The Kennedy Center plans to move its ticketing from a longtime nonprofit platform to Ticketmaster, a change current and former staffers told NPR has delayed the sale of tickets to this year's Kennedy Center Honors and has raised conflict-of-interest questions.
The Honors are scheduled for Dec. 7 at Capital One Arena, celebrating Paul Anka, David Foster, Andy Garcia, David Mamet and Barbara Mandrell. As of Nov. 11, NPR reported, there was only a form to request information about how to buy tickets, and the center did not say how or when tickets would go on sale. For decades the institution used Tessitura, a not-for-profit system developed by the Metropolitan Opera. While a Ticketmaster partnership was being negotiated, then-president Richard Grenell was being paid as a board member at Ticketmaster's parent company, Live Nation.
A dual role, and competing accounts of when talks began
Grenell was appointed Kennedy Center president when President Trump became the institution's chairman in February 2025. A few months later, in May, he joined Live Nation's board. Live Nation's most recent SEC filings show he was paid $260,205 for that board work in 2025 and given 102 shares then worth about $14,200. The Kennedy Center's most recent tax filings say he was paid nothing as its president, NPR reported. The center declined to comment on the dual roles. NPR's attempts to reach Grenell were not answered.
Richard Briffault, a Columbia Law School professor who specializes in government ethics, told NPR: "This is literally conflict of interest." He said a duty of loyalty to one entity, combined with a financial stake in another that does business with it, "that's a problem."
The Kennedy Center said discussions of moving to Ticketmaster have been ongoing since 2024, during the Biden administration and before Grenell's appointment, and that it "began evaluating Ticketmaster in the spring of 2024 and determined it had outgrown its previous ticketing system. The agreement followed standard procurement review." A current employee and a former employee, both granted anonymity because they feared retaliation, told NPR that Ticketmaster was never under serious consideration by the center's leadership in 2024. A former senior executive wrote that the staff had "great ticketing" with Tessitura and that Ticketmaster "absolutely were not negotiating with us."
Ticketmaster, in a statement to NPR, said: "We categorically deny that anyone pressured the Kennedy Center to choose Ticketmaster. In fact, Kennedy Center ticketing staff first approached our team in February 2024 and almost immediately indicated wanting to switch to Ticketmaster because of limitations with their existing ticketing system." NPR updated the story on Nov. 12 to reflect that response.
Canny, a union layoff and a monopoly verdict
Matt Floca replaced Grenell as president when Grenell left in March. Last month the center named Rick Canny, a longtime California-based talent agent, as artistic director. In a March email to then-CFO Donna Arduin Kauranen, obtained by NPR, Canny wrote that he had been advising on the Ticketmaster move "for almost a year," had "shaped many or most of the terms of the deal" and was "reviewing the final agreement tonight." He also blamed IATSE, the box-office workers' union, for getting "in the way" so that Ticketmaster "could no longer make money with us." The center later laid off its IATSE box-office members after the main building closed for a planned two-year renovation, NPR reported.
Consultant Steve Jacobson told NPR that Ticketmaster can work for high-volume commercial venues but is "one-dimensional," while Tessitura, used by more than 750 arts institutions, combines ticketing with fundraising, membership and education. Live Nation controlled about 80% of primary concert ticket sales in the U.S. as of earlier this year, NPR said. The Justice Department's antitrust suit against Ticketmaster and Live Nation was settled in March for $280 million; attorneys general of 33 states and the District of Columbia rejected that settlement, and in April a jury found that the companies operated as a monopoly. Live Nation has previously denied that it operates a monopoly.