The music industry has got to be the largest industry I can think of which seems to be full of people that just fundamentally don't seem to understand the issues of supply and demand. And I don't mean the musicians, since that's not really what they are there for, I'm talking the management.
When demand drops, you have to have some combination of lowering the price, lowering the supply (smaller venues), or having excess production (in this case, empty seats). It doesn't matter if you blame the customers (really stupid), blame the economy, or blame the moon, some combination of those three things is going to happen. The laws of economics demand it. Most industries have money people that seem to actually understand this.
(The natural hurr hurr response is to claim this is because they are used to just lobbying for things from the government, but it goes beyond that, just as in this article in which they appear mystified about what to do with empty seats and someone has to actually suggest that maybe the price needs to be dropped. Maybe if they hired an economics sophomore as an intern next year they could get this earthshakingly-brilliant idea before a news story is written.)
...because the artist asks them to. Check out lefsetzletter.com sometime, the guy's an ex-industry lawyer with some bombastic opinions and astute observations about what's been going on in the music industry, and he gets emails from all walks of it.
Those fees that get slapped on to your ticket? Some of them are from the venue, some of them are from Ticketmaster, but some of that's been mandated by the artist being greedy.
And now it's anecdote time! Back in the late 90s in DC the radio station 99.1 WHFS put on a festival called the HFStival - 20 bands for 20 bucks. The headliners were national acts, as were most of the bands on the lineup, and there were a few local bands who'd round things out earlier in the day.
Now you can't even get lawn seats at a pavilion for $20, and that's not counting parking, convenience charges, charging you money to print the ticket at home rather than having it mailed to you at no charge (WTF), the $45 tshirt (because the venue takes $20 per shirt sold), the overpriced drinks, etc. etc.
You want to see live music? Get involved in your local scene. Plenty of people out there playing small (non-livenation) venues for $5-$15, playing their hearts out.
TicketMaster typically obtains agreements to become the sole provider of tickets for all the commonly used venues. They already have quite a few competitors, but these exclusive deals prevent competitors being able to compete in most venues.
... and then Ticketmaster doubles it.