Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds • Hacker News Board

Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

#121

Post by scarecrowbob » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 2:05 AM UTC

jp57 wrote: post #65

scarecrowbob wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having produced, performed in, and engineered a number of shows and festivals, this is a terrible idea for a pricing strategy. Consider portajohns for an outdoor festival- incentivizing folks to wait until the last possible minute makes it impossible to determine what the needs are there, so how do you plan for how many shitters you need to bring and maintain for, say, a 3-day festival? Consider that "festivals disco…

Not everything sells out right away, though. I've bought concert tickets on the day of the show more than once. Somehow they still managed to have all the concessions staffed. But regardless, the formula for decreasing the price could be adjusted. For example, it could be an exponential decay toward the reserve price, with the decay rate set so that most of the decline in price is early. Or, for shows that are entire…

The issue is that most events don't even sell out. This is a terrible idea.

Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

#122

Post by foolswisdom » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 2:06 AM UTC

jfengel wrote: post #115

hackingonempty wrote: post #3

from 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.

I cannot imagine how they came up with that number. If it were under $2 per ticket it wouldn't have been worth pursuing. This happened because they were taking tens of dollars for no other reason than that there was no alternative.

The jury in this case is required to rule by preponderance of evidence (= more likely than not given the evidence). One of the economic experts calculated this number as being overcharged based on internal ticketmaster documentation.

Cases aren't always about the actual problem, they're about what you can prove in court.

Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

#123

Post by hgoel » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 2:08 AM UTC

ipaddr wrote: post #120

hgoel wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most flights are available at high frequencies (on the order of days, weeks) compared to concerts (once a year or so). You also don't care as much about sitting together on a plane.

You care just as much on a plane. Sitting beside wife/friend => stranger

I disagree, if you can't get seats with your friends in a concert, you might just not go because the social aspect is part of the experience, but if you can't get neighboring seats on a plane, you'd (or at least I would) just tolerate it since you would still get to be together at the main event (the destination).

Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

#124

Post by ipaddr » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 2:15 AM UTC

alistairSH wrote: post #111

bdangubic wrote: post #89

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? Get a refund if you can't go > Or you buy tickets as a gift for someone. This is easy part. > There’s a lot of legit reasons to want transfers, outside of scalping There of course are but they pale in c…

We don’t have to use one broken market (airline seats) as a model for another broken market (concerts). Anyway back to the top post - a Dutch auction foods almost all these issues without weird rules.

A Dutch auction kills first day sales and would affect those who need to plan ahead. It will create less ticket sales for medium tiered acts.

Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

#125

Post by Nursie » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 3:00 AM UTC

sporkland wrote: post #119

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.

We can agree scalpers are net negative. And I like your ideas but I don't see why the venues and artists don't want to capture more of what people are willing to pay enabled by what the parent comment suggested. I wonder if in your system it actually attracts fans or just people that have the time to wait for tickets.

> I don't see why the venues and artists don't want to capture more of what people are willing to pay

Because artists don't always want to extract the maximum money possible from their fanbase?

Artists are not always rapacious capitalists. Sure, they want to make money from the show, but a lot of them also genuinely want to reach people who may not be able to drop hundreds of bucks on a ticket. Always selling to the highest bidder is a recipe for larger acts to only be accessible to the wealthy. And as surprising as it may seem, some of them have views on that sort of thing.

Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

#126

Post by mardef » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 3:00 AM UTC

Loughla wrote: post #92

redwall_hp wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fairly common in Japan: you can't transfer tickets, as they get a name attached at purchase, and many concerts use a lottery system. You register interest in tickets, and if you're selected, you get a window to buy them. No camping out the minute presales open, and the price is the price instead of rent-extracting dynamic bullshit. Square Enix did that for the Final Fantasy conventions in the US as well (where…

The Savannah bananas do that for their tickets. You enter a free lottery to buy tickets then pay the same price regardless of when you buy them in that window if you're chosen. I don't think there's much scalping that happens with their tickets, so it must work.

I went through the multi-step process for the bananas last year. It failed to validate me during the purchase window. Their support never responded to me (it's been 9 months now).

It was a stupid flow that sent me from email to computer to phone and had one-time links that didn't transfer between devices.

I have no interest in going through this much effort to go to an event.

Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

#127

Post by Nursie » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 3:11 AM UTC

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…

Here in Western Australia, resale prices are capped at face-value plus 10%. IIRC the reseller platforms can still charge a fee on top, but IMHO it seems to have had the desired effect on ticket sales.

Unless it's something really, really popular, you don't have to be waiting the morning they go on sale. In fact you can usually pick up tickets for events a few weeks after they go on sale, or even longer. If they run out, there's often a small amount of resale tickets available for a bit more cash but not multiples.

Having come from the UK where you'd damn well better be online in the first 30 seconds or you're out of luck, and reseller sites fill up with tickets at high multiples of face value within minutes, it's a breath of fresh air. (I understand the UK is introducing similar resale price-caps soon)

Of course it may partly be that Perth people just don't go out that much. Either way it's really nice.

Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

#128

Post by mepiethree » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 3:22 AM UTC

ceroxylon wrote: post #117

What is the moat of the major ticketing companies? Is it deals with venues? It is hard to rationalize how one company can even get a stranglehold on an entire market like this. I feel like I could ping any random HN user and build something better in a week, which means it has been done many times already... why don't alternatives gain traction?

Yes exclusivity with venues. Live Nation owns and operates or invests in many many many large venues

Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

#129

Post by aidenn0 » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 3:22 AM UTC

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…

Starting in the late '70s, and by the '90s it was entrenched with economists that could affect policy that vertical integration is good for consumers. In theory, this shouldn't matter, since there were laws against it, but in reality this created a large precedent of judicial decisions saying that there's no problem with vertical integration.

Re: Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

#130

Post by bdangubic » Thu, Apr 16, 2026, 3:26 AM UTC

kube-system wrote: post #113

bdangubic wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are 300 people on the plane (big one) and 80k people watching taylor swift. national security is funny way to put this…

To be fair, we didn't start having the government screen people on planes when hijackers were merely endangering one plane worth of people. About 3,000 people died and likely tens of thousands of people were injured before we started doing that.

Because 3,000 people died I am unable to just transfer my upcoming flight to someone else? Even if this crazy sentence rang through in any way, just this year I had to fly twice "the next day" so-to-speak and basically bought tickets and then flew the next day. 9/11 is as far from a reason why airline tickets are non-transferable as it gets.