Internal emails reveal Ticketmaster helped scalpers jack up prices, FTC says

> Their whole business is based on bullying, dark patterns and ripoff

No. It’s based on monopoly. There are a limited number of venues that can host a modern superstar, generally no more than one per geography, and Ticketmaster made it a point to represent all of them. Which means any modern superstar and their fans must work through Ticketmaster. Which, in turn, enables this nonsense.

The cause is monopoly. Not “bullying, dark patterns and ripoff;” those are effects.

In Vancouver, Canada, the PNE (Pacific National Exhibition), owned by the City of Vancouver, got fed up with Ticketmaster and created its own ticket-vending outfit called Ticketleader.

https://ticketleader.ca

This might have been around 2011?

This PDF document from 2010 (don't let the 2018 in the URL fool you) still mentions TicketMaster. It is an announcement in connection with the 100 year anniversary (1910 - 2010):

https://www.pne.ca/files/uploads/2018/01/entertainment.pdf

Rick Beato thinks that AutoTune and whatnot killed music.

Maybe it was just Ticketmaster.

Ticketmaster is the obvious reason why fewer people go to live shows in North America, whether rock and roll or not.

Selling tickets is a really tough really low margin business with a ton of gatekeepers and risk.

First up you need to convince promoters to give you the tickets. Not artists. When an artist signs a deal with a promoter the promoter owns the tickets and can pretty much do what they want.

Problem is, a lot of good promoters in the US particularly are owned by Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster.

That’s fine though - just work with promoters who aren’t owned by Live Nation! Only problem is the venues those promoters are hiring are owned by Live Nation.

Also, a bunch of artist management companies are owned by Live Nation too.

So if you want to sell tickets for shows in non-Live Nation affiliated venues for non-Live Nation affiliated artists that’s fine.

But those are going to be small shows with relatively unknown artists. The risk increases in inverse proportion to the size of the show and profile of the artist. The promoter you’re dealing with is going to want cash up front, so as the ticketing company you’re going to have to loan them the money. If they run or the show flops or whatever else you are left holding the can.

And because you’re tiny and dealing with unknown shows you’re never going to get allocation for big name shows, so you’re not going to be able to build a valuable list of consumers that you can cross sell shows to.

And for the shows you’re selling you’re going to be left with remnant inventory and so you need someone with good lists who can shift that for you. So you’ll probably end up giving Ticketmaster 30-40% of your allocation from the promoters you are working with.

Here in Oslo Norway, Ticketmaster is almost everywhere. Yet the local venues, Ticketmaster ones included, have tons of shows in the $30-50 range. That's for venues with a capacity for 500-1500 people.

We have larger venues for larger artists, almost always international ones, and there ticket prices are often starting at around $80-100 and quickly go way up if you want a good location.

However personally I found I enjoy the sub-$40 concerts the most. Mainly because the smaller venue lets you get close, sound is usually much better and quite often I find a lot more passion on stage at these venues, which turns into more memorable experiences. And if the concert ends up not being my thing or just not that great, then I've just wasted the price of a few beers so no big deal.

One thing that keeps Ticketmaster in its reins here in Norway is our legislation, which limits the kind of processing fee shenanigans and similar they can do. Also scalpers became much less of a problem after they introduced a law that you can't charge more than the original price when reselling tickets.

I doubt you'd have much luck getting investors on board with a pitch that amounts to "we don't want to screw customers for additional profits"

But what do I know, I'm better with computers than people.