraud um, which you ate the buildings didn't need it. You ate it um for expensive tickets um, the ones that were over a thousand dollars. And there were some events that were I made people signed stuff before I send it to him. We had a form that we would fax to them and they would sign it because it made it harder to charge it back. Um. You know, that's

just the course of doing business. You just build that into the dynamic. Okay, I interrupted you. You were talking about the accident. Want to eat the charge? Keep going? And then and then there was another thing I had separate. This changed after I left. The outlet was less than the phones because you've built all that into the phone charge. And then when I left, they decided to just yank make the service charge the same as the outlets and the phones, and so they started to take credit cards

at the outlets. Um, it's just the course of doing business. And you know the outlets, the the acts would call you up with the manager would call you up and go, look, I know you've got this three percent charge for credit card. How do you feel about moving it to the public And I went, okay, you know, the level of innocence in all this is nonsense. So the promoters often took you in the building and you'd make the deal with the building. And sometimes the buildings let the promoter and

on a fee, and sometimes they didn't. Most of the time they did. Um and I. And you know, you became the bank. You were the accounting system for everybody. And one of my favorite stories is I was talking to some building in the South and I'm talking to the guy and and it sounds like, you know, it sounds like a dog died. He said, ah, you know, this was when there were more municipal buildings than private buildings. And he goes, I gotta go tell the mayor I

gave up the rent. I go, how much was I go? How much is the rent? He's just fifteen grand? I said, I'll give it to you. He said, how are you going to give it to me? He said, I said, I'm just there had three dollars to the service. George, I know what's going on. I'll give you your money. Whether it was fifteen or twenty grand I can't remember,

and I'll keep the rest. He's a great idea. Then what would happen is the music writer would call him up after the show went on sound and go, how come the service chargers will hire it for this event? And the building manager go, gotta keep an eye on those people in Los Angeles. So you know it was Kabuki Theater, and Bob, you were around, you saw that. You know the criticism we got from new music writers. You know what the building managers said. But not one

building did we lose. And no one connected the fact of saying, wait a minute, if they're doing all these things without all these people knowing, and they're complaining about it, why aren't they throwing them out or suing them? But everybody was part of the process, and I took the heat for everybody because look, the fact is, this is what I really believed, and it's my mantra from day one. No one pays more for a ticket than they want. And I want you to think about something that's different.

I sometimes walk into arenas and I'd look up in the in the nosebleed sections less ten rows. Or you go into a stadium it's cold, people sitting there without shirts, it's raining. Why do people do that? Because it's emotion. You cannot regulate emotion. So think of this the Bolstead Act, which was for those of you who don't remember when prohibition that failed the war on drugs. In my mind, there's a failure gambling. You know now that you've got

all these draft kings and everything else. That's side of leaves some of the balloon app But people will play numbers in the fifties because you can't stop people from doing emotional things. And he has the problem. Tickets are emotional. I need to be in the building. It has nothing to do with logic. And you can't regulate emotion. So here's what really happened and what destroyed the business market. I leave StubHub comes along the guys that wait, wait

before you go to StubHub. When did the acts start getting pieces of the fees? Not while I was there? Okay, okay, stubbub. There was one that did that was the Rolling Stones. Michael Michael Cole and I made that deal, which is really funny because we make the deal was sitting at a restaurant. We don't have paper or a pen. I got a white napkin. We put a cross on the napkin, did service charges for the whole country, and settled a hundred million dollars on a napkin. None of that would

happen today. There'd be four lawyers involved in every we shook hands. That was the relationship we had. So when I left, you know, we did all in ticketing in ninety four with a couple of acts and everything. We're hiding the service charges now All in Ticketing is the

Flavord jure. It's hysterical to me because nothing changes. Let's be clearer though, for people that don't know the number one people who don't want all in Ticketing mean, it's not the ticketing company, it's the acts, correct, because they today everybody's got a piece of everybody, right, And the truth is that when you look at some of these crazy numbers, the acts ticketmasters, probably I would think this, and I'm not sure, but I would guess Ticketmaster getting

a flat fee plus the credit card. Everything else above that flat fee is going somewhere else. And basically Ticketmasters a collection agency. That's what they are. So when the President, God bless them, says, you know, we're gonna look at ticketing and we're the airlines the hotels, well, every airline gets the ticketing fee. Every hotel gets a hundred percent

of their ticketing fee. And by the way, when I did my um my appearance in front of Congress, John Conyor said, I went to Pine Knob and I paid a two dollars ticketing fee. And I don't know why I would pay a service charge if I go to the box office, So I send one of my people to find out what that's about. That was a facility fee, and the facility fee ticket mess that doesn't get but a facility fee was created to the act one share

in that money, which you will know right. So the dynamic, the dynamic for all of this was some level of kabuki theater and some level of saying, listen, you need to understand because I remember when Bruce Springsteen paid five shows at the Sports Arena. The front rows, okay, the front rows eighteen dollars the least rows eighteen dollars, And they go, how come they're scalping? Going on? You go, hello, so so wait, we scrambled the rows out. There are

things I never forget. We scrambled the rows. Did'd be these scalpers standing outside Music Plus and they you know, this young lady walks out and he says, where you're sitting? She's his second row, third night. He's just too how many tickets you haves for whatever? It was two or fifty dollars a ticket No. Five of ticket No. Seven, fifty, last and final offer. She took the money, then got

back online and probably complained about my service charge. The point the point is you can't regulate this, and what StubHub came along, you had scalping laws. So I'll give you a couple of anecdotes, because I know you're like anecdotes. When I left, the Grateful Dead always had their tickets, and they had their fan club and so on. But the acts generally couldn't take their tickets, and when I left, they got threatened, and so they gave every act ten

percent of their tickets for their fan club. Now Mary Jane or Jim Jones in any part of this country. Now have four tickets in the first ten rows, and stuff up comes along, peer to peer. They sell two tickets and pay for and pay for for. Then they go, wait, I can sell forth tickets and pay the rent. Now, who is the government gonna sue Mary Jane Jim John. They're not gonna do any of that. So all the

scalping laws get eviscerated. And what happens is everybody says, I don't understand why tickets cost so much, because the public decides what they want. And here is the thing that's really important. And I use this as an example. A week before the Taylor Swift of situation, the Phillies are a month the Phillies were in the playoffs, and the Philadelphia papers are talking about the fact of isn't it wonderful that that the secondary market now is it's

such a hot game. It's a thousand dollars a ticket, batch of honor, badge of honor. Is the Taylor Swift. The world is coming to an end. And by the way, also, I'm not gonna get into what the government can do and can't do. But they're not interested in sports tickets they're not interested in any other tickets but concert tickets.

And from the days that I was doing this stuff, the concert ticket market is not a market that fits in the antitrust loss because in the end, what percentage of the concert market is of all the tickets sold in America very small. When you add up all the league's and everything else, you go, we're only doing music tickets, and only doing music tickets before acts. Hello, Garth Brooks took the took the wind out of the sales by playing more dates, and he and he released it. She

knew what she was doing. It was a no lose situation. Anybody with a brain would not have put all that stuff on sale at one time. And and her view of the world was, look, if it blows up, I'll take credit and you'll will throw you under the US. And if it doesn't blow up, it comes out great. So when when I did a sing in an interview, I go, I don't understand. Ticketmaster took in five hundred million dollars in one day. How many companies can take

in five million? Amazon, brokerage firms, banks, most companies, airlines can't, hotels can't, I said, And she's gonna make more than three hundred million dollars and everybody's walking around going it's a failure. The failure is they should have had circuit breakers that when you got that many calls or attempts, so that you just shut it off. The Martin Stock Market does it. Bank? You can't do a run on banks. But ticketing lives in this magical world where everybody thinks

you're entitled to go to a concert. And by the way, which which is not a joke, this is not the first time this happened. When when the Spice Girls were at the height of their power, they did one show in Madison Square Garden. I old various government officials and said, please come down and watch the sale. Because of the twelve thousand tickets that we're gonna be made available, I think we had eight. So you got to try and not do a four minute sale because the world's gonna

come to an end. So I go, can you come down and watch the sales so you can see what we do and make it a end. They go, when is this sale? They go Saturday? They go, I don't work on Saturday. So needless to say, on Tuesday, there's a big press conference, right of we're gonna find that way the tickets are because the kids are crying. Then there was a situation in eighty nine. I can't remember, well, the first Cubs night game is gonna go on sale, and we agree it will be phones only, two tickets

of person. So I take my kids out for I scream, I live in California. I come back. Phone rings, guys on the phone high, this is somebody from Station one. I Q, how does it feel to take down the whole phone system in Chicago? I go, what are you talking about? Well, there's no one with thirty five million attempts in the first two minutes, and it blew up the phone system. You know, you gotta get smarter. You

gotta get smarter about this stuff. But it feeds into the emotion instead of the logic, and we're in the we're in the emotion part, not the logic part. I mean, I just saw the government threatened Ticketmaster that if they screw up the Beyonce sale, hey go back and do mail order. You know, I mean, you you want to, It's crazy. Okay, let's go a little bit slower though. You're out, and then you get back in without box.

Tell me that experience. Well, it was short mistake I made with that was I thought people would be more receptive doing white labels, and I was wrong. And ultimately, I mean I owned a piece which I sold back to a g um. It was an interesting dynamic. Uh, but I was wrong about that, and it's hard to go back home again. Um. The people, Well, what Ticketmaster was allowing people to do is they could put their name and they could do the things they needed. And

I misread the situation. So that lasted about a year and then we all agreed that there was a smart thing to do and just stop it. And basically, since a g has carried such a big weight, um, it's really the deal never should have been done. It was my fault on a certain level. And and basically they're in control of their own ticketing now, which works for them, and they're doing fairly well. Okay, let's talk about Ticketmaster today.

You haven't involved for the neccess of twenty years. What is different to your knowledge about the system today from when you ran it. Well, I think the system works, It's evolved pretty well. I think part of the problem is that the company on some levels become the phone company. I don't think they've done a good job explaining what they do and how they do it. And I think some of the combination. You know, you can read it any way you want. I think it's pretty efficient. I

think most clients are pretty happy with it. Um it's thankless. Every arena manager knows that ticketing is thankless. So the thing I find most humorous today is there are five or six people involved in the solar system. You have the active managers, their agents. You have the arena, right, so that's four or five people, or the stadium and the promoter. And somehow, no matter what happens when all

this stuff gets rid, it's only Ticketmaster's fault. Like you know this, this big overarching company controls everything, which is absurd, and and I think they've done a good job taking it. I think you know what's what's amazing to me is I've been gone twenty five years and people still come back. And you said, Mr Ticketmaster, it's spent faceless for years, and so people go back to the people who found it.

And I would tell you this. A lot of people told me at the beginning that ticketing wasn't in business, and I thought they were crazy. I thought there was stone cold crazy. So the way that ticket masters run today, and to the degree you study it, do you believe that the fees, although they're negotiated, forget the fact that they're not included, do you find them more exorbitant than when you were involved? That's natural evolution. Everything close more. Okay,

let's talk specifically about what went down. So we know that Live Nation was it was allowed to merge with ticket Masters. That's in the rear view mirror. You're an attorney, so you understand these issues. The issue reformed. Okay, so so am I? Uh? But do you believe this is just us talking? You know, because it doesn't hold any weight. Do you believe the ticket Master is a monopoly? No,

so just explain why. Look if Ticketmaster didn't exist and we called it Bob lefts, it's tickets they hey, you too? After a year, the solar system is you're set up to be the strong man. It's the way the word the world works. And what people can't get through their head is this. It doesn't make a difference how many ticket companies are. It makes a difference how many tickets

you have and what the demand is. It's a supply and demand curve, and so if you had forty ticket companies, none of these prices would be any different at the beginning because it's the demand. And ultimately, look, I'm not going to appine on whether because I don't know what Live Nation it's done for the last ten years, that would make them different when both companies, when when that merger was allowed, both companies stocks were in the crapper.

They were both about a buck or two bucks. Nobody saw them as a goliath, and the world evolved, you know, so you gotta put on the glasses to see it the way it is today. But having said that, which is not a joke, I don't know exactly. I don't know whether you can call him. I mean they used to call Ticketmaster monopoly by itself without Live Nation. I mean, how many times did I hear that? I, Bob, as I recall it. Maybe in the nineties you might have

said that too about us. So you know, the truth is that I don't know the answer to that question from a legal perspective, because part of the problem that you have is let's talk about let me talk about Ticketmaster and monopolies, because that I can talk about you have an exclusive. The problem is there's no guarantee from the venue how many tickets you get, No guarantee in the number of shows, no guarantee of the number of tickets,

no guarantee about anything. But everybody was shocked about that. So they go, well, how do you know you're gonna get tickets? You go because they got death service. Okay, so they gotta pay. We think they're gonna have shows. But there isn't one contract that I wrote. And I can't tell you whether that's changed, but there wasn't one contract that I wrote that anywhere was there a guarantee of the number of shows, number of tickets, um, number

of events. What you did is you took a statistical analysis of the building the last five years and kind of plugged it in and came up with a model. And I remember one of the great funny lines of life, which is sort of a digression, but it's sets the point. There was a big stadium show and the Attorney General of that subpoena in US and they said, we want a list of all the people who bought the tickets.

So I go to that we I went to that meeting, and we had given them the number of the people who bought tickets by phone, but not at the outlets. And the woman says, why don't we have the names of the people bought tickets and at the outlets? And I went, because we don't live in Russia. But but but here's my question, why are you calling me? Why don't you call the broker's And she went, we don't know how to find them. I said, you have an assistant, Go yeah, I said, bring me the Yellow Pages, forty

pages of brokers. I go, Look, I'm tired of always been the whipping boy for this business. Here's my private phone number in the office. Here's the name of my assistant. You have any questions, you call us. I am not responsible for where these tickets go. I try as much as I can. And we went through crossing out same address, credit card numbers that you multiple events. We did about

ten things that we could do. But if, but if a broker has got forty different credit cards with forty different addresses, how the hell are we gonna know what that is? And to me, at the way, the way I see it is, nobody wants to know the truth because the narrative doesn't the truth doesn't fit the narrative well articulated, but just speculating. Because you have more background in this than almost anybody. Some people say, by virtue

of their market share, ticket Masters inherently a monopoly. Now what I tell these people is there are antitrust laws. We presently have an FTC that is very aggressive. But if we determine that it is a monopoly, what is the sou They has to have a remedy, and the remedy is going to be worse. I haven't to agree with you. The reality is this, if they split it up, which I don't think they can't. I mean they have

that they can do whatever they want. Whoever replaced this ticket mask is gonna have the same issue after two years. You know when when I'm very circumspect about my meeting with the government, and if you and I know you know this, You've never seen anything written by those meetings because I just say the system worked, but there are a few things I can share. And then and one of the questions is why can't they be multiple ticket companies in the building? And I said, how many operating

systems do you have in your computer? And they said one? And I go, how many inventory control systems? Are there in a supermarket one and I go, why is this different than an inventory control system? That's all it is. And the thing you'll eLearn is this Ticketmaster is no different than Time Life, the eight number, except if you touch entertainment, you are entertainment. And the truth of the matter is if people didn't pay and there you well you was, you was know as much as anybody more.

Events don't sell out. There's always tickets available. There are always tickets that show up twenty four or forty eight hours because nobody knows the configuration of the stage. It's just that, because all of this is controlled by emotion instead of logic. Right, A suite at the Super Bowl last year in l A went for two million dollars. I didn't hear anybody complaining, right, I don't understand. Garth Brooks played more shows Broadway. This is interesting because of

friends of mine. I still go to Broadway shows. And you know, you know enough of the stories about me that I really went of concerts. And when I helped my wife get tickets, I told her I will help me get tickets. But I don't go. You know, It's like that's not my jones, it's not what I you know, But the reality is people sit in the last ten rows because of the need to be in the building service charges. There is a reflection of what people think a fair market is. No more, no less. You don't

want to go, don't pay it. And here's the thing that was shocking to me. About ten years ago, when the Rolling Stones were at the Hollywood Bowl, I got a call. I still get calls some people who still think I have something to do with the company, which I find frightening. Um they said, did you see what the Rolling Stone? This is the Wilshire Journal. Did you see what the Rolling what the Rolling Stones charged at the Hollywood Ball? I went, yeahs the ticket? Well didn't

you think that was excessive? I said, well we went. I mean I bought two tickets. It was what it cost and my wife wanted to go, so we went. But here's my question. Assume that you're not a trust fund baby and assumed that working for the journal provides your income. When you go by a Lamborghini showroom, do you have the need to throw a brick through a window because you can't afford it? What's the difference? Where is it written that popular music requires everybody have a

right to go see it. Now, I know that's heresy. Go to the clubs, go go to the small venues. Guess what. Why is an artist not a brand? Why is an artist not worth the same thing as a floor seat at a Laker or a Nick or Chicago Bulls game. If they choose, that's what they're worth. That's what the cost is. But people lose their mind because it's it's it's music. No one loses their mind in sports.

No one loses their mind in boxing. By the way, I heard a story the two front row seats for boxing, one for half a million dollars each for some fight. No one's forcing anybody to pay these prices, right, And and the great thing is you don't have to go. And and if if you don't go, and you're not selling, I mean, no one's gonna pay two dollars to hear you and I sing you go Bob and Fred the Great duet when you pay two dollars to see it, No,

probably not so so the dynamic. Look. I don't want to say it's all bullshit because that will only make everybody crazier. But the truth is, wake up in the morning. No one pays more for a ticket than they want. If an artist is like Garth Brooks, they're gonna do everything they can to play as many shows as they can to take care of their people. How come that works? Pearl Jam did this whole thing with with certain into seats you know where your name is on it, and

and people did that. You know what. My view of all this is, this is where I get in trouble. You know, you sell it, it's gone, Stop worrying about it, right, price it the way you want. And the answer is I remember we were doing golden circles and I pushed for that and someone said to me, well, how do you know when the golden circle ends? And I said, look, roe A is a hundred dollars, Rosie is fifty. So they said, well, where does the golden circle end? I said,

when you right out of people buying. If it goes to Rosie, that's the golden circle. Here go. What if it stops at roe M I said, then you move Rosie up and moved them back until they meet, and they go, can you do that? And I went, it's a computer. I mean. The point is, if I did anything, I made this a business, and it was always a business because the scalpers knew it was a business. What's your view on scalpers? Some provide a service, some don't.

They exist because there are always people with too much money who don't pay attention to when tickets go on sale, and we'll pay whatever the market will bear. UM. I think stuff Hub is fine. I think the secondary market is fine because in the end, no one's forced to pay that. Um. It's driven by emotion. It's clearly better than it used to be because I think the acts.

Let's put it like this, there was some acts that I knew in the nineties where you could get pneumonia from the from the draft created by the tickets going out the side. Now you know, it's it's more of a business, and I don't judge the morality of it. I never made money from it. And Ticketmaster when I ran it was against scalping and we did what was necessary to protect it. But at the end of the day,

you know, going a restaurant today, everything course more. What used to be X is now X plus Y. Go to a hotel over Chris, you know makes me crazy. People go out to dinner, it's a hundred dollars, but the ticket should only be seventy. Well, but here's the point. I used to have this argument. Why is Bruce Springsteen less than the four seats of the Lakers. He puts on a three hour show. He leaves himself out there

for the fans. When he did Broadway at seven fifty dollars a ticket, you know, that was very limited, but he did it. I know the deal he had, but good for him. And you know, in the last show he talked about the fact that he charged more and everybody went nuts, but there was still half the tickets at popular prices. They just moved the seats to where they were. And here's the problem. You know this, you can't argue with a lack of logic because it's all

driven by emotion. When emotion is involved, people kill people over love, people kill people over you know, over stupid things. Where emotion gets involved. This is just tickets. It's just tickets. I mean, you know, I know that that artist is a good my homies, Hey ticketmaster, Well, really that's the best song you can write for real. I'm sure I'll get a lot of ugly mail like that. Let me let me share this with you, because this is a

great story. I was living in Beverly Hills in those days, and a woman writes me a four page single space letter. She lives in San Diego. She bought foot tickets to the Forum. She cannot understand why she paid sixteen dollars four dollars a ticket when all it did was come out of the machine. Now, one of the things I used to do was called the ten worth letters I get every month. And since she wrote me at home, I thought I could call her on Sunday. What the

hell you know? Like, why not? Right? So I got Mrs Jones, I got your letter. You really should not be this upset. I really feel badly. What I would like you to do. What I'm gonna do tomorrow when I go in the office is I'm going to send you your sixteen dollars back. She says, that's really nice of you. That's four page single space. I didn't kill little Lindbergh, baby, I didn't blow up to Hindenburg, and I'm sure I didn't think the Titanic. But I said,

I need you to do one thing for me. She says, what's that? I said, never use my service again. And if you drive to the Forum, there's no service charge, and she went, but that's not convenient and they'll take a lot of time. And I went, uh huh, and it was like the epiphany hitter, and she went, never mind, Sorry, I sorry, I wrote, sorry to forget it. Don't give me back my money. I'm really sorry. I never thought of it like that. Well, nobody thinks a bit like that.

They go, it just comes out of the machine. Well, who does the money, who does the audits, who does the season tickets, the single tickets, who provides the equipment, who does the software program? There's like a hundred things that the public NEBI sees. But you know what they do see They see the name on it. And and I know this for a fact. Um near the end of running Ticketmaster, I wound up having a meeting with the l A. Times, and I wound up with the publisher,

the editor and the head of calendar. There's a guy named John Lindsay. I don't know if you ever came across him, and you know, okay, he was the head of Callen. So basically, I said, you guys have had a heart on from us from the beginning, and I don't get it. And I said, John, you won't even sit in a room with me and meet tell me why you hate my company. I just want to know. And you know, the publishers said, is he is he making this up in one of the vice Uh ed,

it is, no read the stuff we wrote. It's true. And Lindsey looked at me and he said, you charge a service charge. I said, that's the reason for all the negative you charge for ads. Tell me how I make money if I don't charge a service charge? Where is my revenue? How do I do the things I do without that? And he sat there like a bear,

you know, like wrapped in like a figure eight. That's why he handed the company because we charge a service charge, and no company that charges a service charge in America is ever gonna be perceived as a decent or. I use a friendly company. So if you if you buy a coach ticket, hopefully you land. If you're in the last row coach and not the first row, you land

the same time as everybody. Nobody thinks about that. But if you go to a stadium in arena and you it in a bad seat, it's never the band, it's never the promoter, it's never the building. It's only the ticket company. Like you live in this vacuum where you're responsible for all this. Do you know how you deal with it? You shut it out, you turn off you're hearing it, You walk away and you go listen. You have the right not to go. And it's that simple.

And the answer is the reason the prices have gotten where they are is because that's what they're worth. If you analyze that and analyze those tickets next to sports tickets, no different, it's no different. Let's just talk, as I say, you haven't been in the business for a while, but do you think there needs to be any changes of any type? You know, not only with a government, etcetera. If we I stop my fingers, you're running any running ticket master or another ticket company today, do you think

they're doing something that you could improve upon? They could they could make it more transparent in terms of letting people know what they do. In other words, I don't think they do a good job. They do a lot of things well, but I don't think they that that they like the Bill of Rights. You don't set the ticket prices, you don't determine how many tickets go on sale. There's a whole host of things that need to get

burned into people's consciousness that isn't there. And and the thing is that if one building manager told me about right before I left, he said, you know, if you didn't if you didn't exist, we have to invent you. Because what what ticket Tron did. Ticket Tron was terrible and didn't understand the role they played um and and by being charging a dollar, they fundamentally gave up um how do I put it, They gave up their right

to have a role in the business. You operate in a solar system, so one of the things you know you for you would forget this. But you know, you have various promoters in the towns in a city who weach hated each other, and go, we're putting these three events on sale on Saturday. No you're not. That is not happening. You're the traffic cop. Okay. I think where Live Nation got in trouble is because they were a

promoter and they want to protect the act. They didn't put their foot down and say we're not putting all the shows on sale. I think that's where they had a conflict. I would have stopped it. I said, there's not a goddamn way I'm gonna do that, and I would have put in circuit breakers. Where will you get that many attempts shut the system down? Shut it down. Say listen, we're not gonna sit here all day. We're

gonna spoon feed this. What I would have done differently, not that anybody cares, is I would have said, Okay, for five days, we're gonna open this up to everybody. Send in your name, you can buy two tickets, and then you spin it out so you get rid of all the duplicates, the ones that aren't in the whatever, verified fan program, and all that other stuff, and then create a random program and then notified people. Two days later, you have two tickets, you have three tickets, you have

four tickets. You do that. I would have done that. I mean, basically, it's okay to be the whipping boy for some stuff. It's not okay to be the whipping boy for other stuff. You know, where you basically sit in the room and say, listen, it has to be orderly. We cannot allow Yeah, I'll give you a perfect example. And I know you heard some of these stories. We

got into it with a grateful debt. I always allowed them two um, because of the relationships with everybody would they would take a number of tickets for their fan club, whether it be arenas or stadiums or emphatheute of all places. All been in New York the Knickerbocker Arena. They took the ticket some idiotic amount. People line up and there was a riot because there was no tickets. So who gets blamed? Me? All right, So I tell everybody the

grateful dead can no longer have any tickets, period. Shut it off. Now, those idiots Bud Nick and that group who wrote ticket Masses, which is a nice fictionalized account of that meeting. Um John Prisker who's Jay's soon sets up a meeting with me and some of their people, and we're in this meeting in San Francisco, and of course the initial meeting is we're gonna sue your for anti trust. Look at some point my eyes glaze over, because after you've been suited enough, it's like, okay, great,

can we talk about something else? And I go, let me ask you a question. I have nothing but respect for who you guys are and who the band is. You put on a great show. Remember, we're also living at the time of guns and refunds, where you know whether they show up, whether they refined. I mean, you guys really care about the fans. But here's what I cannot do. I cannot let you trash my outlets for one day. For the other three sixty four can't do it.

The people who are standing online mean as much as your people and your you know, in your fan club, and we've got to find an effective way that enables both to be satisfied, because if you trash my outlets, then I don't have a business the other three and no band can do that. That's not allowed. And the rest of the meeting after they went through death threats and I went, okay, great, you know, like I haven't seen them before. Let's figure it out. And we figured

out numbers for amphitheaters, arenas and stadiums. And they said, if we don't sell them, can we give them back? And I said, of course you can, and you know what, we shook hands and we lived like that until Jerry Garcia died and no one complained. But I stood up for the people who stand online, and I stood up for having a business. And in the end it gets written that I'm an asshole because I said, you can't have the ticket in other words, nobody wants to understand

what's underneath it. Nobody wants to understand the granularity of how you run these things. And I think what's important to understand is this. I knew what I was walking into over the first five It took me a while, but once I understood what it was, I never thought it was thankless. I thought it was really funny. And what was shocking to me is that the height of the Pearl Jam thing, which I must tell you probably took ten years of my life. Our sales went up,

not down. It wasn't like Thailan at all. When people went away, most people didn't even understand what this is all about, because it was insane. And in the end, my view of that, and I don't mind saying, is I feel badly it happened. I wish I could have sat with other with people who weren't told lies, who represented the band, and and I think um um stump. Pilot's manager Steve wrote something on one of you, on one of your blocks, saying, I, I what's what's his

last name? You know, Steve Simon, No, I don't remember. You caught me off guard, Okay, he said, Look, I I went and so forred and we solved everything in fifteen minutes. And he said, nobody else came to look if anybody talk to me. Common sense was eight percent of all this stuff. It's not rocket science, it's common sense. And then you gotta put in the emotion which leaves the planet, because then it's like the world is coming

to an end and you can get congressional hearings. This is this is true Gary Condor who ran the pro Jam hearings. Steve Stewart, the Garry Condent ran the Projam hearings, and you may remember him from the Chandra Levy best right. So I went to see him a year after the hearings and about two months before the government left, and this is what he said to me, you're ready. This worked that great. I got a lot of good publicity. Everybody found no way minute, it gets better. Every everyone

found that you're a good company. And I'm having a fundraising next week. Can you give me five hundred dollars? And I gave him five hundred dollars because I wanted my name to be there that I took the five dollars. If you live in the Maelstrom, you know there's partly a bunker mentality. And then there's also this absurdity that says, what is it that people don't get? You can't build an arena at seven miles long and ten ten rows

can't do that. And when it comes to concert take it's for very few shows the world loses their mind. Nobody complains about clubs. Nobody complains about the two and three and five thousands, you know, cedars, Nobody complains about a lot of this arena acts that don't sell out. But you've got a few of these mega stars that are quite remarkable, that are amazingly talented, that lift the spirits of people, and and and I'm fascinated by that and appreciative of that um. And when it comes to

ticket pricing, I don't get why there's a difference. The hippie hippies are over. I mean, you charge more for Christmas than you do the rest of the year. You know, I I I can't, I don't I say it The following in a reel, This is Fred rosen Line. The people who stolen music found out they couldn't steal the concert ticket, and since then life has not been the same. Let's switch gears a little bit. So what's your life about now? Hey, I'm seventy nine. Man, I'm having a

good time. You know, we travel. I just took my son to askpen for five days. Um, we'll travel in the summer. We're going to Caribbean in a couple of weeks. UM. I do some community stuff to help people. I got on a plane to chase deal. Um, not in ticketing. I don't think it will happen. Um, And I keep myself occupied. Look, we're blessed. We have amazing lives. When you see what goes on in the world, we worked really hard. I'm shocked. I'm shocked by a couple of things,

Bob that you'll find interesting. I'm shocked at the model I created forty years ago. It is still the model. The numbers are different, but it's still the model. I'm shocked that people remember my name live in l a name who was on a comedy, who was on a sitcom ten years ago. If you can't remember any of that or fifteen years ago, no matter what happens, people still identify me with the company, even though I have

nothing to do with it. Um. What's remarkable. I always described myself as this I'm an idiot savant about tickets. I can't explain this whole business came out of my head. I do not understand why. I have sometimes thought about it, and I'm I'm going to write something for my family, basically the beginning, not not a book. I won't write a book because there are too many stories where you would hurt people, and I don't want to hurt people.

That's not what this is about. But I want to write something, a memoir from my family, about how all this. You know, I told you you you got bis and pieces of it because we only have two hours. But but how it all happened, all of its serendipity, serendipity that I was in the office that night where that lawyer would not have called me if I wasn't in the office, serendipity that Steve Wozniak didn't want to use ticket Tron and said, listen, you come out to l A.

I'm gonna spend a million dollars to do this. Who would think that serendipity, that ticket Tron would be so stupid as to walk away from the forum and not honor an agreement. And then the thing that killed Tickettron more than anything else. This was the knife in the coffin. They were doing four shows at the coliseum. Do you remember that, Yeah, okay, So for whatever reason, they went to Tickettron, who had an exclusive contract at the building, and they said, we don't we don't think you can

sell the four shows. You gotta give two shows to Ticketmaster. So I go down to the meeting and and they go, we're gonna flip a coin. Who does one, two and four and one and one and three? And I go, it's their building, give them whatever they want. So they do one in three, we do two and four. By two o'clock in the afternoon, all the tickets we have are gone and ticket Tron still has basically fifty of each show. So with turning people away, So the following week,

I go, we can't do this. So I call the colliseum and said, go to ticket Tron and tell them the following tell them to give us an allocation. I will give them a hundred other than two dollars a ticket, I'll give him a hundred percent of the money above that, and at the outlet they gotta pay the outlet was sent or a dollar, and then they can have the rest I won't make any money, but we shouldn't turn anybody away. Well, guess what happens. Ticket tron couldn't sell it.

I mean, in the world of being smart, it turned out even better than I thought. It went across the country. The Ticketmaster has so little their tickets. And that was the end. It was the beginning of the end. And then when Ogden and a poland who's you know and what the company? They had a guy go around the country and he went like this, I'm much nicer than Fred. Well, apparently everybody was much nicer than me in the eighties and nineties. And they said, I'm much nicer than Fred.

And we're gonna lower the service charge. And they said, okay, great, how much do we get. They go, well, if Fred's giving you a half a million, we'll have to give you a two hundred thousand, you know, or less. And they would go, a son, we have death service to pay Fred's fine. So if you'd like that, Um, that ain't gonna work. And when we sat with the government, we said to them, look, if you own a building

to beat Ticketmaster, you have to pay more. So if TM is paying five dred, you gotta pay seven fifty. Now what happens to the price to the public, and the room looked around. When it goes up and go right, competition forces prices up, not down, because no one's taken less. And that was like this amazing epiphany which you can't find in any other business. But when food services take over, the food goes up, the hot dogs go up, the beer goes up. You know, you can't walk away from

all that. And I can't tell you that when I created this model that was in my head, but the Bible it was clearly a byproduct of the model because I made it early on that I would take the heat for the buildings, and every building manager who would throw me under a bus would call me up the next thing go you don't mind, do you No, that's fine, not a problem, and they go, thank you, thank you. Because to me, if I could make those guys heroes,

I had a business. And that's why in sixteen years that I ran the company, I never lost the client. And and I think it was it was a you know, look, you know enough to know that guys like me create issues. I had great friends and I had great enemies. It's kind of the way it works. And there were people who thought I was too tough, and then people thought I was too mean, and then were other people thought I was a pretty good guy, and and set them up and I made a lot of people a lot

of money. I cleaned up the ticket distribution business. I made it so that people could trust audits. I made it so that acts got their money. I made it so that that at the end of the day, you got a ticket, it was a legitimate ticket. It wasn't a counterfeit ticket. It was a real ticket, whether it was you know now it's on your phone whatever. But the point is, we made a real business out of this when there was none and no one thought it was. And I'm proud of that. I'm proud that. I'm serious

that I'm proud that anybody remembers my name. And you know, it's an interesting legacy, um because nobody wants to learn. Nobody is happy with the truth. So when you're not happy with the truth, you keep finding things that kind of shade the truth. But there's nothing, there's none of that. I mean, someone wrote some s whole article about Bert can Are being involved and some of the people Bert was involved with, and Bert was going from I mean nobody.

You you know the article I'm talking about, it's not they made They made that crap up. We cleaned up the business. Okay, do you miss the action? I missed the peak. Let's put it like this. You know I was dormant for a long time and I missed the peat when I saw that I missed the people. At some point, Um, you get tired of the same fight, if you know what I mean. And I think when I left I had enough. All Right, this is kind of fascinating to me because I go to sleep I

almost any sleepover. This is kind of it's kind of funny for me. And you get it's like a reset that everybody remembers you did this right, you know where you know? People now want to make a documentary. I don't know if I'm gonna let him do it. But the point is, Um, there's an energy that I had in this business that I never had in any other business.

And the people I some night when we're not recording, I'll get you salters and eye and I'll tell you stories that even you would laugh at because I knew all these guys and and the real you know, everything I told you on this is true. But you know, before the Internet, i'd get a hundred hundred and fifty calls a day. I took care of everybody. I made sure that everybody was taken care of. And when people would say, you know what, why are they so strong relationships?

You build relationships and sometimes you'd fall on your sword or sometimes you help somebody out, I would tell you this, this is this is no joke. Paul to Let and his partner, the guy who died I forget his name, two young kids, and they were always what I always remember, those little ads in the l A times for social distortion. That was what I remember, because they would do all those other times and we would pay them after the acts. And then the only two kids, they came to me,

this is way before. I mean, these kids have done you know, post done brilliantly. And they came and sat in my office and said, it's really hard for us because we live hand to mouth, and we were wondering if we could get a line with you. And I liked them. They worked hard, they did their shows. We'd always pay them, you know, so they could do it. And I said, how much of the line do you need? I think there was fifty or a hundred grand. Then I gave him a line. Only people I ever did

that too, and it was me. I mean I did so many things for people that nobody begins to know, because if people knew that, you know, part of the reputation I had kept people away and made you in a place where you couldn't be every place. And I would tell my people, look, I'm the toughest person you're gonna live within a day. So if you sit in the room and somebody's giving you a hard time to say, you're gonna get me on the phone, nobody's gonn want to talk to and look, I'm telling you the truth.

This is how how else can you build a company I started with When I left there with five thousand, I had people everywhere. And the thing is this, you had a reputation that your word was your bond. You ran a clean company, You didn't screw around. And by the way, you know this, I didn't hang out. You know, I was never backstage, you know I was That was not who I was. I mean, I fell asleep when the tenth of the joke was how many times I fell asleep when I did go to events, But That's

how I conducted myself. Where where I found this out later about the government. One of my lawyers was who was a great lawyer, was in Washington, And you know, I started with nothing. You know, when we were losing two million dollars, I didn't go screaming to the government the ticket transcot monopolies. Everybody told me I was wrong. I was gonna lose. And this is what they said. We didn't think he was that smart. Oh, that's what

they said. We didn't think he was that smart. You see, because if you're a wise ass and you saw those idiot comments I make, if I don't sell every ticket in America, I can't sleep. I mean, I would just say stupid, outrageous stuff. But I cared about what I did. I really did care about what I did, and I cared about taking care of the people who worked for me and taking care of um my clients. And I'm gonna tell you two stories that that I think are

really important that nobody will ever talk about Ticketmaster. I promoted a guy in three from thirty two to thirty five thousand dollars make him head of operations, not that I knew what an operation was. At that time, I was trying to figure it out, and he came in my office and he said, I don't think I can take the job because you're gonna find out I'm gay and I want to make a hundred thousand dollars a year and I'll never get it here, although I do

think you're gonna build a big company. And I looked at him and said, what has any of that got to do with your ability? He said, well, nothing. I said, to get the funk out of my office. I don't need to hear I don't need to hear this. You'll be judged on who you are anyway. Fast forward. Because I didn't care about that, and I built a really diverse company. And Larry will tell you that we had everybody in the company. About a third of my senior

workforce was gay. And in ninety two, when Calendar actually meant something m c A. It was a big story in Calendar about domestic partner insurance. And because I felt that human capital was the most important capital that you can have, and that I would tell people look in the mirror, because everything you get from life is looking in the mirror. Good, better, and different. I read this story, I call my the people. I know what m c A, and I go, would you share that information with my people?

And they went yes. And I called this gentleman in my office two and said, this is a really great idea. We should do this for all people on two conditions. He said, what are they? I said one, I've spent as much time as I'm going to spend on this. This is now in your bailiwick. All I want to know is what it costs, and I'll do it, and the cost will not I just want to know what it's gonna cost me, and I'll do it. And we put it in ninety two because you can you follow

what I'm saying. Yes, but let me ask you why to switch it to one thing? What about anti Semitism today? Awful? But I was the only Jewish guy in my company for ten years for real. Um, Well, you talked about the government and you said they didn't take you seriously. Do you think that was partially because you're Jewish? Well think about this. You're in New York, you're ethnic, you're a lawyer, and you're living in l A. And that's

four out of three strikes. And you went around America and took care of it, you know, and built a business. I think anti Semitism today is I would say this, the pilot light of hate is always on. I think Trump turned it up to a full flame. I look at people like Kanye and this other twenty four year old moron. You know there's a place for them to talk. Um, It's always there under the surface. I have not encountered

a lot of it in my life, fortunately, not directly. Anyway, I think it's awful because I think part of what America is about. I think some of it's driven by religion. America has evolved because it's free him of and firm religion. And I think Bob, to be fair, Jews are easy to blame when you when you run out of everything else, who do you blame? You blame the Jews. It becomes this,

you know, interesting dynamic. Um. I think the president and I think, um, the various organizations are doing what they can. I don't know if it's peaked, but I think it's close. I think in the end, when I look at anti Asian stuff, I can't comprehend it. I can't comprehend what the cops are doing. On some level, I think, I think what COVID did is by locking everybody up for two years. It's like rats in a maze, and so

there's this dynamic of this frustration that gets filled out. UM. My hope is it goes back to where it was. I think people are a lot more proactive about dealing with it. I hate the fact it's on campuses. UM. I hate the fact that young people think that that's the way to behave They have always been lunatics in this country of the far right, UM, and the far left is no fan either. I mean, it's like when I watch some of the anti Israel stuff from some of these people, and I go, so, let me ask

you a question. How would you feel if the people in Mexico We're gonna start lobbying bonds. It's not like Hamas hasn't had a million ways to make peace, but their whole goal is, Okay, we have to eradicate Israel, which is not gonna happen. My view of how to I have actually a view of how to make peace in the Middle East, which is by it, but underneath it is it bothers me that it exists. I'm troubled by it. UM. I've been to Auschwitz My wife and

I have been at Auschwitz. We've been at various places. That place. You can't even describe it as evil because it's a level beyond the evil and dastardly and mean. And I always think the thing that's most interes thing about that is they knew how crazy they were, which is why they all left to go to whether they all try to escape, because they knew that what they were doing was wrong, and a Western civilization doing that shocking,

but and and appalling, um and you know, frightening. So I hope the more we focus on anti Semitism, um, that it lessens and goes back to where it was. I cannot see it getting much beyond where it is now. Um. And you know, I have levels of nervousness by who gets elected. I mean, the ultimate line was ghosts are throwing Omar off the committee because she made anti Israel statements. This moron actually went to a pro Nazi rally. I mean, you know, you can't, you can't wrap your head around

stuff like this. And my view has always been to be tolerant and let people be who they are. And I look at religion in the following way. If it gives you comfort, I'm all for it, don't inflict it on me. And if it's if it's violent or nationalistic or creates hatred of another race or nationality, I can't deal with that. In the same way I told you the third about a gay guy. We had this young African American come into my office in three and he goes,

do you know Peter Schwartz? And I he was a guy fixed machines, And I go, why would I know Peter Schwartz? And he said, well, he's Jewish. I got there's five thousand Jews in l A. Do you know every black person? He goes, well, no, but I thought all the Jews knew each other, And go, okay, you need to have a seat at the table. But that's life experiences. Man. It's like, you know, like wow, um, and what my hope is this? You'll find this funny. All work, to me is spiritual and holy, not holy

in the religious sense. But if you do something and you work at it and you want to be the best at it, that's great. Some of us are fortunate and have evolved. Some of us are fortunate where we've had careers and been successful economically. But if you're a bus driver. That's that's honest work. Be the best bus driver if you're I mean, I'm not judgmental about stuff like that, because to me, what counts as human capital. And one of the things I'm proud of st the

ticketmaster is and Larry will tell you this. I took fifty people who started with me between thirty and fifty grand. They didn't go to the best colleges. I didn't have an NBA in the company for ten years. I made him all millionaires. That to me, because they all became more than they thought they would be. And these the stories, you know, you got me in this place that I'm not gonna be in a newspaper article that I'm not going to talk about because I'm too busy being Darth Vader.

And I think people pay. The loyalty I got was because of the loyalty I gave and I protected my people. And there was a story I won't tell you the building where a guy walked into my office and he was almost crying, and I said, why are you crying? He said, because so and so beat me up. And he said, you sold him a bill of goods. And I called the guy who ran the building, and I went to see him the next day and I threw the contract on the table. I said, rip it up.

You can't beat up my people. You can beat me up, you can't beat them up. And if you think I sold you a bill of goods, I'll stay till you find another ticket company. But you cannot behave like that because I won't tolerate it. And you know, he said, no, I'm trying to get you another client. But the point was. The point was people saw I stood up for them, and when you stand up for people, they will do amazing things for you if you give them loyalty. You know.

It's like I spoke to a group of people and I said, your generation talks about quiet quitting. My generation talked about quiet firing. You gotta do your job. You need to show that you have ambition, otherwise ten years from now you'll be in the same place. I'm not known Fred. I think we're gonna leave it there for today. We could certainly go on and I would enjoy it,

but I'm gonna give the audience a break. I want to thank you so much for being so honest and forthright and explaining all this to some people who don't want to hear it, but there you go. Well, let me say thank you for giving me the opportunity to do it um and let me answer the questions openly. And you know, after all these years, it's nice to put a face to the person, and you know, we both evolved and the truth is, you know, the truth is.

Guess what, Let everybody live a long time, Let everybody be happy. I know that sounds kind of weird. And the answers, man, it's only a ticket. Can we just get on with life? I mean, really, it's a ticket. And it's like, it's so insane when you watch this stuff, and oh, I gotta I gotta share one anecdote with you, one more anecdote, which you love. So there was this class action lawsuit because we didn't get back service Georges.

And there were two lawyers. I'm not gonna tell you where because you would know, you would know the situation. But we gave back the money. There's ten people in the room and I'm paying for everybody, you know, the building, the promoter, everybody's got lawyers. And these two guys go on for about fifteen minutes about how I basically ruined

the world by not giving back service charges. So when they finished, I took a toy ambulance out of my pocket and I've rolled it down the conference table and they said, what's this and I said something for you to run behind. You guys are so full of crap it's unbelievable. They started screaming, and I said, tell you what I'm gonna do. Tell you what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna give a hundred thousand dollars to the school

system grand the year for four years. You have exactly five minutes to take the deal, otherwise I'm gonna leave, in which case, all these lawyers you can go sue me and I'll just pay the money in legal fees. But here's the deal. Because I think you're such monumental asses. You can make the press conference that I gave the hundred grand, but you know what your fear is zero. You've got five minutes to accept it because I'm going back to l A. And they took the deal, Bob

being thank you, Fred. Until next time, it's Bob left Sex