Ticketmaster's a very vertical monopoly, if you go with anyone else then a ton of venues simply will not work with you . If you open a venue that works with anyone besides Ticketmaster then you won't be able to book any acts that do work with TM, which is "pretty much fucking everyone". There's a lot more to this, Doctorow and Giblin's recent book "Chokepoint Capitalism" has a couple of chapters that examine this who…
Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?
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Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?
#12Point 1: Let her sell it on a different website.
Yesterday, Ticketmaster said millions, but it was probably more than 10 million people, logged in to try to buy hundreds of thousands of products. Each product has inventory=1, and you're not allowed to double sell a product. Try pushing this to any other website and it would crash for days.
This used to happen when sneaker reselling was at its peak. People would get angry at the terrible way Adidas or Nike would sell a sneaker, but when the same shoe was sold on a small website owned by some small store in Paris, the website would completely shut down until the owners could convince people via social media that the shoe will not be sold online, ever. Everyone loses. This problem was later solved by all stores either moving to Shopify, who has its own ticketmaster-like system, or just not selling popular sneakers online. Another thing that can happen is a seat could be sold to 100 people, then 99 get cancellations later. Would that make people happier?
Point 2: Bot protection. It's hard. I've worked on reseller/bot protection, you either go too light, and let bots in, or go too strong, and block non-bots. Especially when millions are hitting the website at once, and every seat can be sold once.
Point 3: It's not all professional resellers.
Someone can be a huge Swift fan, but if they see people spending thousands, or tens of thousands on StubHub, and it can pay for rent or half a new car, they'll sell it, even though they're not professional resellers. As long as Swift didn't block transferring tickets, and some rich people are willing to spend thousands, this will happen 100% of the time.
Ticketmaster, to try to fix this, has also attempted to sell the tickets themselves for resell prices, cutting out the middle man. But then people get mad at them. As long as the rich people are willing to pay, either Ticketmaster or resellers will charge them the high price
When you buy a ticket on stub hub, you see the buyers original name. Some times itll be some LLC, but most times its just some regular shmoe looking to make a buck
Are you looking to disrupt fees on a concert that never sold out? Sure, someone could do that, thats mostly politics internal to the entertainment world. Are you trying to sell out 20 stadiums at the same minute? It's either raffle, or queue, and not allowing anyone not on the paying credit card to enter concert
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?
#13Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?
#14Ticketmaster's a very vertical monopoly, if you go with anyone else then a ton of venues simply will not work with you . If you open a venue that works with anyone besides Ticketmaster then you won't be able to book any acts that do work with TM, which is "pretty much fucking everyone". There's a lot more to this, Doctorow and Giblin's recent book "Chokepoint Capitalism" has a couple of chapters that examine this who…
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?
#15I heard that ticketmaster has exclusive agreements with basically every large venue. So if performers want to play venues of over a medium size (large theaters, arenas), they're forced to use ticketmaster.
That's because most of the major venues are owned by LiveNation... which is the same company. When they merged in 2010 everyone saw this coming.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?
#16Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?
#17This has been discussed a few times before (see link below). It's difficult to do a TLDR for such a complex issue, but from what I remember the biggest problem seems to be that Ticketmaster is extremely vertical to the degree it either owns or has exclusive contracts with venues. Seems like a pretty strong argument that they have a monopoly (so gov. regulation might be the only way to change anything). https://news.y…
Every freshman-level economics 101 course when discussing the basic mechanisms required to have a functioning free market has "no monopolies, no cartels, no anti-competitive agreements between market participants" as necessary conditions.
But functionally, in America today, the Republicans are happy to have money-printing monopolies because their donors are profiting. And the Democrats are happy to have money-printing monopolies because their donors are profiting and large stable incumbents are easier to control with regulation than many small, changing entities.
In a better world, we'd break up the monopolies, and have thousands middle-class-owned small-businesses operating competitively, rather than one corporation.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?
#18Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?
#19Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?
#20https://www.amazon.com/Ticket-Masters-Concert-Industry-Scalp...