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If you are attending any event and you can actually buy the tickets directly at the box office then go that route. You'll likely save anywhere from 25-60% off the price of the tickets. Plus you'll get actual physical tickets.
Sure this doesn't work for some crazy in demand show, but nobody goes to those anyway right?
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…
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…
This is where free market fails, and to fix this, government would needs to outlaw these types of exclusive agreements.
Can you convince a small venue to use your new system? Maybe? But since the big venues use Ticketmaster, it's advantageous for the smaller venues to use the same thing.
Can you convince a big venue to use your new system? Absolutely not. You're some unproven little company.
Example: Broadway theaters. There are three organizations that collectively own the vast majority of the Broadway theaters, Shubert, Nederlander, and Jujamcyn. These are very wealthy and very old fashioned organizations. Even when it's time for them to renew their contracts, do you think you can convince any of them to leave Ticketmaster/Telecharge? Not a chance in hell.
Lastly, Ticketmaster already covers all of the use cases that these venues have. It doesn't do the best job, but it does the job. Even if you do a great job of covering 90% of the use cases, they won't switch to you if there's even one thing they need that your alternative can't handle. Even these small and rare edge cases are absolutely essential to their business. To even come close you will need to hire several experts in the ticketing industry to learn that business to even know what these cases are.
Ok, so let's say you hire ticketing experts and you build a system better than Ticketmaster that does indeed cover 100% of the use cases the venues have. And you have perfect timing, the venue's exclusive deal with Ticketmaster is coming to a close and you have the opportunity to sell to them. Can you do it? Can you convince them to take a huge risk to use your platform? What's the upside other than the fact that its nicer for ticket buyers? Sticking with Ticketmaster is a safe bet for them. If you fail to convince them in that one window, you won't be able to try to sell to that venue again for several years.
TL;DR: Ticketmaster's customers aren't the ticket buyers, it's the venue.
Source: I have worked in ticketing in the past.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ticketmaster was just as bad and just as monopolistic in the 80s and 90s.
Ticketmaster today is significantly worse than even the entity I remember in the 2000s. The worst they'd do is charge 20% out of thin air for a "processing fee", and in any case, there were alternatives available, like buying paper tickets from record stores or directly at the venue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ticketmaster was just as bad and just as monopolistic in the 80s and 90s.
Every Phish tour starts the same way. Enter the lottery and hope to win tickets in some random spot.
Don't win lottery and join the Ticketmaster queue. Watch the site fall apart for an hour. Crashes at checkout and you're back to the end of the queue.
Go on Stubhub and pay 2x or more for the "big" shows (Halloween, NYE, etc).
But hey, also crashed chess.com.
Vertical integration. They acquired the independent ticket sellers, then went on to acquire the physical venues themselves. Now if the artist wants to play at those venues, they deal with Ticketmaster from start to finish. That means that even if artists wanted to buy a block of tickets to sell to their fans, their allotment would be whatever Ticketmaster themselves deem appropriate.
Andrew Schulz's Beef with Ticketmaster | Joe Rogan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS8a1rnPGGo