Even before the live nation acquisition, they were a monopoly. At the height of their careers, Pearl Jam tried to tour without using them to sell tickets. They failed. I doubt any current bands have as much market leverage as Pearl Jam did back then.
Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?
71–80 of 126 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?
#72This 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…
Could you give an example of a true right-wing political party, in your eyes? Anywhere in the world.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?
#73TicketMaster 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…
No body goes to those shows anymore, they are too crowded
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?
#74Because it actually works.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?
#75In 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…
Not true on StubHub. No information on original purchaser. Also effectively not transferable as you can’t print the ticket. Must use mobile device, not optionally use.
Stubhub prices appear to be significantly lower, but I had to call them to figure out how to retrieve my tickets, the UI is so confusing. Selling was a breeze though.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?
#76I think big artists need to start doing what some large sporting events do and sell a significant proportion of tickets on a ballot system. Instead of being first come first served, anyone who registered to buy a ticket (possibly paying a deposit to disincentivize duplicate entries) would go in the draw for the opportunity to buy a ticket, preventing things turning into an auction benefiting those who have the fastes…
The Grateful Dead had a system where you just bought the tickets. If you didn’t make it in the lottery, your envelope was returned unopened. Don’t remember what the method of payment was.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?
#77TicketMaster 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…
Is Y <<<< X?
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
We’ve had 50% Republican administrations. Regulatory capture is their technology as they can’t pass anti-competitive legislation, no matter how much they are bribed.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?
#79Because they work with venues, promoters, and artists behind the scenes by sharing the profits and playing the bad guy to the public.
Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?
#80The reason resellers exist is because people are prepared to pay many multiples of the face value for tickets. If people stopped buying tickets on the secondary market, the resellers would be left with worthless paper they paid thousands of dollars for and the secondary market would disappear.
TM is actively dismantling the secondary ticket market by (a) being a secondary market themselves, (b) pushing paperless tickets so they are very hard to transfer, (c) surge pricing to capture the margin the secondary market needs. There's both pros and cons to this outcome, but I don't believe havig TM as the single owner of the entire live event industry is on the whole, a good one.
You are correct but you are missing that TM is doing this in collaboration with the promoters and artists, which of course means sharing the profits with them too.Example, The Black Keyes told TM to invalidate secondary market tickets to one of its.shows.
https://variety.com/2019/music/news/black-keys-hundreds-turn...