Irving Azoff Defends Ticketmaster Amid Congressional Scrutiny of Tour-Sale Fiascos

thewrap.com:

Irving Azoff, a music industry executive and former CEO of Ticketmaster Entertainment, fired back at Congress and tech companies that he said helped the scalping industry Wednesday, adding another twist in the ongoing furor over recent concert ticket debacles.Azoff said the real problem lies with an army of scalpers, who deploy bots on official ticket sites to buy blocks of tickets and then resell them at huge profits. “Scalping has always been a problem for the concert industry,” Azoff told the crowd listening to a panel on ticketing at the 34th annual Pollstar Live conference on Wednesday.  “But it only got to be a critical problem for the industry when the tech companies got involved and created these huge scale platforms like Vivid, StubHub and SeatGeek that profit from every scalper sale.” The companies and scalpers have crated a “safe harbor” that turned the secondary market into a $5 billion a year business, forecasted to grow to $10 billion by 2027, he said.

Representatives for Vivid, StubHub and SeatGeek did not immediately respond to inquiries by TheWrap about Azoff’s remarks.“None of that profit makes its way back to the artist or any facet of our industry that has actually invested in the artist and the artform,” said Azoff, who left Ticketmaster over a decade ago to return to the talent management business. “These companies have no skin in the game, have invested nothing, risked nothing, created nothing, yet they reap the lion’s share of the profit.

How does that make sense?”Making matters worse, Azoff said, Washington “isn’t focused on the real issue, and is screwing artists and their fans.” Azoff said the live music business in the U.S.