Now do service fees and 'convenience' fees. Every ticket I buy for a movie somehow costs $2 extra now. (As with everything else). Robbery.
usually the service fee doesn't even get refunded, which feels additionally foul
Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds
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Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds
#12from the NYT: > The jury determined that Ticketmaster had overcharged consumers by $1.72 for each ticket. I'm already planning what I'm going to do with the $0.20 refund I receive for each ticket I bought.
Sounds about right. The attorneys take $1.52 and leave the victim with $0.20. And then nothing actually happens that would restore a competitive marketplace.
Back in my day, the federal government would break up monopolies.
Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds
#13The question should be did Live Nation knowingly allow scalpers (aka ticket brokers) to corner the market on highest demand events AND create artificial scarcity by only posting a small handful of the tickets they controlled at extreme inflated prices increasing the percentage fees collected by Live Nation and Ticketmaster on every ticket sold.
Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds about right. The attorneys take $1.52 and leave the victim with $0.20. And then nothing actually happens that would restore a competitive marketplace.
Back in my day, the federal government would break up monopolies.
Well, it’s also the courts. The government recently tried to break up Google but the judge refused
Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds
#15In case you wondered what the point of the federal (i.e. states not totally controlled by federal government) system is, here's a good example. If only the federal government were allowed to pursue this case, it would have ended when the administration changed. 30 states chose to keep the case alive, and good on them.
It makes you wonder why the DoJ settled so early. Or, rather, it doesn’t really make you wonder at all. It’s obvious there was a case and they should have let their lawsuit run. I wonder why they didn’t?
Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds
#16The horizontal control of venues is only one issue. A perhaps bigger issue is the vertical integration (if that's the right term) of first-party ticket sales and resale in one company. Ticketmaster has no real incentive to try to prevent resellers from buying up all the tickets on first sale, because it gets to charge fees on all the resales through its platform. The more times a ticket is resold, the better.
I don't believe a court would ever mandate this, but I'd like to see tickets sold by dutch auction: All tickets start off for sale at some very high price, like $10000, and the price declines by some amount every day until it reaches a reserve price on the day of the concert. Buyers can purchase as many tickets as they want, but professional resellers would have to guess the price that would let them clear their inventory at a profit. Under a system like this the best seats would go earliest (at the highest prices) while the nosebleed seats might still be available on day of the show, or not depending on demand.
Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds
#17Venue contracts are a sort of political firewall against any relevant ticketing technology becoming massive globally.
Music festivals were a sort of guerilla attack on lack of venue contracts.
Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds
#18Concert seats should be handled the same as airline seats. I can buy the same airline seat from dozens of different places online. Why is that?
Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds
#19The horizontal control of venues is only one issue. A perhaps bigger issue is the vertical integration (if that's the right term) of first-party ticket sales and resale in one company. Ticketmaster has no real incentive to try to prevent resellers from buying up all the tickets on first sale, because it gets to charge fees on all the resales through its platform. The more times a ticket is resold, the better. I don't…
Ticketmaster actually experimented with this https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mic.20180230
Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds
#20In case you wondered what the point of the federal (i.e. states not totally controlled by federal government) system is, here's a good example. If only the federal government were allowed to pursue this case, it would have ended when the administration changed. 30 states chose to keep the case alive, and good on them.
It makes you wonder why the DoJ settled so early. Or, rather, it doesn’t really make you wonder at all. It’s obvious there was a case and they should have let their lawsuit run. I wonder why they didn’t?
Bribes, campaign donations, presidential ballrooms. The current administration has settled MANY cases that they'd already won, it's very easy to buy favors now.