Take away this dynamic, and the face price of tickets is going to go up, and the total price is unlikely to change substantially.
Personally, I think this would still be a net plus for society. In order for market forces to work well, you need pricing transparency.
This is the problem with most 'monopolies', they reach a certain critical mass where they can no longer be dealt with on even footing. You are at their mercy as a vendor and as a customer. You can often argue that 'choice' exists, but what choice is it really? Taylor Swift isn't going to come play at our local music house/bar.
Beatport, a service that sells music for DJs, has started doing exactly this sort of nonsense. They now have "exclusive" tracks for twice the price, and I would guess that the artists also get a portion of the increased profits. However, for consumers the only change is less choice and DOUBLE the price. Seems very similar to what ticketmaster is doing. I have no idea if they force artists to make all their tracks exclusive if one is, but no doubt that is the next step.
There has got to be a better solution here as it doesn't seem very reasonable to literally be doubling and tripling prices like this. And at the least, if an artist is going to do that, it should be transparent and not hidden under the guise of an exclusivity.
Right off the bat, exclusivity clauses shouldn't be legal, it's the definition of anti-competitive.
Then perform smaller venues and ration tickets to your most-devoted fans. Unfortunately, if you do that, it's tough to become a billionaire. (Analogy: wineries. On the 4 x 4 of size and price point, you have wines positioned in each quadrant.)
TicketMaster is, or more accurately its exclusivity requirements are, the root of the problem. But everyone around them--from the municipalities that publicly finance and permit exclusivity deals by these stadiums to the artists who perform at them--are profiting from and complicit in the market failure. (Ethically, not legally.)
> It’s easy to believe the worst about Live Nation, they have a bad reputation. But the reason I buy this particular story is because it is consistent with the behavior of many dominant middlemen firms in our economy, from pharmacy benefit managers to Amazon to big banks securitizing mortgages in the financial crisis. As monopoly scholar Kate Judge noted, such dominant middlemen use fees and kickbacks, hidden via a complex maze of subsidiaries and overlapping lines of business, to extract in ways that are hard to see. In Live Nation’s case, it’s clear they are generating a great deal of revenue, but somehow show low margins for many of their products. Hiding the price hikes is important, because monopolization is harder to prove that way.
The artists aren't upset with their take. If they are it's because their own management has their hands deep in pockets, or just plain suck. Live Nation knows dam well who butters the bread.
The history of Live Nation is that it is the decedent of bill graham presents. You might want to go look at the history of bill. There is a statement about his funeral, and it having the longest lines of stretched black limos in SF history. It's probably true. Bill made everyone money, himself included as a "promoter" and every penny of that came from fans.
The music industry has been doing its own version of pay to win / loot boxes since the 70's. When they break up LN (if?) its just going to get worse as the greed is gonna just be right out in the open. The lesson of the last decade is that you dont need LN/TM to cover it up. Artist given choice will make tickets non transferable and just auction them off... the new starting bid will be the same as the current all in price.
It's greedy fucks all the way down.
P.S. As I have said elsewhere in this thread, I speak from having spent a few years working in the industry. Find someone who works in "music" like that and it's the same nonsense as game devs, long hours and shit money cause people are passionate...
That LiveNation has created a de facto system where they cannot opt out of their price setting is at the heart of the entire matter.
The venue, often LN, will charge a base rate then everything else goes on top.
There are several other factors at play that lead to higher ticket prices which often comes down to the artist and its tour production being very expensive rather than pure greed
More often than not the deals are worked out on a 70/30 or 80/20 in favour of the artist and split after breaking even on most mutually agreed costs (ads etc), or a bigger artist flat fee which is risky for them.
It’s like a cartel but it’s lead by one “extractor” (front of house, Ticketmaster in this case).
For what it's worth, they refer to themselves as a "syndicate".
CalFAIR charges 2-3x market rate premiums (for similar houses in the same area insured by the companies that own CalFAIR -- this is on top of charging more due to risk), and then refuses to pay out when your house is damaged, engages in lowballing, etc, etc.
Since all the insurance companies that are "competing" against them own stakes in it, the moral hazard should be obvious. Predictably, CalFAIR's market share has been rapidly increasing in recent years. They're supposed to be temporary insurance of last resort, but they've climbed to over 3% market share.
https://sfstandard.com/2023/10/19/california-insurance-crisi...
yes, but they are in cahoots with the fans to fleece the fans. Fans are willing to pay big money to see these shows, that's who pays the high prices. If fans didn't pay the high prices, the prices would drop.
Your comment (the word fleece) suggests you are at least somewhat judgmental about "greed": this type of judgment is why bands try to pretend that they sell the tickets for a "fair" price, and that's what creates the 2ndary market, and that's what creates the kickbacks and the need for a scapegoat.
you expect to pay a high price for a Picasso at auction. You should expect also to pay a high price for sellout, SRO, line around the block shows too. Who should collect that money? fans who got in first? fake fans who pretended to be fans to get in first? People who are attracted by the arbitrage price differential? Or, I dunno, how about Picasso? The band.
The biggest fans in football, season ticket holders who slog through all the bad seasons, frequently sell their superbowl tickets when the price gets high enough. They'd rather have the money, that's the nature of money, and people.
Ya, sure, but you also have to remember that Live Nation often owns the venues, and manages the artists.
So what you're kind of saying is "venues(Live Nation)/artists(also Live Nation) get a kickback of part of the Ticketmaster (also Live Nation) fees".
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1335258/000133525816...
"Ticketing. Our Ticketing segment is primarily an agency business that sells tickets for events on behalf of our clients and retains a fee, or “service charge”, for these services. We sell tickets for our events and also for third-party clients across multiple live event categories, providing ticketing services for leading arenas, stadiums, amphitheaters, music clubs, concert promoters, professional sports franchises and leagues, college sports teams, performing arts venues, museums and theaters. We sell tickets through websites, mobile apps, ticket outlets and telephone call centers. During the year ended December 31, 2015, we sold 69%, 21%, 7% and 3% of primary tickets through these channels, respectively. Our Ticketing segment also manages our online activities including enhancements to our websites and bundled product offerings. During 2015, our Ticketing business generated approximately $1.6 billion, or 22.6%, of our total revenue, which excludes the face value of tickets sold. Through all of our ticketing services, we sold 160 million tickets in 2015 on which we were paid fees for our services. In addition, approximately 297 million tickets in total were sold using our Ticketmaster systems, through season seat packages and our venue clients’ box offices, for which we do not receive a fee. Our ticketing sales are impacted by fluctuations in the availability of events for sale to the public, which may vary depending upon event scheduling by our clients. As ticket sales increase, related ticketing operating income generally increases as well."
$1.6b of revenue selling 297m tickets. $5.79 per ticket. So you are paying $20 fees on a ticket, who do you think gets that money if it isn't Ticketmaster?
>Personally, I think this would still be a net plus for society. In order for market forces to work well, you need pricing transparency.
I agree: fair pricing is better than bullshit pricing with hidden fees and surcharges. It's the same with tipping at restaurants: it's better to just have the actual price printed clearly and advertised, and that's the price you pay, instead of advertising a lower price and then having to do mental math to figure out the real price at the register.
Exactly the opposite, in fact. Did you know that Ticketmaster has two fees? One is the ‘outside’ fee that you, the punter, sees. So you think I’m getting $100 and you’re giving Ticketmaster another $10.
In fact there’s also an ‘inside’ fee that Ticketmaster charges me. So of that $100, they also take $10 from me.
Of course for this you get all sorts of services, right? Tools to manage seating, allocations, reservations, price varieties, and so on? Nope. Not a goddamned thing.
I despised having to work with them.
If you don't like what a concert ticket price costs, don't go.
Yep, that's what I do.
What you are failing to address is the artists being harmed by not participating in this 'fleecing' scheme.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taki...
Venue owners have a choice of ticket sellers, artists do not.
Much of the legal community at the time was convinced there was no way in hell the original merger would be approved. Even at that time LiveNation controlled an astonishing percentage of the live music venue market - which when paired with ticket master's near total dominance of live music ticket sales... this was one of the seemingly simplest competition law cases in years. Then the deal was approved, of course.
I am not surprised in the least it's finally getting anti-trust attention.
They crushed all of the meaningful competition that long ago. Even breaking the company up into parts wouldn't suddenly fix the industry.
I've gotten smaller clubs and comics to hop over, and got one big tour to join, but when it comes to the well-known artists, they are contractually bound to go with the big companies. I'm very happy someone is taking action.
> On January 25, 2010, the U.S. Justice Department approved the merger pending certain conditions.
It's just using their vertical integration and monopoly to move as much money onto their books and increase ticket prices and margins.
Shady.
move as much money onto their books and increase ticket prices and margins
Fee or Commission works fine here. The line item for sellers/buyers agent isn't "tax" when you buy/sell a house despite it being a percentage.
This is actually equally as cancerous - there is a reason realtors have one of the biggest lobbying groups in America.
Presumably the _average_ fee is the cost to provide the service (including the profit they want to make on it). So the more expensive tickets subsidize the cheaper ones.
Fee is a fee, no matter it is fixed sum of percentage. Same with taxes - they are not always a percentage.
Just make all sales final. Check IDs at the door, or use technology to speed up identity verification (mail out rfids, etc). Sucks if you get sick or whatever, just like many things in life where you cancel last minute. It’ll substantially decrease cost due to these bottom feeders.
Couldn't you mandate tickets must be sold back to the original seller if you e.g. can't make it to the event? Rather than to a third party?
Not true.
About "10% of [performing arts] tickets sold in the primary market are later re-sold by ticket scalpers," increasing to "20-30% of top-tiered seats" [1]. Banning scalping increases attendance but results in "fewer distinct productions...shown in metropolitan areas or states that require ticket resellers to be licensed or that prohibit resale above face value."
Empirically, markets with scalpers have lower ticket prices [2], though this has been studied more in sports than the performing arts. Which makes sense. Scalpers de facto underwrite the seller's risk.
[1] https://www.oxy.edu/sites/default/files/assets/Economics/Chi...
I haven't read the full paper yet, just the abstract, but the abstract talks about ticket window prices. Do they analyse the prices actually paid by the average attendee, which includes prices paid to scalpers? Or am I misunderstanding the term "ticket window"?
As a lay person, my gut asks: if scalpers don't cause attenders to pay more overall, then why do they exist?
We don't need any more surveillance, data-mining and sales, thank you. Your stated cure is worse than the disease.
https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2018/01/31.html (HN referers banned, so cut & paste into a fresh tab)
Don't these suits usually result in a fine and an agreement to stop doing XYZ while both parties wink and nod, then the government lawyers go work in lucrative private practice a few years later?
How would that work? Do you have some example of proposed legislation around this?
https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/26/investing/kroger-albertsons-m...
TM is so hated that, if the DoJ goes for the jugular and misses, there might be appetite for Congress to re-empower the DoJ.
Monopolies aren't just anti-consumer. They can strangle the country's ability to innovate and compete in a global marketplace.
I reached out to support for assistance, and after several days of wasted time and run-around, they finally sent my issue to their engineering team saying they'd get back to me in 5 business days. Keep in mind I said I bought these tickets a week before the event, and they'd already wasted a few days giving me the run-around, functionally meaning I wouldn't be able to sell my tickets.
I attempted to charge back the purchase since they did not provide what I paid for (tickets I could sell), and they fought me and won somehow.
So thanks Ticketmaster, for sucking me out of hundreds of dollars for nothing more than bytes in your database that I couldn't do anything with. I hope they go bankrupt.
For anyone who is in my shoes and hasn't used Ticketmaster yet and might be tempted to give them a chance thinking all of these horror stories are just unlucky people- don't. I was naive to think that all of those companies with bad reputations are just the loud minority but Ticketmaster is the only one I've had the misfortune of finding out is seriously awful. Use SeatGeek or countless other platforms instead. Gun to my head to use Ticketmaster again I'd probably take the lead instead.
This has happened to me twice now (though not with TicketMaster) and I was 100% in the right, and I lost. When I mentioned it on HN I was met with a lot of doubters. I think something has really changed regarding chargebacks.
It wouldn't surprise me if we're seeing a tragedy of the commons: chargebacks were easy as long as people were inculturated to use them as a last resort. Now that enough people reach for them first, banks have to look at each one more closely and they're going to err in the direction that takes less work.
If they were sold as marketable pending function(situation) with the implication that function(situation) was not simply "return false" but it turns out that function(situation) was actually "return false," that too is a problem.
Everyone is complaining about Ticketmaster but they're still giving them their money, so how are they supposed to respond? They are not being financially incentivized to change their ways. This feels a lot like the video gamer who hates Video Game Company XYZ with the passion of a thousand suns, yet like clockwork buys their video games again and again.
Show tickets aren't even a necessity. They're not like food and water--nobody has to buy them. Each and every dollar Ticketmaster collects is from a fan making a voluntary purchase of a luxury. Purchasing from a company that abuses them.
This is why monopoly is a market failure. There isn't a market mechanism that can correct this.
What do you like to do?
Bike? What if one company controlled all bike sales and bike lanes, bikes costed $20,000 and you needed to pay every time you go on a ride?
Programming? What if one company controlled all computer sales and internet access, they costed $50/hour to use and each program is another $10/hour and it costed another $200/month to host anything publicly?
Live events have been the norm throughout history.
The fact that it can now be classified as a luxury speaks to the need for drastic change.
Seeing a live event is not a luxury. Seeing the most popular entertainer in the world in a giant stadium is a luxury.
As a luxury. Put on by a Roman politician running for office, or as a rare treat travelling through town.
Also, caveat: TicketMaster has a monopoly on ultra-large venues. You can see small bands and plays without ever touching TM.
It did not. Lots of live events happening all the time everywhere for very cheap, even free. Look around local bars and clubs.
Probably not going to find top performers for cheap though.
I agree with you. People are talking about Oreos and biking and shit. You know, Oreos have calories, bikes move you around the world. Just don't buy the fucking tickets anymore. It's that simple.
There are a million ways to monetize. If you stop going to live shows music won't die. Maybe huge pop acts will.
Breaking up LiveNation/Ticketmaster would wreck the biggest artists, not little ones. Really we should be asking: What has Taylor Swift done for small artists? Whom has she featured on her tracks? Ed Sheeran, Bon Iver, Brendon Urie, Haim, Maren Morris... You might not have heard of Maren Morris, but she has millions of monthly listeners on Spotify.
The problem with what the Justice Department is proposing has similar energy to many of their efforts in the creative industries: they don't know what their fucking side is. They think it's "consumers." Man, if only it were so simple.
That's a monopoly. The actual product being a luxury item has no bearing on whether a business practice is damaging to consumers. If I have no other choice but to buy tickets for a show through TM, I can't easily avoid them to choose a better service.
Frankly breaking up Ticket Master is something that should have been looked into decades ago.
If they are breaking the law, the government should throw the book at them and yea they should have done it long ago, but also people should stop giving money to a company they hate, regardless of whether they are a monopoly.
...does that make me more morally qualified to complain than other people? Why?
There is no reason to behave like we exist in a low trust economy for any non-essential service when these 'non-essential' services are a massive portion of our total GDP.
Really, to follow your over libertarian line of thought it would be ok to say "Oreo's don't need to follow food safety laws because Oreo's aren't a necessity, you can buy bread and water". Instead we apply food safety laws to all food products so you don't play cancer russian roulette.
And the same should go for service transactions. I shouldn't have to find out that the one company that seems to own all venues is a monopolistic bastard that will fuck you over. Instead I should elect a representative government that punishes the living fuck out of companies that try to behave like that so the general consumer saves massive amounts of time and money thereby benefiting society.
The problem with this approach is how the price fixing that can be involved blocks the signal needed to tell the market to modify supply. When supply is meant to be fixed, this isn't an issue.
In this particular case, the Japanese law wasn't clearly explained or referenced. My best guess for the reference is the law Japan passed before the Olympics to ban the resale of many tickets at more than their list price. This isn't price fixing so much as an anti-speculation measure. This does also have the effect of making a lottery needed for many tickets as the secondary market can't balance supply and demand.
Every system has its tradeoffs.
In the span of 1 comment I'm now sold on lottery rationing as my preferred option here.
I think artists should reserve a small fraction of their seats for "real" fans that are willing to do something like this. Make the tickets obtained this way non-transferable to prevent scalping.
Heck, a "solution" to scalping would be to implement the above, and sell the rest of tickets via an auction, so the artist captures the revenue and doesn't leave room for the scalpers to make money.
The second sentence is ridiculous. The Obama administration was pro-monopolist basically across the board for eight straight years. The record is pretty easy to understand.
In the past year, I've tried this a few times and there is simply nobody selling tickets near the venues at all.
IE/Netscape bad or this apparently.
The Justice Department is preparing to sue Live Nation
The specific claims the department would allege couldn’t be learned.
The whole ticketing space is run by narcissistic assholes who should be in jail.
For artists who are maxing out their # of shows and selling out you're right though.
What would be nice would be having independent venues that aren't all selling the same canned water and ticket prices showing the fees.
(Seriously though, we have so many olig/monopolies I’ve lost count. Sad.)
one of my favourite songs
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/clydelawrence/falsealarms.ht...
- ticket sale - ticket secondary markets - they own most of the venues - they run the security (showsec) - they run the tour buses and logistics
And so on. So when they raise ticket prices and claim costs are going up, it is their own costs.
They're criminals. No more. No less.
the biggest problem in the industry is not necessarily ticketmaster; it's ticketmaster combined with the gigantic, largely-hidden world of ticket brokers who have an entire ecosystem of tools and tactics (as well as relationships with promoters) that allow them to buy tickets to high demand events with greater rates of success than real customers and then jack up the prices astronomically with literally no oversight. breaking up ticketmaster will do little to stop the insanity of the ever-increasing prices of tickets, nor will it make it any easier to get tickets to an event you want to go to. it will just change the balance of who is likely to screw you.
all the secondary marketplaces basically sell the same inventory and mask that fact by pretending they don't. tons of the inventory that exists on them is just arbitrage (or zone) inventory designed to trap you into paying way more than face value for a seat you can't even choose. there's an entire cottage industry (enabled by a little-known player called ticketnetwork) of websites that walk a fine line of pretending to be the official box offices for venues trying to confuse and trap consumers into paying over face value for tickets. the pricing models on the secondary markets (and this includes ticketmaster) are basically designed to obfuscate the fact that they're all selling the same inventory and either boost the upfront cost and reduce fees or show you a cut-rate price for the ticket and then make it up with fees.
i totally agree that it is a Net Good that ticketmaster does not control the venue, the promoter, and the primary sale of the ticket. making it easier for venues to shop around for ticket providers is a Good Thing. but without broader market regulation, the fundamental problem won't get any better.
edit: just to explain this a little further, the fact that the secondary marketplaces aren't the sellers is really the thing that makes everything so complex. the people who control the prices of the tickets on the secondary marketplace aren't the big players (stubhub, seatgeek, etc.) but the brokers who then broadcast their inventory at prices _they_ set to all the marketplaces simultaneously. there's not really an opportunity for competition in this space - brokers actively collude (there's a big paid forum called shows on sale where they all talk about upcoming ticket onsales and trade presale codes and intel for getting tickets.) because of this, "enabling more competition" won't change prices past the time that the primaries sell through their inventory, and the brokers will always have an edge when it comes to gobbling that up.
First, you have the venue. The venue has an owner. This may be the owner of the sports team who plays there, a company that's entirely unrelated to the venue, a city or other government entity, or whoever else. *
Then you have the show you are buying a ticket for. This show may be a sports team, or it may be a concert or other live act. If a sports team it's probably got the same owner as the venue, but if a concert or other live act you have...
Promoters. Promoters rent the venue, pay for the show (i.e. they pay the band their fee to come play), sell the tickets, staff all the parts the venue doesn't, and pocket the difference. The promoter takes a risk, in that if they pay Major Act $1m and spend $500k on marketing/the venue/staffing and nobody shows up, they lose $1.5m. The band and venue still get paid.
The ticket platform. This platform sells the tickets for the event and adds their service fee. That service fee is generally used in part to pay the venue for the exclusive rights to sell tickets at the venue to the venue owner. That is both obviously valuable (fans can either pay your fee whatever it is or not go) and an obvious monopoly (if there were two ticket platforms selling for the same event the same seat would likely get sold twice sometimes).
Where this gets dicey: Live Nation (which owns Ticket Master) is both the biggest promoter and a ticket selling platform. Both by far. In fact they pay for exclusive rights to more than 80% of large venues. Most states only have a few venues that can do major acts (20,000+ seats), and a major act has essentially no alternative but to either play Live Nation venues, or play smaller evenues where independent promoters will pay them smaller fees.
Artists hate this system because it gouges their fans and arguably reduces their rates (there isn't a thriving market of promotors because most of them can't even use most big venues) but since Pearl Jam lost trying to break it up 30 years ago (when they were separate entities and TicketMaster had just as big a monopoly as now) they've not bothered to sue. Fans hate this system because they get gouged coming and going. It works well for Live Nation and the venues, obviously, though the venues still would be fine as they have very little competition. In my area there are two viable venues in the summer for a 25,000 person concert and one in the winter, and we're bigger than most.
Live Nation can use the vertical integration (they get both the promoter's share of the ticket revenue and the ticketing fee) to buy up most venues. And by buy up I mean either pay for exclusive contracts too, or just purchase outright.
It's been pretty clearly in violation of anti-trust laws for decades. TicketMaster before the merger and the combined entity now. I don't know how they've gotten away with it for so long, and they should undo the merger they never should have allowed to begin with.
*Unrelated but interesting: the venue also sells the rights to services inside the venue, like merchandise and, most lucratively, food and beverage. Third parties buy the rights to sell all of the food and drinks for very large sums. So a venue owner is responsible for relatively little of the work that goes on inside the venue. Someone else sets up the shows, pays for everything, sells the tickets, sells the food and drinks, etc.
you want to solve the problem of airline tickets, let people resell their tickets to other travellers.
In the airline model, your ticket is tied to your identity. If you don't want to use it, you get a refund instead of selling it.
You can also choose a ticketing agent instead of being forced to use just a single outlet.
In the concert model, you (or a complex entity) buys as many tickets as you can get your hands on from the only seller, and if you don't plan on using the tickets sell them for multiples of what you paid via a shady network of reselling.
Hotels operate in a similar fashion as well.
There's like 50+ lines at an event, if TSA had 50+ lines then the airport would be so much faster.
Considering it's an antitrust suit, the answer should be self-evident.
Because the venues are locked into exclusive contracts with Ticketmaster. This is why them being a monopoly is bad.
Many bands in the 90s attempted to work around the system and they all ultimately failed.
edit: it's a joke y'all, obviously they got great tickets with those family and Ivy League connections
If the DOJ breaks up live nation the only group who gets screwed is the consumer. The sort of artist who is big enough to use live nation also wants a pay day for going on tour. They want the door, they want to sell their merch, they want a cut of the 20$ beer you buy. There might be 1 or 2 artist left who dont want to see you gouged on the ticket but that might not even be true any more.
Liven nation goes away. The venues are going to remain as a single company, the concessions are going to cost just as much. Ticketing might be phone/app only.
Every concert will turn into an auction. Want to get in front of the line. Pay 100 bucks to join a fan club. Want to cut that line, pay a 1000' bucks for a meet and greet and decent seats. Other wise wait, and bid. And that bidding is going to be ugly...
Fans are an interesting group of people. They tend to think with their heart and not with their head.... Dont believe me, we were selling hats and shirts at concerts long before video games. If you're willing to pay 5 bucks for a virtual good then 50 for a tshrit doesn't seem bad.
Today we see Ticketmaster adding numerous fees and using anti-competitive venue and artist lock-in to avoid the industry having competition.
I have been to over 100 concerts in the last 2 years and I can't say I have noticed any additional value or ease by using my tickets through Ticketmaster (I actually use DICE a lot which at least has a simple resale process for FV and shows full cost)
Doing onsales is pretty hard, your basically making every one stand in line all be it virtual.
No one wants to deal with that. The current all in price is just going to become the "minimum bid" put down more money and possibly get better seats. When ever one has bids in, then close them and run an algorithm to distribute seats and start charging cards. The tech is cheaper, you cut out scalpers for the most part and every one makes more money.
Ticketing can get worse and it probably will.
This is true, of course, but the rest of your claims are pretty speculative. Big bands were touring long before the TicketMaster monopoly became a thing.
A competitive marketplace benefits both suppliers (ie: the bands) as well as consumers. Why wouldn't a band want to play several ticketing companies off against each other to see who can offer them the best deal? It's also not in a band's best interest to rip off their own fans: they want to keep tickets cheap enough to make sure that the stadiums get filled.
In Europe there is a much more competitive market in the ticketing/events space, where LiveNation/Ticketmaster competes against multiple big players like Eventim, AXS, See Tickets, as well as innumerable secondary and resale-market ticketing companies like Viagogo/Stubhub, DICE, Ticketswap, etc. And there's certainly no shortage of big bands on tour.
Ticketmaster is the result of consolidating all the regional ticking systems that existed back when printing and retail sales were a thing. This lawsuit is against Live Nation, that Ticketmaster is a part of... It's the evolution of what Bill Graham started. Your thinking ticket master is the problem but promoters are the ones maximizing value from ever aspect of the experience.
Bill Graham made EVERYONE money, and it all came from the fans...
>> Why wouldn't a band want to play several ticketing companies off against each other
Ticketing is a zero sum game... You dont really need paper tickets or local markets. If ticket master dies ... "oh no were auctioning tickets now the other tech is hard" is going to the excuse.
>> It's also not in a band's best interest to rip off their own fans... There are two artists who give a shit about this.
I did point that out, there are a few... but there aren't many. The only money is in touring and licensing. There are lots of artists who say this, and push low "ticket prices" and take their cut of the "high fees". The only ones who give a shit: non transferable tickets. It cuts out the secondary market (and means they, or their promoter, can sell there themselves...
>> In Europe there is a much more competitive market in the ticketing/events space... And there's certainly no shortage of big bands on tour.
It isnt that much different. AEG is 2nd after LN/TM and owns O2 they also own AXS, and Eventim, independent but now into venues in joint deal with AEG... It's a bit of an insestuous circle jerk not as "free" as it appears.
Europe as a market is still a region in America. Taylor Swift is doing as many dates in Indiana as she is in any EU city...
>> secondary and resale-market ticketing companies like Viagogo/Stubhub, DICE, Ticketswap
Here is the well known inside secret, why do shows still have "promoters" instead of marketing departments? Because lots of these secondary sales were never primary sales.
Actually allowing auctions for tickets might make it so they can make money directly and not bother ... .ahahaha I can't even write it.
In that case, that is a better future for consumers, because right now, Platinum Pricing is where we really get screwed.
Besides, in my experience, I've seen that artists generally don't actually want this (at least solely), because they want their concerts to be populated by passionate fans as opposed to just rich fucks that tend to be more boring as audience members. Don't a bunch of artists have deals where longtime active members in their fan clubs get first access to tickets so that they don't have to pay more on scalper sites?
1. I thought scalping was illegal? Maybe that has changed, or maybe there's a big loophole, but most of the big ticketing apps have essentially legalized scalping and they even have conventions for their "partners" (scalpers) where they entertain them and teach them how to buy and sell more tickets. Since the ticketing apps take massive fees on each ticket, more secondary sales benefits the ticketing company even more.
2. If scalping is still illegal, there needs to be a limit on the price hike for secondary sales. Clearly, someone who bought 50 tickets to a concert was not planning to use them all. This is a scalper. Since they could create many different accounts, it's hard to determine who is a scalper and who isn't. Either way, if you can't go to the concert and you want to resell them, then a max increase for your time to relist the tickets is fair for everyone.
3. There needs to be a limit on service fees. There's no reason why the service fee for selling an online ticket should be $50 PER TICKET. Sure, it's not always that high, but that's how high I've seen it in the past couple years. I can ship a cell phone across the country in 5 days for $5 and it is profitable for the service provider. There's no reason the efforts to furnish a digital ticket should cost more than that. It's clearly a hidden fee that is there as an additional profit center.
4. Not only do the ticket primary ticketing companies own the primary sales, they also own the secondary sales. So, for example, they can take a $30 fee PER TICKET on the primary sales and then they also get that $50 PER TICKET fee on the secondary sale of each same ticket. Then if that ticket gets sold again, they can get another $50 PER TICKET. It's absolutely insane.
5. Most major venues have exclusive deals with the major ticketing companies. So, if a large band/artist wants to play at a large venue and they don't want to charge their fans huge fees or allow scalping, they have no choice -- that venue has signed a deal and the artist has to use the venue's ticketing partner.
6. Some tickets aren't sent until just days before the event. If I bought tickets today, and they're charging me a $50 digital ticket fee, those tickets should be available to me immediately. Again, I can ship a cell phone across the country in 5 days for $5, there's no reason digital tickets should be withheld for months when a $50 fee was paid.
7. There's no transparency. Since it's so obscene, it's time for transparency. At a minimum, I should be able to see how many tickets for each event the person I'm buying the tickets from has sold in the past year.
I know there are more issues, these are just the ones off the top of my head.