Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?

Post by maerF0x0 » Mon, Jun 08, 2026, 8:34 PM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #10

mschuster91 wrote: post #4

> With all the hate Ticketmaster has gotten and all the other ticketing platforms out there, I'm surprised Ticketmaster still has a hold of pretty much the entire market. That's the thing. Everyone hates Ticketmaster... but forgets that the venues and even many high profile artists could easily cancel their contracts with Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster takes the blame, rakes in the cash and distributes the cash to venues…

Precisely this. Ticketmaster's entire business model is based around taking the blame. Artists don't want to set a face value for their tickets that represent a realistic market-clearing price, for fear of being seen as greedy; this leaves a lot of money on the table for scalpers. TM scrape as much of that value back for artists and venues, who get a cut of all the fees and charges and "authorized secondary resale".…

Post by gobdovan » Mon, Jun 08, 2026, 8:44 PM UTC

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 08, 2026, 8:50 PM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #34

rrrpdx1 wrote: post #8

I always wonder why ticketmaster/live nation isn't making more money? Given they are a monopoly, I'd expect them to be making a ton of profit. But it doesn't really seem to look that way: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/LYV:NYSE

Ticketmaster's job is to take the heat for ticketing (high prices, BS fees, sketchy reselling, etc), but funnel enough money back to the producing parties (artist/event, venue, promoter) that nobody is going to go through the effort to try to compete. Better to set their margins at 2-3% and keep a monopoly than be forced down in a competitive marketplace.

Post by drdec » Mon, Jun 08, 2026, 8:56 PM UTC

Grombobulous wrote: post #7

mdni007 wrote: post #2

Rant: Trying to buy tickets for the Knicks game at MSG. Is it really impossible to have a ticketing platform that prevents scalpers from marking up prices to an insane amount? $10000+ for a ticket that originally costs around 2k should be illegal. Most of these tickets will go unsold I'm sure.

In my opinion, the scalping problem isn't really the primary problem with Ticketmaster's monopoly. Scalping is just the result of a gap between sale price and fair market value. I also think that many of the things Ticketmaster could do to stop scalping would build further walls around their monopoly. To me, a ticket should generally be like a piece of a paper that has right of first sale. I don't want a situation wh…

Post by datsci_est_2015 » Mon, Jun 08, 2026, 9:01 PM UTC

rrrpdx1 wrote: post #8

I always wonder why ticketmaster/live nation isn't making more money? Given they are a monopoly, I'd expect them to be making a ton of profit. But it doesn't really seem to look that way: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/LYV:NYSE