Ticketmaster remains the most dominant force in ticketing, but anyone shopping for a new provider in the past 18 months knows the market is far from a one-horse race. What was once a straightforward decision based largely on technology has become a far more complex calculation. Factors to weigh include marketing strategy, branding and fan engagement. And increasingly, venues view ticketing companies as long-term partners in addition to service providers.

A yearlong battle with the Department of Justice (DOJ) over antitrust concerns has loosened Ticketmaster’s hold on the reserved-seating business and opened the door for competitors like AXS, which is owned by AEG, and SeatGeek, which has grown its enterprise platform by signing major sports clients.

Meanwhile, the general-admission ticketing business, which serves clubs, theaters and festivals across North America, has never been more competitive. More than a dozen companies are vying for market share, from Eventbrite, Tixr, Etix and VenuePilot to brands recently acquired by larger players. See Tickets was purchased last year by German giant CTS Eventim, while indie favorite Dice was acquired by Fever in June.

For venue executives, this abundance of choice is both a welcome development and a new source of stress. Each platform offers a different value proposition: Some emphasize reach and scale, others focus on brand control and data transparency, while a newer wave prioritizes anti-scalping tools and mobile-first discovery. The real challenge is finding the partner that best aligns with a venue’s long-term vision.

Ticketmaster Vs. AXS

For much of the past two decades, Ticketmaster has dominated by sheer scale, processing hundreds of millions of tickets annually and maintaining a direct pipeline to buyers that competitors couldn’t match. Venues often accepted compromises — around fees, revenue splits and branding — because Ticketmaster’s reach was unmatched.

The 2010 merger with Live Nation strengthened Ticketmaster’s position but also sparked a movement among independent venues searching for alternatives. As part of the merger conditions, the DOJ helped prop up AXS as a competitor. But growth was slow, hampered by disagreements among early owners, including TPG Capital and QuickBooks founder Dan Gilbert.

While AXS struggled, Ticketmaster expanded rapidly, rolling out dynamic-pricing modules, secure digital ticket tokenization and verification tools for artist presales. Its biggest advantage, though, was visibility: The Ticketmaster site became the unofficial front page of live music, a default discovery and transaction platform for millions of fans.

Over the past 18 months, however, Ticketmaster has faced mounting public scrutiny and a multistate antitrust lawsuit brought by the DOJ and dozens of attorneys general. AXS, now fully owned by AEG since 2019, has taken advantage of the opening. The company has positioned itself as a venue-focused platform with innovative anti-scalping features, including its widely adopted digital waiting room to manage high-demand on-sales and prevent bot-driven purchases.

AXS has also grown its own ecosystem of fans. While it doesn’t yet match Ticketmaster’s built-in demand, it is steadily gaining traction and credibility.

The Indies: Solutions For The Midmarket

“There are a lot of ticketing companies out there that can do many different things, but the one thing we shouldn’t expect from them is to act like banks,” says Thomas Cussins, CEO of Ineffable Music, which uses five different systems across its 10 California venues.

Many platforms offer upfront payments and signing bonuses to lure promoters, but Cussins warns that relying on this financing only raises long-term costs. “We have to accept that there is a cost for the hardware and a cost for the software,” he says.

For midsize arenas, fairgrounds and expos, companies like Etix, Eventbrite and Tixr provide fully featured ticketing solutions without the overhead of major enterprise platforms.

Etix, based in Raleigh, N.C., blends traditional box-office support with mobile scanning, customer relationship management plugins and sponsorship tools. It’s popular among established promoters for its flexibility, cost transparency and attentive service.

Eventbrite, headquartered in San Francisco, powers a DIY platform favored by small promoters, local organizers and pop-up events. With minimal onboarding, users can create events in minutes and manage them without relying on a sales team.

VenuePilot, launched during the pandemic by Justin Kantor, co-founder of venue Le Poisson Rouge in New York, has grown among independent clubs and performing arts centers. It emphasizes data ownership and revenue clarity but offers fewer customization and discovery tools compared with larger platforms.

The Mobile Revolution

No companies have generated more buzz over the past two years than Dice and Tixr.

Dice has built a reputation as a discovery-first platform, leveraging integrations with Spotify and Apple Music to recommend shows, notify fans about low inventory and alert them when tickets for their favorite acts become available. Its acquisition by Fever — a fast-growing live-experiences marketplace — has expanded its reach globally. Now connected to fans across nearly 100 markets, Dice brings venues demand they could never generate alone.

Tixr has positioned itself as a design-driven, white-label alternative that gives venues a fully branded ticketing environment. Its “experience-layered” model lets fans bundle tickets with merchandise, food and beverage credits or VIP upgrades in a seamless purchase journey. While Tixr lacks Ticketmaster’s discovery engine or Dice’s global reach, its user experience is highly regarded by venues that prioritize brand control.

The Takeaway

There has never been a more diverse or dynamic moment in ticketing. Ticketmaster still holds the upper hand in scale and sales volume, but competitors such as AXS, SeatGeek, Dice/ Fever and Tixr have reshaped the conversation. For some venues, Ticketmaster’s reach and infrastructure will remain irresistible. For others, especially those seeking brand ownership, mobile innovation or stronger anti-scalping tools, new options are increasingly compelling.

Most importantly, ticketing is no longer just an operational decision. It’s a public-facing part of the fan experience. When someone buys — or struggles to buy — a ticket, that interaction reflects directly on the venue itself.

And in 2025, with fans both savvier and less forgiving than ever, the quality of that experience could mean the difference between a lifelong customer and a lost opportunity.

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BLACKPINK’s JENNIE drops her first tumbler collab with Stanley 1913. After recently teaming up with Beats for a limited-edition Ruby red Solo 4 headphone, the megastar is opting for a sleeker “Midnight Ruby” black colorway for her newly released tumbler partnership. Inspired by her 2025 debut album, the Stanley 1913 x JENNIE collection is a “first-of-its-kind collaboration” that celebrates the K-Pop star’s signature branding and self-expression as well as introducing two new inaugural Luxe products: the Quencher Luxe Tumbler and a smaller All Day Slim Luxe Bottle.

The 30 oz Luxe Tumbler is a sleek makeover of the brand’s Quencher bottle. At $75, this limited-edition tumbler features JENNIE’s style in a compact, carry-everywhere size. With double-wall vacuum insulation and an easy-carry handle, it’s made for all-day hydration without sacrificing style. There’s also collectible charms to add even more of JENNIE’s personal touches to the bottle, including a NINIBARA, an exclusive capybara design, a bear and a ‘JENNIE’ name plate.

If you’re looking for something even more lightweight and portable, the 12 oz All Day Slim Luxe Bottle features a minimalist silhouette and twist-off lid for easy on-the-go sipping. It’s slim build was also made to fit seamlessly in any bag. It’s mostly black design is broken up by silver floral accents, a heart-shaped graphic, etched logo, and JENNIE’s signature motifs.

“I love how the products turned out, and I think fans will notice the ‘JENNIE’ touches that represent me,” JENNIE shared. “I hope they feel the personality and energy we poured into every detail.”

The full Stanley 1913 x JENNIE collection is available now at the brand’s website. If you love the limited-edition “Midnight Ruby” black colorway from the JENNIE collab, here are a few other best-selling, all-black tumblers, bottles and cups worthy of a spot in your bag.

Hundreds of artists have yanked their music from streaming services in Israel to protest the ongoing violence against Palestinian people, including Kneecap, Faye Webster and Japanese Breakfast.

Aminé, Massive Attack, Soccer Mommy, Rina Sawayama, Fontaines D.C., MIKE, Primal Scream and Fontaines D.C. are also among the artists who have joined the movement, which is called “No Music for Genocide.” The initiative is accompanied by a new website, which features educational resources and shares the full list of more than 400 acts and record labels that have made their catalogs unavailable to play on platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music in Israel.

“No Music For Genocide is a cultural boycott of Israel,” reads the project’s mission statement. “Over 400 initial artists and labels have geo-blocked and removed their music from that territory in response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza; ethnic cleansing of the Occupied West Bank; apartheid within Israel / ’48; political repression of Pro-Palestine efforts wherever we live; and the music industry’s own ties to weapons and crimes against humanity.”

“This tangible act is just one step toward honoring Palestinian demands to isolate and delegitimize Israel as it kills without consequence on the world stage,” it continues. “The successful cultural boycotts against apartheid South Africa prove that our creative work grants us agency and power. When we wield it together, we add unified pressure to a growing, global, interdependent movement, from Hollywood to the docks of Morocco.”

The movement comes just a few weeks before the two-year mark in Israel’s war against Hamas, which began after the deadly terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. Since then, more than 65,000 Palestinians have been killed in the violence — while countless others have lived in a continued state of hunger and homelessness — and a United Nations commission recently declared that Israel is guilty of genocide, which the country denies.

Though kicking off with more than 400 names on its list, the “No Music for Genocide” boycott still wants more artists who believe in the cause to follow suit and pull their catalogs from Israel as well. It marks just the latest music-related initiative to end the suffering in Gaza in recent weeks, following on the heels of the “Together for Palestine” benefit concert in London overseen by Brian Eno.

Information on how to join or support the boycott is also available on its website.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC ) has filed a lengthy lawsuit against Live Nation and Ticketmaster, seeking a permanent injunction against what it describes as years of “systemic unfair and deceptive practices.”

Joined by seven state attorneys general and the Utah Division of Consumer Protection, the 84-page federal complaint filed in the Central District of California seeks monetary relief, civil penalties and restitution for alleged violations of the FTC Act, the Better Online Ticket Sales Act (also known as the BOTS Act) and various state consumer protection statutes.

The lawsuit seeks to penalize Live Nation for failing to enforce the BOTS Act — an eight-year-old law the FTC is charged with enforcing but has only enforced two times in nearly a decade.

The lawsuit represents a second major legal action against the company by federal and state officials in two years — in 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Live Nation on anti-competitive grounds, arguing its 2010 merger with Ticketmaster gave the company an unfair monopoly of the concert business. Today’s FTC complaint argues that Live Nation and Ticketmaster control “roughly 80% or more of major concert venues’ primary ticketing” and abuse that dominance through deceptive pricing, tacit collusion with ticket brokers and violations of federal ticketing law.

The lawsuit alleges three main categories of unlawful conduct by Live Nation: deceptive, or bait-and-switch ticket pricing; collusion with ticket brokers to evade ticket limits; and what it calls “systematic violations of the BOTS Act.” Each example of unlawful conduct, according to the complaint, directly inflates prices, harms artists’ intent to keep ticket costs affordable and “extracts billions in additional profits for the defendants.”

Ticketmaster has long received complaints about its drip pricing, which means customers view one price while shopping for tickets and then are presented with a higher price, sometimes as much as 30% higher, when fees are added. In recent months, however, the company has been leading efforts to promote all-in pricing, which would show the entire price of a ticket at the beginning of checkout.

“Defendants’ deceptive price display was no accident,” the lawsuit, written primarily by FTC Attorney Elizabeth Scott, alleges. “The design resulted from years of internal testing designed by Defendants’ employees that shows that Defendants’ revenues increase when their price display is, in Ticketmaster’s words, ‘less transparent.’”

According to one internal study from 2015 cited in the lawsuit, a Ticketmaster executive acknowledged that “‘the less transparent the higher the conversion,’ concluding that ‘this means we’re headed towards less transparency.’”

“Not until May 2025, deep into the FTC’s investigation — and just before the effective date of the FTC’s Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees, which authorizes the FTC to seek civil penalties and other monetary relief against violators — did Defendants announce their intention to incorporate fees into listed ticket prices,” the lawsuit explains.

The second major allegation is that Ticketmaster publicly blames scalpers and bots for high resale prices while privately allowing (and benefiting from) brokers’ mass purchases of tickets.

Artists typically set per-event limits (4to 10 tickets per buyer), but Ticketmaster fails to enforce them, the complaint alleges, noting “Defendants routinely allow ticket brokers to exceed ticket limits.”

One broker allegedly purchased 772 Coldplay tickets for $81,000 and resold them for $170,000, and 612 Chris Stapleton tickets for $47,000 and resold them for $89,000.

The complaint alleges Ticketmaster not only turned a blind eye but sometimes aided brokers, even issuing warnings about upcoming account enforcement changes so they could “consolidate illegally obtained tickets,” the lawsuit alleges.

“To evade Ticketmaster’s enforcement measures, brokers routinely create hundreds or thousands of Ticketmaster accounts,” the lawsuit alleges, including one reseller who purchased or created 13,000 Ticketmaster accounts over a four-year period.

“Ticketmaster forecast that in 2020, alone, more than five million of the concert tickets that it would offer for resale would be tickets purchased over ticket limits,” the lawsuit alleges. “This was more than 55% of the concert tickets it anticipated would be listed by brokers.”

Ticketmaster has “significantly increased their sale of secondary market concert tickets, from 3.8 million tickets in 2019 to over 20 million in 2024,” the lawsuit alleges, noting that in 2023, 78 percent of resale tickets sold on Ticketmaster were listed by ticket brokers.

Company officials were aware that brokers were using a number of different technology tools to circumvent ticket purchase limits on the site and either looked the other way or provided “technological support for brokers who exceed ticket limits to list the tickets for resale by Ticketmaster,” the lawsuit alleges. That includes the use of tools like TradeDesk, which ticket brokers use to upload tickets to Ticketmaster’s resale platform.

“A September 2018 Ticketmaster presentation reported that each TradeDesk account was associated with, on average, approximately 200 Ticketmaster accounts,” the lawsuit continues, a violation of Ticketmaster’s own rules limiting users to one account per person.

“As a Ticketmaster executive vice president explained to Ticketmaster’s executive team and Live Nation’s President and CFO in the wake of the undercover reporting on TradeDesk,” the lawsuit alleges “Defendants ‘turn a blind eye’ to brokers’ circumvention of their enforcement measures and follow a ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ approach to brokers’ blatantly violative conduct.”

Publicly, however, company officials insist that Ticketmaster “does not turn a blind eye” to “patterns of behavior that indicate unlawful ticket purchases,” according to the lawsuit.

FTC attorneys argue that Ticketmaster benefits from what it calls “triple dipping,” collecting fees “when the broker buys the ticket, again when the broker lists it for resale on Ticketmaster, and a third time when the fan buys the marked-up resale ticket.” According to the FTC lawsuit, Ticketmaster generated $3.7 billion in fees from its resale marketplace from 2019 to 2024.

The complaint stresses that the practices harm not just fans but also artists, undercutting artists’ own efforts to set affordable prices.

“Defendants’ unlawful conduct and tacit coordination with brokers injures fans, who have paid far more than the advertised ticket price,” the complaint alleges, and “injures artists, who set ticket limits that they understand [Ticketmaster] will implement, only to be thwarted by [Ticketmaster’s] choice to allow brokers to evade them.”

According to the complaint, $82.6 billion was spent by consumers on Ticketmaster from 2019 to 2024, including $16.4 billion paid in mandatory fees during that period, along with $986 million collected in resale seller fees and $3.7 billion in resale fees charged to fans. The FTC is asking the court for a permanent injunction prohibiting Ticketmaster/Live Nation from “continuing deceptive practices” and is demanding civil penalties under the FTC Act and the BOTS Act, along with consumer restitution, disgorgement of ill-gotten profits and attorneys’ fees and costs for participating states.

Shortly after the lawsuit was announced, Stephen Parker, executive director for the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) released a statement, said in part, “Today’s lawsuit has given credibility to what fans, artists, and independent stages have believed for years: Live Nation and Ticketmaster exploit their dominance not just in concert promotion and primary ticketing, but in the resale market as well.”

Parker noted that “This is not just bad business; it is deception and abuse of monopoly power. By turning a blind eye to scalpers, even giving them the tools to bypass limits and harvest tickets, Live Nation has acted as the promoter, the primary ticket seller, the artists’ manager, and the scalper.”

He added, “Independent venues and promoters are on the frontlines of this broken system, and it is fans and artists who ultimately pay the price. We applaud the FTC for bringing this case. It further bolsters the U.S. Department of Justice and 40 state attorneys general antitrust case against Live Nation.”

Officials with the National Independent Talent Organization (NITO) also released a statement, saying, “Without commenting on the specific charges, NITO applauds the Federal Trade Commission’s efforts to reform an unfair ticketing ecosystem that too often does not serve consumers or artists. Changes are needed that address excessive fees, availability of tickets for fans at fair prices and keeping the process aligned with artists interests that benefit their fans.”

Billboard reached out to Live Nation for comment but did not receive a response by press time.

David Byrne’s first album in more than seven years, Who Is the Sky?, debuts in the top 10 across four Billboard album charts: Top Album Sales (No. 10), Vinyl Albums (No. 5), Indie Store Album Sales (No. 4) and Top Current Album Sales (No. 9), all dated Sept. 20. It’s his first new album since American Utopia was released in March 2018.

The new set was preceded by the hit song “Everybody Laughs,” featuring the Ghost Train Orchestra, which reached No. 2 on the Adult Alternative Airplay chart in August, marking Byrne’s highest charting track ever on the 29-year-old ranking.

As a soloist, Byrne’s chart history dates to March of 1981, when his collaborative album with Brian Eno, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, debuted on the overall all-genre Billboard 200. Byrne is also the frontman of Talking Heads, who made its Billboard chart debut nearly 48 years ago, when the Talking Heads: 77 set bowed on the Billboard 200 dated Oct. 8, 1977.

Talking Heads collected 13 charted titles on the Billboard 200, including eight that reached the top 40. As a soloist, Byrne has logged 14 entries on the Billboard 200, including Who Is the Sky? (No. 172), with two of those titles visiting the top 40.

Back on the latest Top Album Sales chart, as Byrne’s Who Is the Sky? launches at No. 10 with 8,500 sold in the United States in the week ending Sept. 11, it joins five other debuts and reentries in the top 10. Rich Man – The 6th Mini Album by aespa bows at No. 4 (23,000), ZEROBASEONE’s NEVER SAY NEVER starts at No. 5 (21,000), MONSTA X’s THE X debuts at No. 6 (19,000), Slipknot’s 1999 self-titled debut effort reenters at No. 7 (10,000, up 948%) after it was reissued for its 25th anniversary (all versions of the album, old and new, are combined for tracking and charting purposes), and Rob Thomas’ All Night Days bows at No. 9 (9,000).

As for the non-debuts and reentries in the top 10 on Top Album Sales, Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend holds at No. 1 for a second week (27,000, down 88% in its sophomore frame), Stray Kids’ former No. 1 KARMA is steady at No. 2 (26,000, down 52%), the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack is a non-mover at No. 3 (23,000, up 56% following the wide release of its CD and a deluxe digital and streaming edition with additional tracks) and Deftones’ Private Music falls 4-8 (a little over 9,000, down 29%).

Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart ranks the top-selling albums of the week based only on traditional album sales. The chart’s history dates back to May 25, 1991, the first week Billboard began tabulating charts with electronically monitored piece count information from SoundScan, now Luminate. Pure album sales were the sole measurement utilized by the Billboard 200 albums chart through the list dated Dec. 6, 2014, after which that chart switched to a methodology that blends album sales with track equivalent album (TEA) units and streaming equivalent album (SEA) units.