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US Justice Department to seek breakup of Live Nation-Ticketmaster

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Re: US Justice Department to seek breakup of Live Nation-Ticketmaster

#171

Post by the_gastropod »

nickff wrote: post #146
dpkirchner wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> insulting and alienating the agency staff What are you referring to here?

https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-j... There is a great deal of documentation and discussion, but this document covers some of it, here are a couple of on-topic quotes: > "Documents from and testimony by FTC managers show that Chair Khan marginalized the litigators and investigators at the FTC who had the skills necessary to win cases." > "One manager consulted with his team and reported to t…

I wouldn't read too much into this document. It's written by one of the most egregious political hacks on the planet: Jim Jordan. Even in this report, he can't resist using the classic "Democrat" epithet at the tippy-top of page 5 [1]. Jordan also subpoenaed Khan after the FTC took action against Elon Musk—Republicans' second-favorite billionaire they'll defend at all costs.

This document reads like political theater because it is political theater.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet)

Re: US Justice Department to seek breakup of Live Nation-Ticketmaster

#172

Post by Aloisius »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #98
vikingerik wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The monopoly is really the artists, who then delegate to the venues. Like, Bruce Springsteen ticket prices are high because only he is Bruce Springsteen and nobody else is. The real monopoly is on being Bruce Springsteen . Prices are high because of supply and demand for that artist ; Bruce Springsteen can only put on so many shows for so many seats and there is far more demand than that, no matter who is selling the…

You're really missing the point. The issue here isn't that top artists can't sell their tickets at a high price. It's that venues have exclusivity deals w/ ticketmaster/livenation and ticketmaster/livenation ultimately charge outrageous fees to consumers no matter what. Then often their own reselling arm is involved in the scalping behavior. The artists aren't reaping these fees. Ticketmaster/livenation is capturing…

> ultimately charge outrageous fees to consumers

By and large, it is the venues and promoters that set large fees. The reason they like TM is because TM will take the blame for charging those fees when in reality, they're kicked back.

Of course, the problem is that in many cases now, Live Nation owns the venues and acts as the promoters, so those kickbacks started going, ultimately, to the company charging them.

Re: US Justice Department to seek breakup of Live Nation-Ticketmaster

#173

Post by faeriechangling »

EasyMark wrote: post #51

The FTC and DoJ have been hitting it out of the park recently, unfortunately, there are a lot of judges out there that think corps should be able to do anything they want.

They’ve been swinging around a bat a while lot, I haven’t seen them hit the ball much less knock out of the park. At most they’re scaring the pitcher with erratic behaviour.

Re: US Justice Department to seek breakup of Live Nation-Ticketmaster

#174

Post by tootie »

julianeon wrote: post #16

If Live Nation-Ticketmaster is not a monopoly then there is no such thing as a monopoly.

Isn't it an open secret that large venues contracted Ticketmaster expressly to do price fixing? It's collusion as much as monopolism. They run operations and absorb all the bad press.

Re: US Justice Department to seek breakup of Live Nation-Ticketmaster

#175

Post by brightball »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #70
klyrs wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an election year, don't hold your breath.

Election year is 25% of a single administration's term, why should events be ignored 25% of the time?

Because they've had the entire term to take action and the only reason anything is happening now it to attempt to build some momentum going into the election itself. Soon as it's over, everything most likely goes away.

Re: US Justice Department to seek breakup of Live Nation-Ticketmaster

#176

Post by dan_atem17 »

klyrs wrote: post #166
laidoffamazon wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Election year is 25% of a single administration's term, why should events be ignored 25% of the time?

In this case, because I don't expect Biden to win another term and I expect the prosecution of this case to take longer than a year. The last several administrations have opened their term by tearing down everything that the prior administration had done. To be specific: I'm not confident the prosecutor behind this will have a job at the end of the year.

[dead]

Re: US Justice Department to seek breakup of Live Nation-Ticketmaster

#178

Post by cbsmith »

aodin wrote: post #22
cbsmith wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Particularly for the local music scene, where Live Nation usually isn't the promoter, the junk fees aren't coming from them. Gotta remember Ticketmaster's margins are actually pretty thin.

In Live Nation's latest 10-Q filing they listed the operating margin of their ticketing segment at 32%, with a non-GAAP AOI margin of 39%. [1] https://investors.livenationentertainment.com/sec-filings/al...

Which is on the low side for an entertainment software company. Also worth noting that most of their Ticketing growth is coming from international markets, where they aren't at all a monopoly, and yet the margins there are the same... and it is even more misleading than that, the denominator for that margin isn't including the bulk of the price people are paying for the ticket, which flows through to venues (where the margins are even lower). Per said same report, if you add Ticketing & Converts --and Ticketmaster sells tickets for a lot of other customers who aren't Live Nation, so if anything that is under-counting the total value of the tickets sold by Ticketmaster-- the combined margin is around 8%. So that's ~8% of the money you spend on a ticket that is going to Live Nation.

In fairness though, I did misspeak. The margins on ticket resale are quite big (and that's a driver of much of the profit margin in that report). That's usually not what people are referring to when they say "junk fees".

When people refer to "junk fees", they're normally talking about the fees associated with primary ticket sales, which have much lower margins (closer to 7-8%), because most of the money for those fees flows through to the other parties involved in the event. This has all been documented on several occasions. TM's blog actually recently put out a decent article walking people through it: https://blog.ticketmaster.com/the-truth-about-ticket-prices/.

The primary ticket sales service game is largely about volume. You've got an absurd amount of money being exchanged, so taking a small bit of it can work out to significant revenue, but it doesn't dramatically change the price people end up paying for their tickets.

To me, worse than the fees, is all the crap "promotions" that Ticketmaster tries to get you in on after you decide to buy your ticket from the venue... and it's a pretty good signal about the low margins on those sales. It's super annoying, but it makes sense for them to do it because any lost sales at the end of the funnel there are comparatively a small price to pay for the money they're getting from the promotions (which generate about half as much revenue for Live Nation as ticketing, but at less than a third of the cost).

No question that people are getting a raw deal when they buy tickets on Ticketmaster, but the perception of the problem is really different from the reality.

[For transparency: I spent 7 years in the live events industry. I now have nothing to do with it.]

Re: US Justice Department to seek breakup of Live Nation-Ticketmaster

#179

Post by the_gastropod »

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #157
jimbokun wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How dare politicians implement popular policies to appeal to voters!

I think the objection is the timing. If the administration truly cared about such things, they'd do them in non-election years. But they seem to save up these things for election years so people feel listened to.

Yes. I think that is the objection. But it's absurd. It's not like the FTC has been sitting on its hands the past 3 years. Last year, for example, they sued Amazon for illegally maintaining a monopoly. In 2022, they sued Walmart for facilitating money-transfer fraud, Harley Davidson for illegally restricting customers' rights to repair, countless health insurers to block illegal mergers. In 2021 they sued Frontier Communications for advertising false internet speeds, Lockheed Martin from illegally acquiring Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings, Nvidia from acquiring Arm Ltd, etc. There are hundreds of cases this FTC has brought in the past 3 years. Cynically saying "LOL ELECTION YEAR" at this case, because it's the first case you've paid attention to is just... so comically predictable.

Re: US Justice Department to seek breakup of Live Nation-Ticketmaster

#180

Post by dmvdoug »

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #157
jimbokun wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How dare politicians implement popular policies to appeal to voters!

I think the objection is the timing. If the administration truly cared about such things, they'd do them in non-election years. But they seem to save up these things for election years so people feel listened to.

Right, right, right. So what we really need is for politicians to be consistent and never do anything at all, including during election years, because they don’t really mean any of it (as we wise folk all know).
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