by Fiona Wrench (PGH)
[In this article we republish the May Edition of the entertainment industry shop paper Strike the Stage. You can find the original article here on their website.]
Who controls the live entertainment industry? If we want to unite workers across our industry and establish minimum standards of pay and working conditions for all, we need to know something about who we’re up against.
First of all, you can’t talk about monopoly in the live entertainment industry without talking about Live Nation. Live Nation Entertainment, Inc. is the US steel of live music: it is a promoter, venue owner/operator, ticketing company (since its merger with Ticketmaster), artist manager, advertiser and sponsor all at once. In North America, Live Nation promoted 36,673 concerts in 2024, with 288 total venues in operation, including exclusive booking rights at 68 venues. Live Nation essentially has no competition. It operates 56 of the top US amphitheaters—the second-largest amphitheater operator is ASM Global, which operates only 4. Live Nation manages tickets at 53 arenas through Ticketmaster, while its largest “competitor” AXS manages tickets at only 6. It’s not only large venues that Live Nation controls, but small ones too: Live Nation either owns, leases, operates, or has exclusive booking rights at 127 theaters (1,000-6,500 capacity) and 75 clubs (<1,000 capacity). Spirit and the Roxian are prime examples of smaller Live Nation-controlled venues in Pittsburgh. And this doesn’t even mention how many artists are signed to unavoidable contracts with Live Nation.
This dramatic control of every facet of the live music business allows Live Nation to completely dominate the industry, and it shows: Live Nation’s profits and production outputs have increased dramatically year after year since the pandemic: Live Nation paid out $375 million in profit to shareholders in 2022, $704m in 2023, and over $1 billion in 2024.
Who owns Live Nation? CEO Michael Rapino owns 3.7 million common shares (1.6%). Vanguard owns 17.96m (7.76%) and BlackRock owns 13.45m (5.81%), but the company with the most sway at 69.65m shares (30.09%) is Liberty Media. So who owns Liberty Media? Hedge fund manager Ted Weschler owns 30.03% of it outright, but Warren Buffet’s holding company Berkshire Hathaway owns 29.95%. Ted Weschler happens to be the investment manager of Berkshire Hathaway.
So our investigation has led us to three names: Michael Rapino, Ted Weschler and Warren Buffet. But we can add two more names to the puzzle. PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh, like over 150 other large venues in the United States, is operated by Oak View Group (OVG). OVG is owned by The Azoff Company–formerly Azoff MSG Entertainment; it was re-named when Azoff Music Management bought out Madison Square Garden’s 50% share of the company. All these bizarre company names lead back to Irving Azoff, who, by the way, was chairman and CEO of Ticketmaster and executive chairman of Live Nation Entertainment.
Similar to PPG Paints Arena, Acrisure Stadium and PNC Park, Stage AE is owned by both the Pittsburgh Steelers and a city government commission. But Stage AE is operated by PromoWest Productions pursuant to a lease. PromoWest was acquired by AEG Presents, LLC in 2018, the live entertainment division of Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), which, like Live Nation, also sells tickets. AEG’s parent company is The Anschutz Corporation, a private holding company owned by Philip Frederick Anschutz, an American billionaire who owns or controls companies in a variety of industries, including energy, railroads, real estate, sports, newspapers, travel, movies, theaters, arenas and music. He also owns Coachella.
So an enormous amount of decision-making power in the live events industry is concentrated in the hands of only five men. How much are they each worth? Michael Rapino has an estimated net worth of around $500m. Not including dividends, Rapino was paid $139 million by Live Nation in 2022 alone, a sum more than 5,000 times greater than the median Live Nation employee’s yearly salary of only $25,000. For reference, the best Local 3 could do at Star Lake (a Live Nation-owned venue) was about $23 an hour for stagehands. Azoff’s net worth is estimated around $400 million, Weschler’s is around $264 million, Anschutz’s is $16.9 billion, and Buffet’s net worth is estimated at $150 billion.
This complete monopoly and dictatorship over our work exists on the small-scale too. Setting aside major venues, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust has practically uncontested domination of the entertainment and events market in Pittsburgh. As a non-profit, the Cultural Trust benefits from tens of millions of dollars in grants from city, state and federal government and in donations from foundations and corporations as big as Highmark, DollarBank and FedEx in exchange for tax breaks. But the Cultural Trust is just another corporation. By 2024, the Cultural Trust owned $86.6 million worth of real estate in Pittsburgh, plus $40 million in investments. Its chair, David L Holmberg, is the president and CEO of Highmark Health.
Meanwhile, the Cultural Trust reports bringing in more revenue than it spends each year. In 2020, its revenue minus expenses came out to “only” $2 million, but in 2021 this figure had already ballooned to $20.3 million; in 2022, $32.7 million, and in 2023, $18.9 million. And who do they pay the most for event production? None other than Flyspace Productions, who received $2.53 million from the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust for event production in 2023. Considering the vast majority of Flyspace laborers only make between $15 and $18 an hour, one has to wonder why the Cultural Trust, a “non-profit,” can report tens of millions of unspent dollars, money that could be paid out to workers, which will instead go toward fattening its portfolio and lining the pockets of its executives.
Flyspace itself is another petty tyrant. Flyspace is concentrating capital and further monopolizing the local market, gobbling up one local production company after another and buying even more mobile stages (one of the main ways Flyspace is able to get clients). This is not reflected in any increase in wages. Flyspace has, however, worsened its repression of its own workforce. Workers can no longer see full schedules of available shifts they can request. Instead they have to be invited to work a shift by management through an unknown process. “HR” (the owner’s sister) has no problem sending a threatening email to scold workers for not clocking in and out properly, but she conveniently “forgot” to notify workers of a new policy that automatically removes 30 minutes’ worth of pay from any shift over 5 hours long, regardless of whether the workers were actually given a lunch break. Meanwhile the festival schedule is going to be thinner this year due to construction: Market Square is going to be under construction all summer, the Children’s Theater Festival has been cancelled for 2025, and Three Rivers Arts Fest has been shortened to 3 days instead of the usual 10. All this is only the tip of the iceberg.
What are the typical reactions to this disrespect and abuse? Those with enough capital and connections have jumped ship from companies like Flyspace in the past to start their own; some even pay their workers a decent wage. These constitute a tiny minority and only benefit skilled workers. This is hardly a way to change things in the entire industry when faced with the entertainment oligarchy. Workers frequently quit, hoping to find a better situation elsewhere, but this doesn’t change anything for those they leave behind. Some workers may even change industries altogether, thinking others have it better—but these problems are hardly unique to live event production. Some may try to unionize under an NLRB election, like with the IATSE stagehand local (assuming the union is interested) and wait out years of contract negotiations between the unions’ lawyers and the company while things remain unchanged, eventually either quitting or getting fired. Some may hope to stick it out in Local 3’s hiring hall, with all the nepotism, chauvinism, cliquishness and anti-democratic mechanisms that go with it, again waiting years to move up enough to rely on this sort of work full-time.
None of these “solutions” empowers the workers in any way. Rather than jump ship, the time has come to start improving the industry we are already in as a whole. Many of us still feel very passionately about the work we do, despite the horrors.
We have already seen how spontaneous protests resulted in improvements in conditions. Flyspace shifts at the casino that involve setting up a couple thousand chairs for an event that used to be staffed by only four workers are now staffed by twice that number or more. The chairs no longer have to be torn down immediately after a show; instead the chair strikes are scheduled the following day at a reasonable hour. This changed thanks to a spontaneous “mini strike”: workers stopped accepting these shifts until conditions changed and told others to do the same. Workers speaking up against harsh weather conditions got them hazard pay for a week during the Dazzling Nights load out. At the same time, these spontaneous protests have been met with scab-like practices: Flyspace has resorted to hiring Local 3 stagehands at double the usual rate of $18 when their own understaffing and spontaneous slowdowns started by a rebellious workforce forced them to take action. These spontaneous protests must become conscious, planned actions behind specific demands.
The answer, then, is to forge a politicized, educated and well-organized working class: we have to know our industry and our history. We need a critical understanding of the history of the labor movement and the betrayal inherent to the current government-regulated union system and its body of labor law. Our strength lies in our unity: we have to organize all workers in the events industry under the same organization in order to make scabbing as difficult as possible.
