Part of Ticketmaster's purpose is to allow the artist, promoter and venue to charge extra but in a way that shifts blame to Ticketmaster. They are wildly successful in that, as evidenced by the number of people that bring up this exact point.

If you look at the fees, often there's a "venue fee" and other ones. They are different per event, but often are similar per tour and per venue... which means it's being set by artists, promoters and venues. It's trivial to show all-in pricing (some events have it turned on, so it's what you actually see on the main page). They don't do so on purpose.

I hear this a lot, and it might just be me, but I'd feel better about a $50 purchase where the $50 dollars all go to the artist/venue, vs a $50 purchase where $30 goes to the artist and $20 purportedly goes to Ticketmaster.

Except a vanishingly small number of tickets for popular events are even going for $50 any more, and how do you feel with the ticket costs $95 but you're actually paying over $20 extra for it? Sticker shock is real. Avoiding a $115 ticket price helps avoid some of that outrage. Here's a case study:

The last couple weeks Paul McCartney went on sale in a few places. At PNC Arena[1], the the prices for standard tickets were as follows[2]:

   25.50 + 15.59 =  41.09 (+61%)
   65.50 + 18.54 =  84.04 (+28%)
   95.50 + 20.41 = 115.91 (+21%)
  165.50 + 27.92 = 193.42 (+17%)
  250.00 + 39.24 = 289.24 (+16%)

That doesn't look too bad, until you consider that the lowest price offer, which is just over $41 all said and done, but there were only about 250 tickets at that price level releases, for a venue that holds about 20,000 people. That's just over 1% of capacity.

Less than 1,000 tickets of the $65.50 price level were released (and you had to pay $84 to get them). Less than 3,000 of the $95 price level (almost $116 for those) were released.

Now, I'm not sure exactly how you interpret that, but I suspect I know why they put put in a very low price level but didn't stock it with much inventory, and it wasn't to make sure deserving fans got a chance. It does conveniently allow them to to say that brokers grabbed all the cheap inventory in the beginning though...

That's not to say every artist does this. Some provide quite a large amount of low priced tickets, but the trend on that is down, not up, from what I've seen.

1: https://www1.ticketmaster.com/event/2D00551BBC524826

2: Feel free to check for yourself. Use this JS snippet in a developer console from the event page:

  _storeUtils.eventJSONData.tickets.filter(offer=>offer.description.match(/Standard Admission/))[0]
    .prices.sort((a,b)=>a.amount>b.amount).forEach(pl => 
      console.log(`${pl.combinedFees} + ${pl.combinedFees} = ${pl.displayAmountWithFeesTaxes} (+${Math.round((pl.combinedFees/pl.amount)*100)}%)`)
    )

A portion of those Ticketmaster fees are kicked back to the artist/promoters/venue.

https://help.ticketmaster.com/s/article/What-kinds-of-fees-c...

We tried to buy tickets to Some Big Thing earlier in the year, and they’d sold out. They were, however, available on Ticketmaster Resale.

In addition to the bumped cost of the ticket, there was a AU$50 - FIFTY FKN DOLLAR - Ticketmaster fee! They’ve sold it, and now to help a scalper sell it again “officially” they’re putting a $50 fee on!

There’s no way I’m giving those dirty thieves that money. I didn’t, and I wrote to my MP to say that something should be done. It’s a fucking disgrace.

To make this worse, in all likelihood the scalper was fake and it was not sold out. Ticketmaster will routinely pretend a venue is sold out when it's not and they're not shy of impersonating a third party either.

A percentage of those fees still go to the artist/band/show, it's just another way of hiding the true costs behind these services and what their take is.