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From the time he started Ticketshop in the 1980s until he left as a director of Ticketmaster’s Irish subsidiary in 2010, Tommy Higgins occupied a front-row seat to observe the transformation of the live events ticketing business from the informal drops of ticket bundles at record shops to a heavily centralised online operation.
The concentration of this business into the hands of Ticketmaster came under scrutiny from successive competition watchdogs. As Higgins puts it himself, “there’s seven years out of the last 17 years there’s been investigations going on”. He was a central witness in the first probe by the Competition Authority, which closed without finding any wrongdoing in 2005. The man who brought Ticketmaster to Ireland describes the experience as a bruising three years.
Then at the end of November, another investigation by the state’s new competition outfit, the CCPC, this time led to a settlement whereby Ticketmaster agreed to drop exclusivity contracts under which it secured the bulk of seats at Ireland’s top venues, and to restrict similar agreements with gig promoters.
As revealed by The Currency at the time, increasing vertical concentration between venues, promoters and ticketing agents under the ownership of Ticketmaster’s parent, the US-based multinational Live Nation, both heightened concerns and increased access to contract information for Irish competition investigators.
Yet Higgins continues to defend the industry he contributed to grow and professionalise. According to him, the end of Ticketmaster’s exclusivity agreement won’t make any difference because regardless of what contracts say, “if you don’t perform, you’re gone”. On the contrary, he argues that venues enjoy the strength of a ticketing agent like Ticketmaster to ensure seat sales in a high-stakes business – and there are multiple competitors they can go to if they want to.
In a frank and direct interview with Sam Smyth for The Currency podcast encompassing Covid-19’s impact on those working in the live gig sector and solutions to the endless battles over concerts at Croke Park, Higgins fist discusses another bugbear of concert-goers: ticket touting.
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Sam Smyth (SS): Hello, I’m Sam Smyth and welcome to my podcast with The Currency. For years my guest today was the go-to guy for the concert tickets that nobody else could deliver.
Tommy Higgins was the European boss at Ticketmaster, the international ticket agency for the biggest names in entertainment and sport, in the world’s most prestigious venues.
Tommy, I understand that Ireland has the biggest sales per head for concert tickets in Europe and the second biggest in the world. So that must have made Ticketmaster Ireland, the international company’s most successful territory and therefore its most profitable?
Tommy Higgins (TH): Well, the market is fantastic here in Ireland and, you’re right Sam, I think it’s the highest per capita now it’s not in volume but per capita. And it’s the second or third in the world, has been up until last March and the whole business has been decimated since. It’s been a wonderful market but it’s not down to the – it’s nothing to do with Ticketmaster, this is to do with the promoters.
SS: And the artists, of course. Tell me what does that mean in terms of, what would you be talking about in a year, what would be turned over in concerts?
TH: There’s something in the region of about 8,000 events take place here on the island of Ireland, the island is always considered as the market, it’s not just Southern Ireland and Northern Ireland, even though there’s two jurisdictions. Promoters promote in both markets and it’s a fantastic market, as I say up to last March. But it’s the promoters who have driven that.
SS: What would be the gross for all of that? Is it €50 million a year?
TH: Oh, it would be a lot more than that, Sam.
SS: €100 million?
TH: It would be more. It would be hundreds of millions a year.
It’s a huge market now. And it came out of dancehalls and it just evolved.
SS: Like are you talking about half a billion?
TH: It could be up as far as that, Sam. The market is concerts and sport. You have to include sport because of what we call, ‘live entertainment’, which is concerts and sports. And theatre and arts and all that, that’s what I’m talking about.
SS: Ticketmaster Ireland, that was you, you sold most of those tickets, I think, didn’t you?
TH: Yes, it would be the market leader.
“Way back in the day when people were annoyed or they were unhappy about anything, they would write a letter to the editor.”
Tommy Higgins
There’s been a lot of controversy and there’s been investigations going on. There’s seven years out of the last 17 years there’s been investigations going on.
SS: This is the Competition Authority.
TH: Absolutely, yeah.
SS: Run by the government.
TH: Yeah.
SS: Were they wondering why no one else was competing with you or did they suspect that you were keeping other people or preventing them from competing with you?
TH: I wasn’t involved in this recent one, bar I did one interview with them. But I was heavily involved in the first one from 2002 to 2005. It’s a pretty ugly experience. There was a dawn raid on the offices, I was stuck in my office, I couldn’t make any phone calls, couldn’t do anything.
SS: But you weren’t there at dawn I know that much.
TH: It was 9 o’clock, Sam. And it was quite intimidating….
SS: Did the police come in or what?
TH: No, it was just the Competition Authority and they had a summons and they could come in. Then they started requesting files and all that. But look, where it comes from Sam, is that way back in the day when people were annoyed or they were unhappy about anything, they would write a letter to the editor, it started there. And then it would go to Joe Duffy’s ‘Liveline’. Joe is a master craftsman, a wonderful operator.
SS: What would they be complaining about?
TH: They couldn’t get a ticket. It would not be unusual for 50,000 people to be looking for 10,000 tickets. So, therefore you have 40,000 disgruntled people, and understandable.
SS: How often each year would that happen?
TH: Probably no more than 20 times a year, the big ones. You never hear of the ordinary day to day stuff, it’s only when it was a really, really hot show and demand is really …
SS: Could you list off for me the ones that would be guaranteed sell outs where people would be prepared to pay a multiple of the price of the ticket on the black market?
TH: Well, that’s only a more recent phenomenon. It’s due to the internet. I suppose the biggest band in the world would have been U2, in this country here. So many people across the world wanted to hear U2 in Dublin above any country. So, they travelled from all over the world, which also increased the demand. U2 were never ever able to satisfy the demand for their concerts. So, they would have caused the biggest demand for concerts.
SS: And who else?
TH: Ah there is loads of them.
SS: Bruce Springsteen, is he a sell out?
TH: Ed Sheeran, Bruce Springsteen, there are so many. ACDC. There’s thousands of artists out there.
SS: There are lots of concerts for which you sold tickets that there were empty seats for.
TH: The global number is that 45 per cent of seats go unsold.
SS: 45 per cent.
TH: Over a whole year across the globe. So, you only hear about the ones that cause a lot of controversy. Now, when I was saying that they would go onto ‘Liveline’, Joe might get three days out of that. Which would be 10 people a day/30 people a day and they were saying they couldn’t get their tickets. But Sam, of late, social media has weaponised that.
“I can go back to the 1860s when Charles Dickens did a book tour of North America, there was a secondary market.”
Tommy Higgins
SS: And politicians, of course, took that up too. A Bill went through the Oireachtas I think this year didn’t it?
TH: The Bill went through, that’s to do with the selling tickets above face value. I think it was probably brought in because of the UEFA tournament that’s coming here next summer.
SS: Well, you call that the secondary market, I think.
TH: Well, that’s what it is. That’s what it’s known as globally, the secondary market.
SS: Yeah, but others call it ticket-touting.
TH: It’s another word is ticket-touting, yeah.
SS: A lot of people I know would be prepared to pay. If somebody’s prepared to stand out all night outside your office to get tickets I wouldn’t mind giving them €10 for doing that.
TH: But Sam nobody would stand out…
SS: They don’t do that anymore.
TH: Nobody stands outside the office.
SS: It’s all done online.
TH: It’s all online but…
SS: How come these people who re-sell tickets can be guaranteed to get a big percentage off them?
TH: First of all, Sam, everybody thinks there’s a conspiracy, nobody bothers ever to check the facts. Above face value sales represent less than one per cent of the overall market. Where do they get them? Fans buy four tickets and they sell two. They also buy from artists, fan clubs, during a pre-sale and resell the tickets, there is no mystery.
SS: And you don’t get a percentage of that?
TH: We don’t do those things. That’s the artists, the artists sell their tickets. But 99 times out of 100, pre-sales are very, very good and the artists should be doing them for their fans and looking after their fans. It’s just when there’s a massive demand that is just impossible to satisfy.
SS: And fans you think are the ones more likely to sell them on, but is there not a specialised website where it is sort of respectable to re-sell them? Did Ticketmaster own one for instance?
TH: They used to, they stopped it. I would think that here…
SS: Well, they had to stop it I presume because it wasn’t respectable.
TH: No, I would say that it was financial. Now, I’m not involved with Ticketmaster. I’m looking at it from the outside. But if you look at it here, it’s about numbers. There’s only five million people here on the island. I always compare that secondary market here to a Bentley or a Ferrari, there are very few Ferraris sold here in Ireland, the numbers aren’t here. There’s 60 million people next door, 300 million people in North America, so it’s about numbers. You just work out the numbers. There’s only a small amount of people here on the island. Most people can’t always get a ticket for a concert here in this country. There are exceptions, of course there are exceptions. But how do you satisfy 50,000 people looking for 10,000 tickets. And in the case of U2, there would be maybe a half a million people looking for 80,000 in Croke Park, you’d have 300,000 or 400,000 people disappointed.
SS: Well, I suppose the All-Ireland Final would be …
TH: There’s another example.
I”My own personal view, Sam, is if somebody is stupid enough to pay €500 for a €100 ticket, let them at it. Now where it’s wrong, is when the extra money doesn’t go to the stakeholder which is the artist and the promoter.”
Tommy Higgins
SS: Is that the sporting equivalent of a U2 concert?
TH: It would be I suppose, yeah.
SS: Through this the public, of course, then became suspicious of Ticketmaster because Ticketmaster controlled the ticket sales.
Politicians could guarantee themselves publicity and so on…
TH: It’s a wonderful one for politicians. I don’t know how many of them came through my office complaining. You know Chuck Schumer in North America?
SS: Well, he’s the most senior senator of the Democrats.
TH: He got 10 years out of ticketing. He was the go-to man. I don’t know how many times…
SS: You mean he could get you tickets?
TH: No, no. I don’t know how many times I’d see him looking out over the glass saying, ‘Well, we got to do something about this’. At the end of it, Chuck did nothing about it because there was nothing. It’s supply and demand, it’s no different than anything else.
There’s a Chuck Schumer in every country in the world, Sam. The latest one was Noel Rock here in this country and Noel, he was the go-to man. So, all the reporters would go to…
SS: A decent young fella, I think.
TH: I had a couple of run-ins, not run-ins, that’s the wrong word. We were sparring about this. I told him that you cannot cure this, you cannot ban it.
SS: Yeah, but you tell me now, Tommy, if I managed to get myself a ticket to a very popular event how can you legally prevent me from selling a ticket to a sane person who’s prepared to pay whatever price I ask them for?
TH: My own personal view, Sam, is if somebody is stupid enough to pay €500 for a €100 ticket, let them at it. Now where it’s wrong, is when the extra money doesn’t go to the stakeholder which is the artist and the promoter. That’s wrong. That means that the artist and the promoter haven’t priced the house properly.
SS: Ireland versus England at rugby here have tickets going for €2,500.
TH: Sam, I can go back to the 1860s when Charles Dickens did a book tour of North America, there was a secondary market. I can go back to the 1840s when Jenny Lind, ‘The Swedish Nightingale’, there was a secondary market in North America in demand for going to her concerts and I would say if you go back to the Colosseum, you would have a secondary market there. It’s been around forever and there’s no solution to it.
By banning it, it goes underground then and people are ripped off further. So, Ticketmaster had a company – Seatwave – and they just shut it down. It wasn’t worth the aggravation.
SS: Yeah, but Tommy…
TH: Hold on a second, excuse me. I would say it wasn’t worth their while to be at it. It looked horrible.
“The ticketing companies or any ticketing company is at the very, very bottom of the food chain. They thought that we were dictating the prices.”
Tommy Higgins
SS: If I know some decent family who lives up the street from me, they’ve got two lovely kids, their parents work hard all day, the kids are forever fans of some artist and they’re left standing outside while the children of some very wealthy person can skew a ticket, that’s not very fair is it?
TH: It’s not skewing a ticket, Sam. It’s on some market, it’s up on a website.
SS: Yeah.
TH: The one thing that, and nobody wants to say this …
SS: Is it a level playing field? Can anybody get those tickets though?
TH: I don’t know what you mean Sam?
SS: Well, if there’s say 10,000 tickets for sale, right, and how come if there’s thousands of people trying to get those then someone who’s going to sell them on at a huge profit manages to get ….
TH: I told you where they’re getting them from, Sam. You legitimately go into the artist’s website because you’ve a presale three or four days before the official tickets go on sale and anybody…
SS: So, what advice would you give the parents of some teenagers looking to get tickets that they know is going to be hard…
TH: I can’t give any advice.
SS: Would you say….
TH: Sam, if 50,000 people are looking for 10,000 tickets, there is no solution. None.
SS: Well now the Competition Authority’s investigation, that finished in 2005, they found at the end of that that your agreements with concert promoters do not foreclose the market.
TH: No. Sam, look, hold on, let me explain. I went through three years of torture with that.
SS: And you said they arrived at a dawn raid.
TH: That was only the start of it. Then you had to hire the best lawyers in the country to fight it because once the state comes after you, unless you have the resources to fight it, you’re absolutely goosed.
But they were going on the perception for three years that Ticketmaster was controlling the market with the promoters. Nothing could be further from the truth. The ticketing companies or any ticketing company is at the very, very bottom of the food chain. They thought that we were dictating the prices. And, in the end…
SS: It was the vendors, the ticket sellers who were….
TH: That’s what this investigation was from 2002 to 2005, and I was with it right through to the very end. And Sam, just let me go through it.
I had to go in then, after all their lawyers and the toing and froing, they’d sent 20 pages of questions, we’d send back 40 to them. And unless you’re well lawyered up to go after them, the state would absolutely murder you if you didn’t. So, it ended up that I was in the, what we call nearly a witness box, there were four of them opposite me and asking questions all day. For three years they were going down the wrong route.
There was as whiteboard there and I explained to them how this works: An artist goes out on the road, he appoints an agent to go out and sell the show, the agent then goes around to all the promoters. So, not alone are the promoters here in Ireland competing with one another, they’re also competing with promoters in Zurich or Oslo…
SS: Are the promoters asked for a price?
TH: Absolutely.
SS: How much will you give me for my band for the night?
TH: It’s no different than being a book publisher. When Ms Rowling, if she does another Harry Potter book, you can be sure her manager or agent will squeeze the most out of that and that’s what the agent is to do for the artist.
In the end the ticketing company, they’re only service providers. They have absolutely no say in this at all. So, for three years the Competition Authority were going down that route. Now I will give, in fairness to them, I could see the blood drawing from their faces when they absolutely realised after three years, they were totally on the wrong trail. But it cost a fortune of money to defend that.
SS: Is there a learning difficultly there?
TH: Well, I’ll come back to that in a second, there seems to be.
But I will give credit to the gentleman, I can’t think of his name now, who more or less called a halt to it. In the end of it, in the conclusion of that report, there was no prosecutions. They said it was a benefit for consumers, greater for choice and variety of events, easier and faster access to tickets. They didn’t find anything wrong in the end, after three years. So, that was from 2002 to 2005. Next thing they started up again in 2017.
SS: How much did that cost you in legal fees?
TH: I can’t… I won’t say it Sam.
SS: Hundreds of thousands?
TH: I won’t say it Sam, it was horrific. I would say that the two investigations, basing on what I know that we paid back in 2005…
SS: The word in the trade was, Tommy, it cost you nearly half a million.
TH: And I would say Sam, judging by this current investigation and all the fees, if you count the fees, that the Competition Authority, over seven years, would have run up, I would say between €8 million and €10 million would have cost the two investigations.
SS: Wow.
The Competition Authority’s successor is the CCPC, that’s the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, now they reached an agreement recently restricting Ticketmaster’s exclusive deals and banning direct contracts between ticketing agents and venues. Does that suggest that the CCPC believe that the old relationships were too cosy?
TH: No, and I’ll tell you why Sam, they never found anything wrong. No prosecutions. So, when you examine everything…
SS: If there’s a prosecution, that suspects you break the law. But they can say that there’s a better way of doing things, that they seem to have advised.
TH: To my view of it was, Sam – it was a surrender, they spent four years prodding, looking. There were 240,000 emails in that investigation.
SS: How many?
240,000. So, everybody has to go through every single one of those and if there was something wrong in all that investigation, they would have found something. So let’s go through what they recommended or what we call a settlement.
SS: Well, the settlement is going to be policed by the High Court.
TH: I just read about it that it was going into the High Court.
But just look at what it is, right. They refrain from entering into any agreement with a venue that contains an exclusivity clause.
SS: What does that mean?
TH: No different than what it was before. In the…
SS: Well, an agreement is between two…
TH: The last time I looked at the word contract Sam, there has to be two people agreeing to a contract. So, nobody has forced the venue to enter into a contract.
And I’ll give you an example, Sam, probably outside the entertainment ….
SS: Do you think it’s face saving?
Of course, it’s face saving Sam, it is a surrender, they won nothing out of this.
SS: It was a surrender by whom?
TH: The Competition people.
You can have a five-year contract or a 25-year contract, in effect it lasts about a month because if you don’t deliver, you’re out on your ear Sam. That goes if you’re a centre forward for a football team, no matter where you are, if you don’t deliver the service that you’ve been contracted to do, you’re out on your ear.
So, they refrained from any agreement with a venue that contains an exclusivity clause. But what they mean by the word, ‘Exclusivity’, is 80 per cent of the tickets, it was never any different. Many’s the time Sam, Ticketmaster or any ticketing company wouldn’t get 100 per cent, you’d never ever, ever got 100 per cent of the tickets. The venue would sell some, the promoter would have to sell some and I’ve often seen the situation that you might be down to 70 per cent or 65 per cent of the tickets. That’s the way the industry worked.
SS: So that percentage that Ticketmaster doesn’t get, that’s where the ticket touts get their tickets?
TH: No, no, no Sam, no, no. Through the artist’s fan club website. And Sam there’s nothing wrong with that. As I say 99 times out of 100 the artist is looking after their own fans.
So, the next one then Sam, they refrained from entering into an agreement with a live event organiser that contains an exclusivity clause if the duration of the agreement exceeds three years. So, they have no problem with exclusivity up to three years. So what?
SS: Five years then, they’ve got a problem with.
TH: It seems to be. But five years is the industry global standard, but it doesn’t matter. The only think I see here in this is that a lawyer is going to get more money, he has to do a contract after three years instead of five years.
SS: Could you not just work on word of mouth as people tend to do.
TH: Well, you cannot Sam, if you look at a promoter with probably rolling €20 million to €50 million worth of shows taking place over six to nine months, there’s some pressure on the promoter to make sure that those tickets are being sold properly. And you need to have a very, very, very good ticketing company to be able to manage all that inventory.
SS: Well, that’s what Ticketmaster’s become, and I suppose it has the lion’s share of the half a billion of tickets that are sold for sporting and live entertainment events.
TH: Sam, let me explain this to you, if they were not good enough, they wouldn’t get one ticket to sell. There are loads of other ticketing companies in the market. Now the interesting thing that I see…
SS: Why do I not know any of their names?
TH: Sam, it’s mentioned in the Competition Authority’s report. There are four companies out there. Here’s the one that’s most interesting that I see. There are four ticketing companies. There’s a ticketing company called Future Ticketing. They’re a good company in the horse-racing business, they went after that business.
SS: Are they in Ireland?
TH: Yeah, in Ireland. Eventbrite, an American company, they’re based here. Tickets.ie and Viagogo. Those four ticketing companies have been supported by the government, by government agencies. Either through Enterprise Ireland or any of those. So, you have one arm of the state prosecuting or trying to prosecute Ticketmaster where another arm of the state is supporting the opposition and they’re complaining about lack of competition.
SS: And in what way, is it like direct grants like?
TH: Yeah. Good luck to them. Good luck to them for getting it. We never got a red cent off them from the day we started. And Sam the business that everybody sees as this Big Kahuna today…
SS: Well, that’s what I want to ask you about now.
TH: Okay.
SS: Because Ticketmaster bought 50 per cent of Ticketshop, that’s the company that you set up 11 years ago.
TH: No. Ticketshop was set up a long time before that Sam.
SS: Well listen, Ticketshop sold around a million tickets a year which was estimated to be worth €18 million to €20 million and the best guestimate is that they created around 2 million a year in commission and then came Ticketmaster’s digital whiz kids with Yankee knowhow and you were running it for them.
TH: Before that Sam, we had a joint venture. I realised at the time that Ticketshop, we went as far as we could with that and I needed the technology. The best company in the world with the technology was Ticketmaster and the market was growing at a huge rate and we felt for us to stay ahead I needed to get more expertise and more technology into the business and that was the reason that we went with Ticketmaster. Did a deal with them.
SS: Listen they seem like very clever people, I presume you got a lot of money and you certainly got prestige Tommy because I remember seeing somewhere that you were president of Ticketmaster of Europe, the Middle East and Africa or something?
TH: No Sam, I was down in Barcelona one day, Sam, and the CEO of Ticketmaster said, ‘Would you like to run Ticketmaster Europe’, there was no interview, there was no nothing that’s the way it was.
SS: But you did get the Middle East and Africa.
TH: No, the business wasn’t there. Sam, there’s no prestige about it at all.
SS: Jesus, it’s a very big prestigious company, though?
TH: Ah it is and it was great fun et cetera et cetera.
SS: And to be the boss of that now, Tommy you’re a very modest man.
TH: No, Sam.
SS: Possibly because you’re from Sligo.
TH: You’re being slippy, Sam. I’m not buying that, no. Forget about it, go down a different road.
But Sam, look, as I keep coming back to ticketing, you’re looking at the ticketing end of it. The promoters are the people here who have driven this business and I would also add in Harry Crosbie here who had the vision to put in The Point. Remember this business came from dancehalls and if you look at what happened now, a gross for a concert in Croke Park is about $10 million, the gross for a night down in 3Arena is about $1.5 million, with a top artist of 100 quid, work out the numbers, 12,000 people, figure it out. So that’s why either venues or promoters need a very, very competent ticketing company to manage all of that inventory because there’s so much at stake.
“Croke Park, the promoters, the residents etc, they should look at a five-year plan instead of one year at a time. “
Tommy Higgins
SS: When you think that along the way – I think they’re based in Los Angeles – Live Nation, they’re huge they now, own Ticketmaster; they also have a share in the Irish promoters MCD; they’re financially involved in some of the world’s biggest bands like U2. Now does that not sound like a monopoly?
TH: No.
SS: Hang on a second, they own the Ticketmaster, they’ve got a strong financial interest in the band; they seem to own everything there.
TH: No.
SS: What do they not own? They own the band, the venue and Ticketmaster. I thought the fact that there were three of you there….
TH: All those mergers were cleared first of all by the Department of Justice in the United States, they were also cleared in the UK. MCD which was a large company, that was cleared by the local competition authority, there is nothing wrong with that.
SS: I’m not suggesting there’s anything wrong with that. What I’m saying is that it’s the same company that owns the venue, owns the ticketing company and has a big whack of the band.
TH: But what are you trying to say?
SS: I’m trying to say they own everything, Ticketmaster.
TH: No, they do not. They don’t own all the artists in the world. They don’t own all the promoters in the world.
SS: Sorry I was referring to Dublin there. If MCD are putting on a concert, now they’re a very competent..
TH: Aiken Promotions are huge operators.
SS: Absolutely.
TH: They’re the competition, they’re huge operators. MCD may be larger but Aiken Promotions are big operators.
SS: Yeah, but Ticketmaster own all three…
TH: Yeah, but if you look at the venue point of view Sam, Ticketmaster have been selling tickets since Harry Crosbie brought in Apollo Leisure back in 1989, selling tickets before Live Nation ever came on the scene. So you stand up, I keep going back to saying that you’re as good as a month, if you don’t perform Sam, you’re gone.
SS: Well, there’s a new company now, Deutsche Entertainment. DEAG. They’re new money, fresh ideas. Young Brian Hand is one of those involved. Is that a breath of fresh air?
“If you look at Croke Park it’s probably one of the most underused stadiums of its size in Europe.”
Tommy Higgins
TH: Of course, I keep coming back Sam, you’re not listening to me, that there’s no barrier to entry into the market. There’s also a big company from Hong Kong now coming in with Paul Dainty who is an Australian promoter, they’ve announced that they’re coming into this market here. Let’s see what happens.
SS: Well tell me how about the sporting events that you…
TH: Sam remember now I’m a number of years out of this. I’m right up to date with all the contracts that are going on at present, I don’t have vision into everything. But you take an interest in it because when you were involved in that business for quite a while, of course you take an interest in it.
SS: Tell me now, is there much difference between sports and entertainment?
TH: Just to give you an example Sam, back in 2005 or something, there was a tender for the Croke Park contract. 11 companies tendered for that. Ticketmaster won that. About five years later, there was another tender, Tickets.ie got that tender. You never hear about the ones that, it’s like a horse, the guy that’s gambling on the horses, you never hear of the losses. But Ticketmaster lost that one and that was about 2011-2012 or something. Now there’s another tender out for Croke Park at present, it’ll be interesting to see who’s going to get that one, I’ve no idea.
SS: Well one thing in your business that must have impacted in a big way was, remember the Irish ticketing scandal at the Olympics, did it not poison the public’s perception of ticket sales?
TH: What had that to do with us Sam?
SS: Well, it’s ticket sales. And the public had a suspicion, which was reflected in as we said before, all those TDs complaining and so forth.
TH: That happened at the Olympics and that happened down in Brazil, what had that to do with tickets in Ireland?
SS: I’ll tell you what, because people are suspicious then of ticket sales.
TH: Sure, the whole world is suspicious of the Olympic movement Sam, sure it’s the most corrupt organisation in the world.
SS: Well maybe.
TH: You have no answer for that one. No Sam, I don’t agree with that.
SS: I’m not going to defame anybody.
TH: If you want to edit it out go on ahead but sure, go on.
SS: Something else I wanted to talk about was, Garth Brooks booked five nights in Croke Park, the local Dublin City Council only allowed three and all the gigs were cancelled and I think you were there and you had to refund 400,000.
TH: I wasn’t with the company but that happened and Sam, that was a tragedy. If you look at this, 400,000 people coming to a city, I think the county manager was spineless at the time, he should have let them go ahead, now I think there’s a solution for that, possibly that would be Croke Park, the promoters, the residents etc, they should look at a five-year plan instead of one year at a time.
What nobody mentioned the year before, there were no concerts in Croke Park. I think under the Croke Park planning, they were saying they should have no more than three concerts a year.
SS: Do the people who live around Croke Park, are you saying that because they live there, they have just got to put up with it?
TH: No, I think it would be better to do what I call a five-year plan because sometimes you just don’t have the artists that can fill 80,000 people and then we’ll say a year like that, where you had Garth Brooks that could do five of them. So if you combine the whole lot, say okay there might be two in one year, there might be four another year but do a five-year plan, I think that would help everybody so nobody would know in advance, there is a solution for that and I think they should work it out.
SS: And does that involve giving a lot of people a lot of tickets?
TH: Funny enough Sam, if you look at Croke Park it’s probably one of the most underused stadiums of its size in Europe, there’s only about three-quarters of a million people attend matches and concerts there a year, the Bernabéu in Spain in Madrid, about 2.7 million go there.
SS: Except there’s what, 70 million Spanish or something.
TH: It doesn’t matter Sam; I’m just talking about the stadium. The problem and the cost of Croke Park is to do with the disruption but if you look at it, it’s very low density around Croke Park, there’s not a huge amount of people living there, compared with other cities.
SS: But they’re narrow streets, there’s a lot of…
“I think there’s a festival went on sale there recently, Longitude and there was huge demand for it, which is great.”
Tommy Higgins
TH: Sam, were you ever around Highbury? Or it’s now the Emirates Stadium in Arsenal, 2.3 million a year. Croke Park is closed from October until May, practically. So there’s very low impact on residents there, but there’s a solution there to be worked out and they should do that and I think it would be a help to everybody, the promoters, the residents, to Croke Park, do a five-year operation, two in one year, four another year because it’s not every year you can get artists to fill 80,000 people.
SS: You were around there a long time, how long were you involved in Ticketmaster, Tommy?
TH: In the ticketing business, I’ve been in that end of it, the selling tickets for 50 years Sam, it was from record shops I started off in that business.
SS: Oh yeah and we’ll come back to that.
TH: We brought Ticketmaster in 1997. And I’m gone about six, seven years.
SS: Now in all of that time, tell me, what’s that 23 years? Tell me, which gig or artist that you were involved promoting or selling tickets for at that time, did you most enjoy?
TH: Look Sam, I love live entertainment. There’s nothing, there is absolutely nothing to touch live shows and those 30 seconds when the lights go down and the anticipation of the artist starting that first note. There is nothing to touch it and it’s the same with sports, when they’re waiting for the throw-in or the puck-in or the kick-off. This is why this shutdown at present is just horrible and I hope it gets back and I think it will come back bigger than ever again, it’ll take a little bit of time but there’s a huge pent-up demand.
SS: Oh, listen I would know.
TH: There is nothing to touch it. But I never got involved with the artists.
SS: In particular though that you can remember an occasion, an event, an artist?
TH: No. Sam a lot of the time we would be working.
SS: But I know you have a favourite band.
TH: My band out of Texas.
SS: Yeah, it’s called ‘Asleep at the Wheel’. Am I right?
TH: Yeah, the story of my life Sam. But sorry I never got involved with artists, that was nothing to do with, never ever had anything to do with artists.
SS: No and I know you didn’t manage but you can appreciate them I suppose, but you did play in a band which I saw, a band called, ‘The Rocky Tops’.
TH: Sam I can barely remember that.
SS: A fairly successful band. Were you also involved with, ‘Wee Mick and the Hootenannies’?
TH: No, I had nothing to do with them Sam. No.
SS: Well, I was about to think, you being in Not guilty, I will accept that.
TH: Sam look, let’s go back to one thing here, we’ve an unbelievable live entertainment business here in Ireland that the promoters have driven and you have to throw Harry Crosbie into it for the vision of putting in The Point, the Bord Gáis Arena, Vicar Street, you have Denis, has the Gaiety and the Olympia, they rescued those two theatres. So, this is all done through excellence, ticketing companies and what we did, we’re only suppliers, we were like the truck driver. But we always lifted our game according to the market.
SS: And they also had the investment to make didn’t they?
TH: Yeah, but if you look at a venue that’s why contracts are needed, because you had to invest in technology in a venue and a venue has to make sure – they have so much responsibility for health and safety. They want to know how many people are coming in because if you oversell a venue can you imagine what happens if crushes come in, so that’s why you have to have contracts with venues and with promoters and as I pointed out to you…
SS: And real estate is valuable Tommy, it costs a lot of money.
TH: It does and they have to make sure they know what is going on in each venue. Remember Sam, when we started off nobody wanted to know about it, even, and he’s a good friend of mine, Jim Aiken at the time. He was careful when we brought in the computers because he always did his own tickets and I remember, I’m not saying begging to him but “Please, Jim, will you put some tickets on our computer?” But he said, “You have to prove yourself”. And he was right, so we had to start at the very bottom of the pile and built up that business through extremely hard work, mortgage, wife and kids and everything to make that business work and I would say the same for MCD or any of them.
“I had to go out and apologise to all the people who were all around the corner but what I heard was all the different accents and people travelled 40, 50, 60, 70 miles and they were bollocking me out of it in different accents.”
Tommy Higgins.
SS: It’s like voting by a voting machine and filling in a ballot.
TH: But I’m saying this did not happen overnight. Nobody gave you anything and you had to build up the business and so did all the promoters here built up a wonderful, wonderful business and the consumer here in Ireland never had so much choice for venues and for concerts and for live entertainment. It’s a fabulous market.
SS: I was going to say you are a Sligo-path and you were managing Star Records in Sligo when you saw a gap in the market for ticketing, isn’t that how you started?
TH: Well it started, the promoters used to come around and give you a book of tickets, that was before computers.
SS: And just ask you to sell them.
TH: That’s how I got to know promoters, I had the shop in Sligo and a shop in Galway. The first people to bring in the computer into the country was The Point, Apollo Leisure and we were selling, they put a terminal up in Grafton Street on to HMV because we started off that business, I said to you Sam with the two leased cash registers and a £40 float and a counter inside the door.
SS: Is that your company that you started?
TH: Yeah, we started off that.
SS: So that was the office off Grafton Street?
TH: Just sitting there inside the door in HMV Record Store on Grafton Street, what is now called Ticketmaster but that’s how it started. No different than anybody else.
SS: Two cash registers and a £40 float.
TH: One on Henry Street and one on Grafton Street, but then The Point came in and they put a computer in but it never worked. There’s always a tipping point in a business when you see how are you going to… so we’re standing one day outside and the computers didn’t work. And I had to go out and apologise to all the people who were all around the corner but what I heard was all the different accents and people travelled 40, 50, 60, 70 miles and they were bollocking me out of it in different accents and I said, if you can get the tickets to those people there’s a market out there. So, we dumped the Point one.
SS : I thought you were going say that you came out with a screwdriver and began to work on the computer that was broken but…
TH: No, but it is funny, but the Point were the first people so we went and we put one in probably every major town in the country and there was a huge risk at the time, so we put in the infrastructure hoping then that the promoters would use it but they were very reluctant at the start, rightly so, they had to see this is a new…
SS: It was unproven.
TH: It was unproven so we had to prove it. So, when I look at all these investigations and investigations going on for seven years out of the past 17 years and nothing has come out of it Sam. These few recommendations that we’re talking, means nothing, it doesn’t make any difference to the business.
SS: Listen your contribution to live entertainment is admirable because you’re also the chairman of Sligo Rovers and you helped raise €80,000 this year for the team.
TH: Well, I didn’t raise it Sam, it was the supporters.
SS: But you helped.
TH: No, I did nothing for it.
SS: And you’re also very modest.
TH: No I’m not. It’s great fun Sam, I’m really enjoying Sligo Rovers at present and it’s a different part of your career, something new, you have to be working Sam.
SS: Well listen the government recently because of Covid now which is dominating everything, every facet of life at the minute, they’re giving some money to musicians and to performers, how much damage is Covid doing at the minute?
TH: To which now? To sport?
SS: To the entertainment industry.
TH: Oh it’s decimated, Sam, it’s 95 per cent down, it’s just horrific, the numbers are all out there. But there are no shows taking place.
SS: How do you live as a musician?
TH: You don’t. And what is more worrying is all the infrastructure, you have the lighting people, the sound people, the truck drivers, it’s just extraordinary the amount. Where have all those people, will they be able to get them back? That ecosystem that was out there supporting the whole industry worldwide, but it will come back and what’s great news now about the vaccine, you can nearly see the cloud is lifting and I think there’s a festival went on sale there recently, Longitude and there was huge demand for it, which is great.
It’ll be slow, it’ll come back bit by bit, it’ll probably take to 2022 before it’s back fully I think.
SS: Well of course you often put your money where your mouth is I suppose, you were one of the original investors in Riverdance, Tommy, isn’t that right?
TH: Yes. That was a Hail Mary one Sam, because Ticketmaster at the time, sorry it was before Ticketmaster, it was Ticketshop at the time, we lost money for seven years but we had the belief that the business would succeed and that’s what I look at the Competition Authority coming down hammering you there, you never go back to think about the hard days of starting off, and we invested in Riverdance and it was huge.
SS: It was one of the best investments ever.
TH: It was a very good one and it changed the fortunes of the company from losing money, we started making money.
SS It put soles on shoes and arses on trousers?
TH: Sam, I remember our accountant coming in one day and he showed me the monthly thing and there was no brackets, I said “I never knew how to read a set of accounts without any brackets on them.”
SS: And no red pen.
TH: Oh yeah. But I’ve a huge admiration, I keep going back to, they never get the credit, coming back to the promoters who drove this business, took extraordinary risk. When you look Sam, that you put down a million dollars or something for a guarantee for an artist, that’s a lot of pressure on you to do that and then you have politicians and competition people complaining about this and that and the other and yet the consumer never, ever had so much choice.
SS: Just last week I suppose it was, Bob Dylan sold his publishing rights for nearly $300 million.
TH: I was wondering about that but he’s not the first one. David Bowie did it some, maybe 15 years ago or something. I think he just leased his for a number of years and got it back again but they’re all doing it.
SS : Bowie?
TH: David Bowie yeah.
SS: Taylor Swift did the same.
TH: Slightly different.
SS: I think her management.
TH: I think her management sold her and she’s going to record all the songs again. I don’t know, to be honest with you Sam I don’t know the ins and outs.
SS: How does that work, the publishing bit Tommy?
TH: It’s like a lease, I mean Dylan’s catalogue will be there for 500 years.
SS: If I write a song, how is the money raised from that song that I write?
TH: Spotify gives you so much, radio stations.
SS: Will your record company for a start?
TH: Yeah.
SS: Like there’s a royalty paid for the performer, a royalty paid for the publisher?
TH: And the writer, I don’t know the percentage, they’re all different. They’re very valuable commodities.
SS: That’s where the money is made I think, isn’t it?
TH: Dylan will be mentioned in hundreds of years in the same breath as Mozart or Beethoven. So, it’s a very valuable piece of work and you’ll never know with Bob, was he doing some estate planning, I’ve no idea.
SS: People said death duties to be?
TH: I don’t know. Stevie Nicks did with hers, I see David Crosby, they’re all at it.
SS: Crosby, Stills and Nash.
TH: There’s a market out there because it’s a one-off Sam, a catalogue like that, what would Bruce Springsteen’s be like?
SS: I suppose if you’re going to pass money on to your family?
TH: I don’t know, there could be various different…
SS: Tax efficiency I suppose. But listen I’m just looking at the clock.
TH: The clock on the wall Sam, the clock on the wall says.
SS: And as I would say, no business has been as good as show business for you Tommy and it has given you a fascinating life and because you didn’t drink or do drugs you remember it all. Are you going to write a book?
TH: No, I’ll scribble something together Sam but no.
SS: Have you something written?
TH: No I did, I wrote a book Sam, only for family really, for family reasons.
SS: So there’s no…
TH: No scandal Sam, don’t worry.
SS: So listen we’re overtime now. So Tommy Higgins thank you very much for joining me.
*****
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