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Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

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Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

#151

Post by mrWiz »

dylan604 wrote: post #27
jazzpush2 wrote: post #8

Now do service fees and 'convenience' fees. Every ticket I buy for a movie somehow costs $2 extra now. (As with everything else). Robbery.

My favorite is the local tax office charges extra for paying online vs going in to the office to pay in person. At first, I thought it was a way to recoup the processing fees as you're obviously paying by card online. The last time I paid in person with a card, that fee was not added on though. So they are charging you extra for not having to pay an employee to process your account.

Until a few years ago merchants were not allowed to charge credit card fees. In that case, online fees make a legally-allowable proxy for credit card surcharges.

Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

#152

Post by latentframe »

Intersting cases like this one are a good reminder that the market structure takes source directly into the pricing because when the distribution and access are concentrated then the pricing power often shows up as fees rather than headline prices ; this makes inflation harder to measure but still very real so antitrust in that sense isn’t just about competition and it’s one of the few levers that can affect price dynamics at macroeconomic level

Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

#153

Post by cbsmith »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #18

Concert 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?

Ask yourself why airlines deliberately overbook flights while venues do their best to never overbook events, why are subject to identify verification before a flight, and why you go through the TSA before you board... and you'll start to understand why airline seats are maybe not such the perfect metaphor for concert seats.

Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

#154

Post by paganel »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #58
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s kind of annoying in practice. For example you buy four tickets to go with your friends. But you get sick so you offer your ticket to a different friend instead. Oops that’s not allowed so now no one gets to go? Or you buy tickets as a gift for someone. There’s a lot of legit reasons to want transfers, outside of scalping.

I can't do this with airline tickets, hotel bookings, train tickets, dinner reservations, or any other kind of receipt that allows me to put my butt in a seat at a specified time. Why are concert tickets special?

Because they're not airline tickets nor hotel bookings. Crazy though that nowadays train tickets have started implementing this ID thing (I'll take your word for it, last time I purchased a train ticket, as a tourist, I had to input no name on it, it was either in Italy or Switzerland, I forgot), the same goes for dinner reservations. Enshittification is indeed accelerating.

Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

#155

Post by nektro »

autoexec wrote: post #29
jp57 wrote: post #16

The 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…

Why not just ban the transfer of tickets and allow refunds? You buy a ticket, you show your ID at the door. Early refunded tickets get resold online and late refunds are sold at the venue. All seats, including the best seats, go to actual fans instead of scalpers just hoping to make a profit while providing zero value. First choice in seats goes to the most passionate and attentive fans.

this is the way

Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

#157

Post by troupo »

nradov wrote: post #104
QuantumFunnel wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the big artists people want to see ever play at those venues

That's exactly my point: boycott the artists who contract with Live Nation. Your life won't be any less rich if you go see a local band instead of Taylor Swift. People have so many options now and yet they're afflicted with this weird FOMO.

This essentially boycotts 99% of artists who are big enough to book a venue with more than 500-1000 people

Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

#158

Post by mschuster91 »

hgoel wrote: post #93
autoexec wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just ban the transfer of tickets and allow refunds? You buy a ticket, you show your ID at the door. Early refunded tickets get resold online and late refunds are sold at the venue. All seats, including the best seats, go to actual fans instead of scalpers just hoping to make a profit while providing zero value. First choice in seats goes to the most passionate and attentive fans.

Alternatively only allow transfers within a very short period of the event. Anyone with a legitimate reason (giving to a friend etc) can work it out even on the day of the event. But scalpers have to take on a big risk buying up the good seats early, because they have a short window of time within which to secure a sale (buyers won't risk pre-paying, sellers can't risk prospective buyers backing out at the last minut…

> Anyone with a legitimate reason (giving to a friend etc) can work it out even on the day of the event.

I've seen it happen multiple times people couldn't find someone to take the ticket off of them, even for free.

Sure, for an ultra mainstream act the likes of Rammstein? A FC Bayern soccer game? You'll always find some people outside the venue willing to pay in cash for tickets.

But anything with a small fanbase? Whoops.

Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

#159

Post by miki123211 »

autoexec wrote: post #29
jp57 wrote: post #16

The 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…

Why not just ban the transfer of tickets and allow refunds? You buy a ticket, you show your ID at the door. Early refunded tickets get resold online and late refunds are sold at the venue. All seats, including the best seats, go to actual fans instead of scalpers just hoping to make a profit while providing zero value. First choice in seats goes to the most passionate and attentive fans.

Scalping only exists because there's a difference between what the tickets cost and what the fans value them at.

For popular shows, there are more people who want to see the show than there are tickets available, so you need to pick a strategy for deciding who's going to go.. Ticket sellers have to balance lost profits from lower prices, prices being too high and the show not selling out, and fans being furious at the artist for making the tickets unaffordable for most of the true fanbase.

Dynamic pricing (airline style) and auction-based systems basically ensure that only the rich can attend. Scalping is a way to do price discrimination / progressive pricing. If you're a true fan, you know when the ticket sale will happen ahead of time, and you snatch the tickets quickly. If you're not, but are rich enough not to care, you have to buy from a scalper. Like all discounting and price discrimination strategies, it sometimes backfires; if you're a true fan attending your mother's funeral when the sale opens, you'll have to pay the rich person's price.

You can also see scalpers as being awarded by capitalism for taking risks. They make sure the show sells out and the artist is happy, even if fan interest is lower than expected. In such a case, they take on the losses, if all goes well, they take some of the profits from the sales.

Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

#160

Post by ChildOfChaos »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #58
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s kind of annoying in practice. For example you buy four tickets to go with your friends. But you get sick so you offer your ticket to a different friend instead. Oops that’s not allowed so now no one gets to go? Or you buy tickets as a gift for someone. There’s a lot of legit reasons to want transfers, outside of scalping.

I can't do this with airline tickets, hotel bookings, train tickets, dinner reservations, or any other kind of receipt that allows me to put my butt in a seat at a specified time. Why are concert tickets special?

You can do this with train tickets, dinner reservations and hotel bookings though? Only thing you can’t do that with is for flights and that’s due to security checks/passport etc

Most concert tickets are not standing and you used to get paper tickets you could just hand to someone else, why should you not be allowed to do this just because it moved to digital?

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