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

91–100 of 126 posts

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

#91

Post by KptMarchewa »

pedalpete wrote: post #85
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…

It isn't just that the venues have exclusive contracts, its also that if they break the exclusivity contract with TicketMaster, they can't use a competing service for 2 years (though I can't find proof of this, when I worked in venues 20 years ago, this was the case). SongKick took a stab at breaking TicketMaster, as did PearlJam, and a few others. Everyone has failed so far. This is clearly monopolistic and harmful…

> It isn't just that the venues have exclusive contracts, its also that if they break the exclusivity contract with TicketMaster, they can't use a competing service for 2 years (though I can't find proof of this, when I worked in venues 20 years ago, this was the case).

How is that legal under Sherman Act?

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

#93

Post by coder543 »

ars wrote: post #88
robrenaud wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> They run a not that complicated website. That's not entirely true, the surge demand on their site is enormous. They pay for enormous capacity that is used only sporadically.

> They pay for enormous capacity that is used only sporadically.

In this day and age? I am highly skeptical.

Any large, upcoming surge of traffic is planned in advance, as in the case of the Taylor Swift Era Tour ticket sales, so they can easily preemptively scale up infrastructure ahead of that. There is zero reason to hold onto that infrastructure all year long, and dynamic scaling works fine for this type of service the rest of the year.

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

#94

Post by georgeplusplus »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #91
pedalpete wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't just that the venues have exclusive contracts, its also that if they break the exclusivity contract with TicketMaster, they can't use a competing service for 2 years (though I can't find proof of this, when I worked in venues 20 years ago, this was the case). SongKick took a stab at breaking TicketMaster, as did PearlJam, and a few others. Everyone has failed so far. This is clearly monopolistic and harmful…

> It isn't just that the venues have exclusive contracts, its also that if they break the exclusivity contract with TicketMaster, they can't use a competing service for 2 years (though I can't find proof of this, when I worked in venues 20 years ago, this was the case). How is that legal under Sherman Act?

It's probably not along with many other industries that sorely need the Sherman act, but the DOJ would have to bring charges and sometimes it's not politically popular especially during periods of bad economy to do so

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

#95

Post by lotsofpulp »

bombcar wrote: post #62
jnac wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good data point, the market is surprisingly small which could account for lack of competition. But the last annual report has the ticketing org alone at 37% EBITDA margin [1] (they call it AOI). No expert on benchmarking this # but wouldn't say they're not milking it. [1] https://d1io3yog0oux5.cloudfront.net/_6fc34851c72a6087b32b93... p47

37% EBITDA is in line with APPL (31%) and relatively low when you consider that APPL produces a ton of actual physical goods. It seems that companies that go much above 35% start "investing" in stupid shit (FB hit 50% EBITDA margin in 2018 and then went nuts with Meta, dragging themselves back down to the 30s). I'd say that these are rookie numbers and they could get that stuff to 50% or more (though some of it they…

Livenation has a zero percent profit margin for 10+ years.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/LYV/live-nation-en...

Why are investors buying its stock? Do they want to capture more of the market before they start ratcheting up prices?

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

#96

Post by Tangurena2 »

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…

> If you are attending any event and you can actually buy the tickets directly at the box office then go that route.

I used to try that - in order to avoid ticketmaster fees. For most venues, even if you buy tickets at the venue, it is a ticketmaster terminal/printer that prints the tickets out. And you still pay the ticketmaster fees.

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

#97

Post by bsimpson »

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…

I've been buying my tickets at The Greek in Berkeley since Ticketmaster started requiring 2FA and rejecting my Google Voice number.

They charge a $5 fee for physical tickets now. It's less than their online bullshit, but it's still bullshit.

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

#98

Post by BoiledCabbage »

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.

People need to stop calling inherent flaws in unregulated capitalism, "regulatory capture".

Unregulated capitalism has flaws - this is one of them. Vertical monopolies are a huge issue period.

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

#100

Post by 2kwatts »

thedangler wrote: post #83

I am so pissed at my 2004 self. I was in 2nd year university and won a bid to create the website and ecommerce platform for a local event. The website was for: Event information, Team Schedules, Buying merhcandise, and event tickets. My partner and I created, to our knowldge, the first ticketting system with live purchasing for seats at a stadium where you could choose your seats. Ticket master was not doing this at…

No post body was provided.
Post reply on HN