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

Ask HN: Why has no one replaced Ticketmaster?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 169 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why has no one replaced Ticketmaster?

#101

Post by tylergetsay »

cbsmith wrote: post #23
danabenson wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Succinct. Precise. Accurate. Correct.

Not accurate. TM already had a lock the market before LN acquired them. In fact, LN created their own ticketing platform to compete with TM... and failed miserably. Take a look at the largest venues in the country. Most of them aren't owned by LN, but they still use TM for ticketing. If anything, TM has helped LN to acquire more venues than the other way around. In general, TM has a much more dominant share of the ti…

It's not that LN owns the venues, but that the venues have an exclusive ticket agreement with TM. So if you want to perform at this venue, you must sell via TM. When my startup was trying to compete, we found that basically every single outdoor amphitheater had exclusive ticket rights. This makes stuff like crowdfunding a concert impossible

Re: Ask HN: Why has no one replaced Ticketmaster?

#102

Post by frankster »

hfhdjdks wrote: post #93
kelseyfrog wrote: post #11

Ticketmaster has exclusive deals with artists and venues. Artists not signing deals with Ticketmaster lose access to venues, and venues not signing exclusivity deals with Ticketmaster lose access to artists. There are enough of these on both sides that neither wants to lose the other so they sign. Side note: I worked at a small ticketing software shop circa the Ticketmaster/LiveNation merger. The CEO got a call from…

Sounds like a two-sided market, where a company gets their value from being able to connect one side (the artists) with the other one (the venues). What I find strange is that people aren't usually reluctant to sign exclusivity agreements because it's very limiting. How did ticketmaster get so big to begin with to force / convince people of signing exclusivity clauses?

Gets value ? Or extracts value?

Re: Ask HN: Why has no one replaced Ticketmaster?

#103

Post by input_sh »

gigatexal wrote: post #77
kelseyfrog wrote: post #11

Ticketmaster has exclusive deals with artists and venues. Artists not signing deals with Ticketmaster lose access to venues, and venues not signing exclusivity deals with Ticketmaster lose access to artists. There are enough of these on both sides that neither wants to lose the other so they sign. Side note: I worked at a small ticketing software shop circa the Ticketmaster/LiveNation merger. The CEO got a call from…

So where’s Lina Kahn pressuring to break up these exclusive agreements? She made hay talking about them in 2022 but what has been done recently? https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/big-firms-lik...

> but what has been done recently?

Specifically about Ticketmaster or what has FTC done more broadly?

Proposed a rule against hidden fees (10 days ago). It's also supposed to give FTC enforcement mechanism so that it'd be more effective than state laws that were passed and basically ignored.

Also filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon (less than a month ago) for how they're treating third-party sellers. And if I remember correctly a lawsuit against Facebook is supposed to proceed in December, in which the FTC is asking the court to force Facebook to sell Instagram and WhatsApp (I wouldn't get my hopes up on this one).

FTC definitely has some teeth now, but they can't wish monopolies out of existence, they have to go through a years-long court process against an army of lawyers employed by tech companies with a budget that's orders of magnitude higher than FTC's.

Re: Ask HN: Why has no one replaced Ticketmaster?

#104

Post by blueboo »

gigatexal wrote: post #77
kelseyfrog wrote: post #11

Ticketmaster has exclusive deals with artists and venues. Artists not signing deals with Ticketmaster lose access to venues, and venues not signing exclusivity deals with Ticketmaster lose access to artists. There are enough of these on both sides that neither wants to lose the other so they sign. Side note: I worked at a small ticketing software shop circa the Ticketmaster/LiveNation merger. The CEO got a call from…

So where’s Lina Kahn pressuring to break up these exclusive agreements? She made hay talking about them in 2022 but what has been done recently? https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/big-firms-lik...

Bigger fish to fry

Ticketmaster is big but it’s not Amazon or banking.

Re: Ask HN: Why has no one replaced Ticketmaster?

#105

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

safety1st wrote: post #73
bastard_op wrote: post #18

The question should really be why the FTC tolerates this, letting them after all this time enjoy the blatantly monopolistic anti-consumer stance they've enjoyed since the 80's (at least). It isn't difficult to see how nasty of a business this is by how hated they are by artists and consumers alike, and if nothing else they should be broken up the same way Ma Bell as a telecom monopoly. At least it might come with som…

What's really wild is that for the last 2.5 years the FTC has been led by somebody who's super dialed in on antitrust issues and trying to take these companies to court, but the government is having a hard time winning the cases. So either the courts have been bought and paid for, or the laws are weak and out of date because Congress is bought and paid for, or both. All this despite a rough but widespread understandi…

I posit a 3rd option:

antitrust enforcers starting with Lina K are so incompetent that they cant win open and shut cases

Exhibit A: action against a merger between Amazon and a robo-vaccum company, iRobot.

Let that sink for a minute.

Re: Ask HN: Why has no one replaced Ticketmaster?

#106

Post by bradfa »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #11

Ticketmaster has exclusive deals with artists and venues. Artists not signing deals with Ticketmaster lose access to venues, and venues not signing exclusivity deals with Ticketmaster lose access to artists. There are enough of these on both sides that neither wants to lose the other so they sign. Side note: I worked at a small ticketing software shop circa the Ticketmaster/LiveNation merger. The CEO got a call from…

Ticketmaster is the official ticket seller for the NFL. It would be interesting if the NFL decided to do tickets themselves, as they easily have the scale and sway over the venues and teams. But there’s probably not enough money in it to justify it for the NFL and if Ticketmaster isn’t broken from their view, why fix it?

I think we would need some entity on the scale of the NFL to fix this. Ticketmaster is too big to take on any other way.

Re: Ask HN: Why has no one replaced Ticketmaster?

#107

Post by CPLX »

themaninthedark wrote: post #94
CPLX wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not true. You can have two or more companies share a market via market splitting and the result is still effectively a monopoly.

That would be a duo poly not a mono poly.

Perhaps. It still sucks for the same reasons.

Re: Ask HN: Why has no one replaced Ticketmaster?

#108

Post by bazmattaz »

morsch wrote: post #79
progbits wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't wait for EU commission to notice this and add them to the "gatekeepers" list.

Ticketmaster isn't huge in Europe. I think CTS Eventim is the closest equivalent, with a similar share of tickets sold in a few countries, including their home turf, Germany. But I don't think it's comparable, as they're not similarly vertically integrated. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTS_Eventim

Ticketmaster is gigantic in the UK

Re: Ask HN: Why has no one replaced Ticketmaster?

#109

Post by ggybdese »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #88
Apreche wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tickets for events necessarily have a limited supply. If demand exceeds supply, price goes up. The box offices keep the face value prices of the tickets lower than what the market will bear. Therefore, someone will always step in to arbitrate and collect the margin. Even if Ticketmaster were destroyed, it would not have any impact on scalping. The only way to stop this from happening is for the face value of high dem…

That doesn't really respond to cushpush, who is proposing that resold tickets shouldn't be honored by the venue.

Are you suggesting there is no valid use case for reselling tickets other than scalping? (I am unable to make it to an event today for which I bought tickets due to an unforeseen circumstance). Do you propose that my ticket has to go to waste?

Re: Ask HN: Why has no one replaced Ticketmaster?

#110

Post by Spivak »

jasode wrote: post #98
hfhdjdks wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a two-sided market, where a company gets their value from being able to connect one side (the artists) with the other one (the venues). What I find strange is that people aren't usually reluctant to sign exclusivity agreements because it's very limiting. How did ticketmaster get so big to begin with to force / convince people of signing exclusivity clauses?

>How did ticketmaster get so big to begin with to force / convince people of signing exclusivity clauses? By dangling more money. In the 1980s, Ticketmaster beat the competitors (e.g. Ticketron) by offering the venues a better financial deal . Ticketron charged the venues a service fee. Venues pay Ticketron. Ticketmaster flipped that around and made a clever proposal: instead of charging the venue, we'll charge the c…

Or just don't, keep charging the the people who have the money and aren't price sensitive.
Post reply on HN