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Ticketmaster: Rocking The Most Hated Brand In America

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31–34 of 34 posts

Re: Ticketmaster: Rocking The Most Hated Brand In America

#31
post #3

I talked to the old CEO of TicketMaster years ago about the fees and when I found out that most of the service fees are kicked back to the venues, I found them far less evil. They take all the blame that should be directed at venue owners.

I worked at Ticketmaster for 2-3 years. A chunk does go back to the venue, but also the promoter, and in some rare instances, also the artist. (How else do you pay the artist 105% of ticket price?)

They could combine their fees into the ticket price, but they're afraid the artist will also demand 90% of the combined ticket price, putting significant risk on the table for them. Their motivation is minimal: People still buy tickets & nobody ever blames the venue or promoter. So from their viewpoint, why change?

Re: Ticketmaster: Rocking The Most Hated Brand In America

#32
post #4

It's perplexing that they charge such a large premium when the industry must be saving many millions of dollars a year in printing costs, box office attendants, and sales.

Everybody hates Ticketmaster's fees, but they are simply capitalism at work. The successful capitalist prices his goods and services not by his costs, but by what customers are willing to pay based on perceived value. (As any seller of software around here should inherently understand.)

Remember that you can, for the majority of venues, bypass Ticketmaster completely by simply going to the box office and buying the tickets in person. Don't want to? Then you're getting what you pay for in the convenience fee. $8 to not travel across the town or state, but instead do your ticket buying while sitting comfy at home, starts to look like a decently reasonable deal.

And that print-at-home fee? Market segmentation writ small. Obviously, print-at-home is more convenient for most customers than waiting for mail delivery. So the successful capitalist can charge more for print-at-home, capturing the revenue from whichever customers are willing to pay it. What costs the industry might incur or save simply don't enter into that question. It's revenue maximizing as all capitalists should strive to do.

Yes, Ticketmaster can do these things because it's a monopoly for any particular event. There is no alternative able to drive down those fees by competing. But this status does not originate with Ticketmaster. Whatever artist you want to see already inherently has a monopoly. Bruce Springsteen already has a monopoly on Bruce Springsteen concerts, because he is Bruce Springsteen and nobody else is. Springsteen and his managers just choose to delegate some of that monopoly power to Ticketmaster.

So yes, everybody hates Ticketmaster, but its practices are really just capitalism and not so different than what companies and startups around here do or would like to.

Re: Ticketmaster: Rocking The Most Hated Brand In America

#33
post #3

I talked to the old CEO of TicketMaster years ago about the fees and when I found out that most of the service fees are kicked back to the venues, I found them far less evil. They take all the blame that should be directed at venue owners.

That supports my theory that TicketMaster's primary reason for existence is to be a scapegoat. Venues want to charge market-clearing prices, but don't want to be accused of "gouging" customers. So they bring in TicketMaster to take the reputation hit, in exchange for splitting the profits.

In my time there, I would agree with that. My theory was Ticketmaster did well for theory reasons:

1) Venue relationships 2) Taking the fall on fees 3) Ability to scale

People are often surprised by #3. Having seen many startups try & fail (as well as large entities like LiveNation), ticketing is a hard problem.

In my time at Yahoo & Google, I believe they have the technology to build a ticketing company, but beyond on that, most -- startups to large entities such as LiveNation & CTS -- had big problems handling onsales for large U2-sized events. In fact, it always made me think "Good luck with that" when people would talk about the design of ticketing systems using relational DBs. :)

Re: Ticketmaster: Rocking The Most Hated Brand In America

#34
post #22

The thing that irks me the most about Ticketmaster is their absolute monopoly on this market. There's no denying just how crappy of a product they have, which is likely due to not having an incentive or need to innovate as there are no competitors. Having the unfortunate experience of dealing with them every time I (attempt to) buy football tickets for my college, I really am bothered by the simple lack of innovation…

You (the consumer) are not Ticketmaster's primary customer.

Ticketmaster's primary customers are the venues and promoters.

The product is actually the best one available, which is a system in place designed to sell large amounts of tickets, in some cases very quickly.

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