It feels like every event/venue is selling tickets exclusively through Ticketmaster. Every other ticketing platform seems to only hold resale tickets in their inventory which just transfers the tickets to your Ticketmaster account when bought. With all the hate Ticketmaster has gotten and all the other ticketing platforms out there, I'm surprised Ticketmaster still has a hold of pretty much the entire market. How are they doing this? Why haven't the other platforms been able to compete?
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?
#2Rant:
Trying to buy tickets for the Knicks game at MSG. Is it really impossible to have a ticketing platform that prevents scalpers from marking up prices to an insane amount?
$10000+ for a ticket that originally costs around 2k should be illegal. Most of these tickets will go unsold I'm sure.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?
#3They merged with LiveNation and they own half of the venues. The other half of the venues have exclusive deals with TicketMaster, who provides them with software to run venue logistics (TicketMaster for business), creating vendor lock-in.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?
#4> With all the hate Ticketmaster has gotten and all the other ticketing platforms out there, I'm surprised Ticketmaster still has a hold of pretty much the entire market.
That's the thing. Everyone hates Ticketmaster... but forgets that the venues and even many high profile artists could easily cancel their contracts with Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster takes the blame, rakes in the cash and distributes the cash to venues and artists. Everyone in the industry is complicit.
On top of that, I 'member the times here in Germany before the big gun Eventim took over, getting tickets used to be a clusterfuck before as your average 1000 seats venue just can't be expected to build a system that doesn't collapse under (often literally) hundreds of thousands to millions of fans.
The fix would be legislation, but given the amount of money in live events... it just won't happen.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?
#5Oh yea ticket master owns the venues. The artists can't revolt if they want to put on a big show. Software companies can't compete without dipping their toes into big money real estate property.
Software start ups are all about that 0 cost replication of software. One webserver spawns millions of threads for free. Start ups crack under the pressure of real world costs. Like sure anyone can make a website where users send tweets to each other. But if you have to spend billions of dollars constructing stadiums so Swifties can have an ex-ticket master experience... That's a hard sell to the software guys.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?
#6Bono, Geldof, livenation, cartel.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?
#7Rant: Trying to buy tickets for the Knicks game at MSG. Is it really impossible to have a ticketing platform that prevents scalpers from marking up prices to an insane amount? $10000+ for a ticket that originally costs around 2k should be illegal. Most of these tickets will go unsold I'm sure.
In my opinion, the scalping problem isn't really the primary problem with Ticketmaster's monopoly. Scalping is just the result of a gap between sale price and fair market value.
I also think that many of the things Ticketmaster could do to stop scalping would build further walls around their monopoly. To me, a ticket should generally be like a piece of a paper that has right of first sale. I don't want a situation where Ticketmaster has the right to hold my tickets hostage (which they're already doing quite a bit of with digital tickets).
As it relates to the resale market, Ticketmaster's main sins are:
- Making it impossible to engage in a safe secondhand ticket marketplace outside of their own platform. It would be technologically trivial to implement some kind of pre-purchase mechanism for buyers on third-party sites to verify the authenticity of resold tickets and ensure ownership gets transferred upon successful purchase, but the only real mechanism is transferring tickets somewhat blindly via email accounts. E.g., I go to StubHub and pinky promise that I'll transfer my tickets to the buyer via the Ticketmaster account when they pay, and the buyer pinky promises they won't fraudulently report that the ticket wasn't transferred. Ticketmaster could easily implement some kind of technological solution to having a more open escrow market that helps keep third-party transactions secure. There could be a buy/sell/trade API that they open up to providers like Venmo, Cash App, Zelle, PayPal, etc. But they keep it all within Ticketmaster to maintain that monopoly.
- Double-dipping on huge transaction fees on their own second-hand market. The only truly safe place to buy second-hand tickets is Ticketmaster (see above), and they take excessive fees far outside the realm of a fair transaction fee.
It's really the artists, vendors, promoters, teams who control the side that prevents scalpers from leaving seats empty. For example, I recently went to a concert where the artist/promoter simply didn't turn on ticket resale at all. I assume this was done to keep more hardcore fans in the seats rather than giving people temptations to sell.
You saw $10,000+ prices for a ticket, but the Knicks game will be filled all the way. It's just overpriced for now until game time gets closer. Or, perhaps $10,000 is just the fair market value. The building only fits 19,000 people inside. New York City has 350,000 households with over $1 million net worth.
Manhattan Scalpers won't leave unsold seats to a game like this, but they will try to offer prices far above fair market value until they figure out what that fair market value is.
It's also a situation where we either have to accept that New York City has a lot of wealthy people bringing up the fair market value, or the team has to decide to sacrifice revenue to enhance the fan experience (e.g., do a ticket lottery + named tickets that must match your ID).
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?
#8I always wonder why ticketmaster/live nation isn't making more money? Given they are a monopoly, I'd expect them to be making a ton of profit. But it doesn't really seem to look that way: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/LYV:NYSE
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?
#9Tho not exactly a direct solution,
Related:
Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?
#10> With all the hate Ticketmaster has gotten and all the other ticketing platforms out there, I'm surprised Ticketmaster still has a hold of pretty much the entire market. That's the thing. Everyone hates Ticketmaster... but forgets that the venues and even many high profile artists could easily cancel their contracts with Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster takes the blame, rakes in the cash and distributes the cash to venues…
Precisely this. Ticketmaster's entire business model is based around taking the blame. Artists don't want to set a face value for their tickets that represent a realistic market-clearing price, for fear of being seen as greedy; this leaves a lot of money on the table for scalpers. TM scrape as much of that value back for artists and venues, who get a cut of all the fees and charges and "authorized secondary resale". Selling tickets is the easy part; the secret sauce is selling tickets for as much as possible, while allowing the artists to pretend that they're being sold for a "fair" price.