Andrew Schulz's Beef with Ticketmaster | Joe Rogan

She actually got the DNA test. Okay. Can we talk about how fucked up Ticketmaster is real quick? Yeah, you wanted to talk about that. I just figured that. I just put my mind together on this thing. Yeah, it was a taxi sent me. Oh my god. Fat models, Ticketmaster. We're gonna take them all down. Okay, so Ticketmaster, you know the place we buy tickets. I had no clue about this Ticketmaster thing. I'm just starting to do some theaters and shit on the tour, so I'm starting to look at what they charge to do the processing and servicing. Right? You buy, it's like a $30 or $40 ticket. I looked at yours. $40 tickets. $16 in servicing. For a service charge, yeah. Is it per ticket? Per fucking ticket. They gotta pay for- 40%. Don't they gotta pay for shit in the venue? Like the ushers? No, they don't. That's the venue cost that you also gotta pay. It's just to process the ticket, and if you want to pick it up, it will call another $3. It's unfathomable, right? So I'm starting to think I'm going, okay, so for the first time in my life, I'm like, okay, I'm selling some tickets, everything's good, and I'm just getting pieces of the door, so I'm happy. Right? And my boy, who's like this genius fucking kid, OJ, Nigerian, all these Nigerians are geniuses, and he comes up to me, he's like, okay, but what about the processing fee for Ticketmaster? How much are you getting off of that? I go, what? He's like, what percentage are you getting off of that? I go, nothing. He goes, wait, but you're bringing all the ticket sales. Why aren't you getting a piece of it's 40% of your ticket price? And I'm like, well, I don't know. And he goes, and what about the data from the tickets being sold? Are you getting that? I go, no. He goes, hold on. So they're fucking you and getting paid to fuck you? I go, what do you mean? He goes, the game is data now. Any business that's successful right now is all about data acquisition. Right? Any business. And data is not how many followers we have on Instagram because they could take your account away in a second, how many subs that you get on YouTube because they could throttle your search, we could see that happen all the time. It's direct connect to fan. Right? And what Ticketmaster has done is, they're your ticketing site, they get your email, they get your data set, they get all your fans, they know exactly who your fans are. And they email them and tell them when you're coming into town. Or when somebody else. Somebody that they might like that's like you. Exactly. And then they're getting paid an absorbent amount of money, they're fucking over the fans on it. So I'm like, I'm talking to him and he's like, yo, we got to just create another one of these. We got to create another system that gives all that data to the comic. Why is the middleman even there? We could create a way cheaper ticketing service that gives every one of those emails to a comic. And it's like comics used to do back in the days by putting a comic cards on the tables and you collect them afterwards. You can have an email list for every time you go to Idaho, an email list for every time you go to New Jersey, an email list for all these different places. That's what most authors do. And Kevin Hart, Kevin Hart, that's how Kevin Hart came up. Kevin Hart was going into all of these comedy clubs and he was getting everybody's motherfucking email. People wonder why whenever Kevin would launch on these social media sites, he'd get all of these crazy followers immediately. It's because of that road work he put in in those comedy clubs. That's it. He saw it before anybody. I think Louis CK did that as well. Louis had this massive email and now you have direct connection with your fans. And that's what your fans want. Your fans don't want Ticketmaster telling them that Led Zeppelin's coming through. They want to know when Rogan's coming through. But you know Pearl Jam tried to fight them back in the day. They have exclusive deals with certain venues. They are top to bottom. So they own Live Nation. And Live Nation owns a venue. So they're completely vertically integrated. So if you want to plant the garden or wherever the fuck it is, right? So you go, we're going to process your tickets. The only way you do is perform here is you do it with our promotion company, which is Live Nation. And you're going to have to use our ticket processing fee and our venue. They actually own the venues now. But here's the thing. There's a handful of you guys that get to play those venues. Now I think with podcasts, now shows are 300 people. There's going to be thousands of comics that have 300 fans. And the venue where we perform is not imperative that it's this specific one. It could be a comedy club. It could be a hall. It could be some conference center. It could be anything. It could be Airbnb. But aren't you only doing Ticketmaster when you're doing these big ass venues? Well sometimes now that they're Live Nation, they own some certain clubs. Well I do. I work with Live Nation. So now all my gigs are Live Nation. So do you still do stand up? Yeah. Really? Why not just do the podcast live every fucking way? Different man. It's not the same. Yeah. I like podcasts like this where it's just people talking. You do it differently when you're playing for an audience. You perform for them and it becomes this weird thing. Start dancing and shit. It just is not the same. It's not a real conversation. Like I think the intimacy of podcasts, one of the things that people like about it is they listen in their ear. Right? They got an ear plug. It's like you're talking to them. You're like you're right there. When you're doing it live, it becomes a different thing. There's a reaction. It's a bad thing. But it's a different thing. The stand up is way better. It's just way more fun. All I'm saying is what are we doing with this? Right? It's like you should have a direct connect to all your fans. I should have direct connect to all my fans. Right? We should be able to, even the venue should have that as well. Why do we, why are we giving away all the data? To a company that's really not, I know my agent's going to call me right after this. He's going to be like why the fuck we have deals with ticket messages. Shut the fuck up. So you want their emails. You want your audience's emails basically. And that's what the audience wants. And I don't want my audience to get charged 16 bucks every time they buy a ticket. Where does that money go? Like it costs $16. Why don't you just give 40% of the ticket price? Why not just create an email and when you're at these venues, just put it up on the jumbletron and be like, yo, email me after the show. I mean, that's one more step. Or we could just create the ticket process and the charges are way less, excuse me, and already starts aggregating the emails. And then if you want to get real crazy with it, you have a boy of yours that like, let's say my buddy Akash, right, I do a podcast with. It's like, hey Akash, you're about to go on tour? Yo, why don't you just use my data set, man? They're going to know you from doing the podcast with me. Maybe they'll want to see you. It's like, we get to empower each other through that shit. Am I making sense or? No, it makes sense. The thing is specifically about data, about the email list and about they get that if you show up in these different places, they get the email address because that's how people get their tickets. But you get the option of saying, because they'll ask you, they'll say, can Ticketmaster reply to you or can Ticketmaster send you the latest updates and news and events. You can click no. Yeah. And I click no all the time. Sure, that's Ticketmaster, but you would click yes if it was us and it was somebody who you were invested in going to see, you just don't want Ticketmaster promoting random events. Depends what you're sending me. But even if you click no, Ticketmaster still gets your email address and might sell it. Absolutely. Yeah. Even if you just click no, like you do want updates from Ticketmaster, you're not saying, is it okay if this company just starts selling my email address? Because that's what they do. That's what they do. Yeah. Bro, they own us anyway. But they don't have to. I'm saying now, like, everybody that's there, they're like, oh, I'm not going to sell it. I'm saying now, like, everybody that's coming out to your shows is coming out from this podcast. They're not coming out because of Ticketmaster. And if you use a different email service or ticketing service, they would come out with that one.