Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 126 posts

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

#41

Post by zwkrt »

eschneider wrote: post #19

I spent a fair bit of time researching this space as it seemed like an obviously good startup idea. It turns out that almost everyone who you think would benefit from a better system have already been coopted by the current players. It's definitely an uphill battle.

To put it into perspective I work for two years at Amazon to try to create a competitor to Ticketmaster. Our ticket sales infrastructure wasn’t quite as polished as Ticketmaster is but it was passable. What killed the product though is that we couldn’t get any reasonably sized contracts in the United States. So even a company with the motivation to burn capital the size of Amazon couldn’t swing competing with Ticketmaster.

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

#42

Post by bombcar »

Let's see. LYV is the parent company (including venues, etc).

They are worth $16 billion (or about 1/4th an Elontwitter).

They had revenue of $6 billion and made a EBITDA of $573m.

So disruption of the Ticketmaster monopoly is going to result in $500 million? Perhaps?

They don't seem to be printing money as much as everything thinks they are. Someone could buy LYV and show people how you really milk a market to death.

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

#43

Post by ForHackernews »

Xcelerate wrote: post #35

Why is there a secondary market anyway? I don’t understand why ticket prices don’t just rise to the optimal balance of supply and demand. Same question I have for the allocated bourbon market actually...

Some artists and performers have goals separate from "extract the maximum revenue possible on every sale", they may want to price their tickets so that young fans or other people not in the 1% of income distribution can attend their shows.

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

#44

Post by Denvercoder9 »

robrenaud wrote: post #23
datapolitical wrote: post #3

The answer is that Ticketmaster gives 50% of their revenue to the venue, which is a pretty good deal for the venue, so they have every incentive to keep that relationship going

They run a not that complicated website. As someone who loves live music, they take way too much in ticket fees for the value and difficulty of the service they provide. Legitimately, it feels like expertsexchange. Economically, it doesn't seem to make sense for artists and venues to be giving so much money to a partner who is delivering so little value. Even if the venue is getting half of the ticket master fee, the…

> Economically, it doesn't seem to make sense for artists and venues to be giving so much money to a partner who is delivering so little value.

Artists and venues receive a part of the fees that TicketMaster charges. TicketMaster's essentially being paid by artists and venues to be the bad guy.

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

#45

Post by theturtletalks »

wolpoli wrote: post #11
egypturnash wrote: post #6

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.

I can’t believe they went after Microsoft for IE, but all of this is fair game. It regulatory capture and it’s rampant in every industry.

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

#46

Post by carlosdp »

They own most of the largest music venues in the world, after their acquisition of Live Nation in 2012. So, if Katy Perry goes on tour and needs to choose a ticketing provider, she pretty much has no choice because several of those venues will only use Ticketmaster, period.

It's one of the most quietly intractable monopolies on the planet.

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

#47

Post by vintermann »

floor2 wrote: post #17
nervousvarun wrote: post #7

This 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…

This is why it's frustrating that America has no right-wing political party. 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…

Right-wing? When did a right wing party, anywhere in the world, go through with a strong smash-the-monopolies policy?

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

#48

Post by zwkrt »

francisofascii wrote: post #14
egypturnash wrote: post #6

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…

But the acts don't have exclusive rights with TM, do they?

It’s complicated. Live Nation is a promoter. For those of you not in the industry a promoter is basically like a mini VC that funds a tour or a live event. The promoter invests the capital necessary to put on the show and in turn gets to dictate what the ticket prices will be where the show will be what acts will be performing together and who will sell the tickets.

So if Taylor Swift promoter for her to her is Live Nation than the answer is no she does not get to choose the venues.

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

#49

Post by twiddling »

rchaud wrote: post #24

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.

Luxottica is another example of vertical integration that needs to be broken up.

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

#50

Post by noodle »

I briefly worked on starting a small competitor to TM as a contractor (which is incidentally still around and doing fine). The reason TM is hard to disrupt boils down to this:

Everyone makes more revenue when they go with TM - artists, venues, etc - everyone except for the ticket buyers, who pay out the nose. And TM plays the "bad guy" role in the equation to cover for all of those other people. Yes, TM holds a lot of contracts with venues, even owns some venues outright. But those contracts wouldn't exist if they weren't very juicy for the venue.

Post reply on HN