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Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?

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Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?

#131

Post by Y_Y »

jorisw wrote: post #129
marysol5 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OASIS did that one when they announced their return tour. "We have no control over the ticket prices" Yeah you do, there's no show without you...

What incentive would Oasis have to help bring down the prices for their own shows anyway?

Presumably the don't want only old rich people and empty seats. Otherwise you could self-scalp all the tickets at the highest price possible, maximisung revenue for a single gig but making it so unfun/bad press that you come off worse.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?

#133

Post by QuantumNomad_ »

jorisw wrote: post #129
marysol5 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OASIS did that one when they announced their return tour. "We have no control over the ticket prices" Yeah you do, there's no show without you...

What incentive would Oasis have to help bring down the prices for their own shows anyway?

Idk about Oasis specifically, but there have been multiple examples of other bands fighting to keep the concert tickets affordable for their fans. Nirvana did that for example.

And even if you explicitly want to charge as much as possible from your fans, why claim that you have no influence over the price?

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?

#134

Post by Slow_Dog »

mininao wrote: post #132

I'm in Europe and i use DICE a lot, it's a great app. And most of the time tickets are on sale on multiple platforms at once here (eg DICE and Ticketmaster)

Indeed. Pick any two of Ticketmaster, Dice, AXS, Skiddle and seetickets. There are so many it's not straightforward to track down where your ticket is when you're off to the gig.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?

#136

Post by ndepoel »

marysol5 wrote: post #122
peteforde wrote: post #109

Many of the other commenters have explained how the ownership structure of Ticketmaster gives them near monopoly control because they also own the radio stations and the venues and the promoters. (I'm using "they" and "own" very liberally in this paragraph.) The simple fact that there's an ownership link between Ticketmaster and the scalper I mean totally legit resale sites is so wildly corrupt that, well, it's textb…

OASIS did that one when they announced their return tour. "We have no control over the ticket prices" Yeah you do, there's no show without you...

Which is complete nonsense anyway. Robert Smith from The Cure famously went against TicketMaster before their last world tour several years ago, pointing out the ridiculous prices and demanding that they be lowered to make their shows more accessible. He managed to get TicketMaster to budge and even got them to refund some of the marked up resale prices, costing them millions but generating a lot of goodwill among fans in the process. It's not that artists do not have control, but they do need to put in a good amount of effort to make change happen.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?

#137

Post by gregoriol »

jorisw wrote: post #129
marysol5 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OASIS did that one when they announced their return tour. "We have no control over the ticket prices" Yeah you do, there's no show without you...

What incentive would Oasis have to help bring down the prices for their own shows anyway?

Having seen shows with super-premium prices at the front, with half the place being non-reactive to the show because people paying extra are not actually huge fans but huge wallets, yeah you need to put down prices and get those front tickets to fans if you want to have nice shows

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?

#138

Post by darkwater »

QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #133
jorisw wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What incentive would Oasis have to help bring down the prices for their own shows anyway?

Idk about Oasis specifically, but there have been multiple examples of other bands fighting to keep the concert tickets affordable for their fans. Nirvana did that for example. And even if you explicitly want to charge as much as possible from your fans, why claim that you have no influence over the price?

> but there have been multiple examples of other bands fighting to keep the concert tickets affordable for their fans. Nirvana did that for example.

Tickets price landscape radically changed in the last 30 years. They incremented between 3x to 5x (or even more) in that lapse of time, depending on the artist and venue, and accrued inflation doesn't explain it (quick search says that in the last 30 years in the Eurozone inflation grew ~85% and in the US ~110%)

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?

#139

Post by iamben »

peteforde wrote: post #109

Many of the other commenters have explained how the ownership structure of Ticketmaster gives them near monopoly control because they also own the radio stations and the venues and the promoters. (I'm using "they" and "own" very liberally in this paragraph.) The simple fact that there's an ownership link between Ticketmaster and the scalper I mean totally legit resale sites is so wildly corrupt that, well, it's textb…

Go to a lot of smaller shows, been using DICE for a long time - I think they dominate the smaller venues (in the UK at least). They've made tickets as easy as Amazon made ecom.

Alerts when for when tickets go on sale, (almost one click!) buy for friends and share, bans if you sell over face value, and (for a lot of places) you can return tickets to the pool to resell if you can't go (so there's often last minute waitlist tickets). It's all super smooth and a genuinely delightful experience.

Rooting for them too!

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?

#140

Post by Slartie »

luplex wrote: post #57
eqvinox wrote: post #54

https://pretix.eu is having some success in the EU market. But other sibling posts correctly point out this is… let's just say "overall shit situation".

We also have Eventim and many other local ticket shops. I usually get my tickets right at the venue's online shop, or maybe from the artist. They use all kinds of systems.

Eventim is pretty much "Ticketmaster in Germany".

They captured like 90% of the German ticket market by closely watching Ticketmaster and basically repeating their playbook. Eventim also owns some venues, has exclusive contracts with many of them it doesn't outright own, hosts an official fan resale site, offers promotional services and generally integrates a lot of the business around large events vertically.

What's actually interesting is that it seems to be possible to compete with Ticketmaster only by copying their playbook on a large-enough scale, and Germany appears to be large enough. The Netherlands right next to Germany don't seem to have been large enough, as Ticketmaster basically controls them.

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