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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?

#111

Post by egorfine »

wdr1 wrote: post #109

I worked at Ticketmaster as an Engineering Director for a few years. I'd be happy to share my perspective. - Selling tickets is hard. I mean really hard. By coincidence, I just hit my 14 year mark at Google. I also spent 5 years at Yahoo! in the early 2000s. I'd like to think I've seen hard technical problems over my career. And again, ticketing is hard. - There's not that much money it. Especially relative to the te…

> a ticketing system that fans want. Ticketmater could already do that.

What are the reasons they don't?

Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?

#112

Post by mksherif »

koolba wrote: post #32

TicketMaster has exclusive contracts with the vast majority of venues and just about every large one. These contracts include kickbacks where TicketMaster will add $X of fees to each ticket it sells and pass back Y$ (Y It's essentially the venues and artists outsourcing the job of "being the asshole" to TicketMaster as a large chunk of the money eventually flow back. They get to publicly blame TicketMaster, claim the…

the only way this will work is if the venues can potentially get more money from another source besides Ticketmaster.

Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?

#113

Post by tomcam »

e_y_ wrote: post #103
idunno246 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still get hit with fees at the door in my experience. Considering most venues bigger than a bar are owned by livenation which is the same company as Ticketmaster…

Last couple times I went this year, it was a $5 fee at the box office, which was still considerably less than the $18 in fees online (for a $35 ticket). After I paid, they asked for my number and texted me a Ticketmaster link.

I’m old enough to remember when it was free to purchase at the box office

Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?

#114

Post by benji-york »

egorfine wrote: post #111
wdr1 wrote: post #109

I worked at Ticketmaster as an Engineering Director for a few years. I'd be happy to share my perspective. - Selling tickets is hard. I mean really hard. By coincidence, I just hit my 14 year mark at Google. I also spent 5 years at Yahoo! in the early 2000s. I'd like to think I've seen hard technical problems over my career. And again, ticketing is hard. - There's not that much money it. Especially relative to the te…

> a ticketing system that fans want. Ticketmater could already do that. What are the reasons they don't?

My guess: the customer isn't the fan; the customer is the ticket seller.

Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?

#115

Post by syndacks »

wdr1 wrote: post #109

I worked at Ticketmaster as an Engineering Director for a few years. I'd be happy to share my perspective. - Selling tickets is hard. I mean really hard. By coincidence, I just hit my 14 year mark at Google. I also spent 5 years at Yahoo! in the early 2000s. I'd like to think I've seen hard technical problems over my career. And again, ticketing is hard. - There's not that much money it. Especially relative to the te…

What's so hard about selling tickets? Is it a technical challenge? A sales challenge? An operational challenge? I'm having a hard time understanding how selling tickets to a concert is so hard.

Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?

#116

Post by ChildOfChaos »

koolba wrote: post #32

TicketMaster has exclusive contracts with the vast majority of venues and just about every large one. These contracts include kickbacks where TicketMaster will add $X of fees to each ticket it sells and pass back Y$ (Y It's essentially the venues and artists outsourcing the job of "being the asshole" to TicketMaster as a large chunk of the money eventually flow back. They get to publicly blame TicketMaster, claim the…

Not even contracts, but they own the venues via Live nation who own ticketmaster, they essentially have a monopoly, at least here in the UK, all the main concert venues of scale are owned by Live Nation.

Live nation also runs most of the major music festivals too as they bought them up.

Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?

#117

Post by citizenpaul »

People will work an extra 100hrs to afford the ticket for "promoted big band" instead of just for visiting a local band show that would be not as flashy but still very fun. You just have to do a bit of research on your own. All it would take for people to defeat ticketmaster(if they are indeed so bad) is just stop choosing them for their entertainment for a little while, but they don't. Entertainment is not a scarce resource.

Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?

#118

Post by citizenpaul »

wdr1 wrote: post #109

I worked at Ticketmaster as an Engineering Director for a few years. I'd be happy to share my perspective. - Selling tickets is hard. I mean really hard. By coincidence, I just hit my 14 year mark at Google. I also spent 5 years at Yahoo! in the early 2000s. I'd like to think I've seen hard technical problems over my career. And again, ticketing is hard. - There's not that much money it. Especially relative to the te…

From a technical standpoint outsider it would seem similar to payment processing/gateways. Any chance you can expand on why it is harder? I'm sure I'm not the only one that would like to know more.

Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?

#119

Post by batmaniam »

Justsignedup wrote: post #89
koolba wrote: post #32

TicketMaster has exclusive contracts with the vast majority of venues and just about every large one. These contracts include kickbacks where TicketMaster will add $X of fees to each ticket it sells and pass back Y$ (Y It's essentially the venues and artists outsourcing the job of "being the asshole" to TicketMaster as a large chunk of the money eventually flow back. They get to publicly blame TicketMaster, claim the…

So much this. And just to add, any startup that even attempts this, EVEN WITH 100% ARTIST SUPPORT, cannot work out because venues have the exclusivity contracts. And worse, you can't split a venue up to 2 different sellers. They don't have a communication protocol for which seats are sold, so you end up in a position of double-booking. Also bad. Basically the only way for this to work is: a) a system exists where ven…

Sounds like the gov needs to step in and break it up. Anyone have any idea on getting that process started? This is probably a better path than trying to disrupt Ticketmaster as another random startup.

Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?

#120

Post by ironick09 »

ripe wrote: post #104
shmatt wrote: post #12

In short: the anger over what happened yesterday is overblown. If a commodity is sellable, people will sell it. The ONLY option here is to make tickets non-transferable, full ID check to verify the name on ID is the name on the ticket Point 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…

> the anger over what happened yesterday is overblown Much of the anger is about Ticketmaster’s terrible website, which made it impossible for fans to reliably buy tickets even when they spent the whole day hitting refresh. There can be no excuse for that.

You mean there is never any good reason or excuse excuse you’ll accept for any website to crumble under the pressure of nearly 15 million people clicking add to cart, or checkout at the exact same instant?

People clicking refresh the whole day to get tickets? Let’s be real here unless you were in queue before the tickets even went on sale, the chances of getting a ticket were nearly zero.

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