One important thing to know is that the venues/artists often get a kickback of part of the Ticketmaster fees. In other words, the artists, venues, producers, and Ticketmaster are in cahoots to fleece fans for as much money as possible, and Ticketmaster is willing to play the 'bad guy' and take the blame for high prices, and they get to keep a bigger slice of the overall pie than they would in a highly competitive market for ticketing services because they provide that "service".
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.
If I understand correctly Ticketmaster is still the one creating this problem, they demand exclusivity in their contracts which often means the venue has no choice if they want to participate in a large enough market to continue operating. Similarly artists have trouble securing large venues if not participating in their scheme.
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.
To be sure, Live Nation owns and / or operates many of the venues. They also provide management services to artists. So it’s not that TicketMaster demands exclusivity from the venue, they #are# the venue.
And in court they will probably argue that this is vertical integration that creates savings they pass along to the consumer. DOJ will likely argue they are pocketing it.
If isn’t just vertical integration. It’s also abuse of monopoly power. I’m sure the DoJ won’t have any trouble showing how much market share TM/LN have.
I think the real issue is the limited supply of tickets to the most popular shows. Supply and demand dictates that the prices for these limited goods be very high, yet social norms discourage artists from charging the true market value for their tickets (fans will rebel against their favourite artist for perceived greed). So TM provides an effective reputation-laundering service to the artists and collects a hefty fee for it. If the DoJ were to win their case and succeed in breaking up the TM monopoly then I bet the extra revenue would go to some other ticket brokers, not to the artist or into consumers’ pockets.
It’s partly this but also the artists benefit in other ways from large strata of their fan base being able to attend live shows, but merch in person and mingle with each other. The venue and Ticketmaster only benefit from the ticket sales.
Scalpers are also a source of guaranteed sales, so you're diluting the risk of a concert because someone is already buying up all seats already for you and running the risk of not being able to sell them at a higher price later.
The Paramount Decrees way back in the 1940s/1950s: that's why Hollywood studios cannot produce movies and own the theaters which exhibit them. It's also similar to the (much more complex) reasons TV Service Providers (DirectTV, Spectrum, XFinity et. al) are separate from TV Networks, and why you don't see Disney trying to buy, say, DirectTV. Of course, streaming upended almost all of that.
> It’s also similar to the (much more complex) reasons TV Service Providers (DirectTV, Spectrum, XFinity et. al) are separate from TV Networks
Tell me more about how the “TV Service Provider” Xfinity (a subsidiary of Comcast) is separate from the various TV networks run by NBC Universal, LLC (a subsidiary of Comcast).
If you look at many older anti-trust cases from before 1970s, the bar for successful enforcement often seems unbelievably low when comparing it to how things are today. Take a look at this, for example: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/370/294/
But then there was a drastic change in approach to anti-trust during the Reagan era:
"Bork argues that the original intent of antitrust laws as well as economic efficiency makes consumer welfare and the protection of competition, rather than competitors, the only goals of antitrust law. Thus, while it was appropriate to prohibit cartels that fix prices and divide markets and mergers that create monopolies, practices that are allegedly exclusionary, such as vertical agreements and price discrimination, did not harm consumers and so should not be prohibited."
"From 1977 to 2007, the Supreme Court of the United States repeatedly adopted views stated in The Antitrust Paradox in such cases as Continental Television, Inc. v. GTE Sylvania, Inc., 433 U.S. 36 (1977), Broadcast Music, Inc. v. CBS, Inc., NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, Spectrum Sports, Inc. v. McQuillan, State Oil Co. v. Khan, Verizon v. Trinko, and Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS, Inc., legalizing many practices previously prohibited."
Yes, I think they have leveraged their power to keep the situation in their favor and not let a competitor come up. I don't really see a reason we couldn't have 4-5 ticketmaster type companies that still do some of the BS stuff we all hate. The whole thing where Ticketmaster will refuse other artists if your venue doesn't use them is very monopolistic.
Yeah every large venue, even if they were 100% independent, by default has a monopoly within some distance. And their management can access granular population density, income, etc…, data too, so they would all just price roughly the same modulo venue quality and expected demographic within X travel time. Regardless of where the artist chose to perform.
I think that exclusivities are a huge source of market problems in general. They are often used in these ways to create sorts of monopolies and drive prices artificially high.
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.
I don't know where you live, but since this is about US law, this has no basis. This goes against the very 1st amendment of the US constitution.
Freedom of association is an essential part of freedom of speech because, in many cases, and as the US Supreme Court has stated, people can engage in effective speech only when they join with others.
The only way you can take this position is IF one of the parties is subject to antitrust action. Which in this case, it is. So we have to trust antitrust!
That being said, I think that is certainly valid to argue for antitrust action to be automatic - so enforcement is not wholly dependent on subjective criteria.
Your comment seems to contradict itself. Freedom of association is constitutionally protected... but it's ok to strip it away if someone is subject to anti-trust action?
I'm not the person you're replying to, but I do live in the US, and unenforceable/illegal contract provisions are pretty common. What is fundamentally different between banning non-compete agreements, and banning exclusivity clauses?
Also I feel like you kinda have it backwards: an exclusivity clause restricts someone's freedom of association. While that's not automatically illegal (since 1A only applies to the government), exclusivity agreements like the ones we're talking about go against the spirit of the idea of freedom of association.
So yes, I'm totally fine with banning exclusivity clauses in contracts (maybe not in all cases; I'm sure there are times when they might be appropriate), and I don't think there's really any conflict with 1A. IANAL, of course.
>>> but it's ok to strip it away if someone is subject to anti-trust action?
The 1st amendment is not absolute if there's competing laws against it. Which i believe is your point, or at least helps your argument as you will see below.
>>> unenforceable/illegal contract provisions are pretty common.
Agreed, for the same reason that it is illegal to sell your body parts. This is because the illegal provisions (freely entered between consenting adults) would be in direct conflict with another established law, and the constitutionality of said law would have been brought up in front of (higher) courts to debate whether X type of association does not run afoul of other rights.
>>> What is fundamentally different between banning non-compete agreements, and banning exclusivity clauses?
There's nothing fundamentally different except the former is now law, under the 13th amendment [1]. The latter has yet to do so. So you could be correct. The 13th amendment is a better pillar vs going strictly against the 1st amendment for (reasons).
> Freedom of association is an essential part of freedom of speech because, in many cases, and as the US Supreme Court has stated, people can engage in effective speech only when they join with others.
Freedom of association like... an exclusivity clause?
Taylor swift is big enough that she could build a venue in each location if she wanted, so that not an issue. If Taylor and a few other large artists gave the middle finger to ticketmaster and basically created their own ticket system, i promise you that they would have enough pull to basically solve this. However, like you said, thats not in their or their labels interest.
I think Pearl Jam did something very similar to that IIRC with regards to ticketing and re-selling.
It was a hit with their fans, but the problem is that only so many acts have the ability to do so (and as you say - it's actually not in their best fiscal interest, so you're going to self-select even further).
Ticketmaster willingly plays the bad guy role, and makes a fuck ton of money in the process.
That said, the vertical integration it has with Live Nation should be considered a monopoly, and trust-busted as such.
Just being devil's advocate since I also don't necessarily agree that TSwift could build a venue in every market, but there are plenty of large-scale events that use open fields and tents and aren't going to cost billions to setup.
Of course, then it also falls to her and her team to handle permits, hiring employees for the concert (and this would be a one time thing for those employees?), training, arranging materials, foods, and anything else, figure out parking and transportation, manage any necessary insurance, and whatever else is needed.
A venue is more than having a place, it's having everything necessary to handle an immense volume of people gathering, acting, and dispersing from a single location in a safe and orderly fashion.
Cirque du Soleil does this. They always setup their own venue on an open ground, but I think that's more for consistency of their layout and apparatus.
> stadiums are multibillion dollar affairs that take years and lots of public financing
That's a 70,000-seat stadium [1][2]. Arenas (5 to 20k) can be built for a few hundred million [3].
Unfortunately, that would mean either nosebleed ticket prices or rationing tickets to fans. The former would earn the fans' ire. The latter reduce the artist's revenue.
Just a FYI, "nosebleed" means the cheapest tickets - ie. the highest up/furthest away from the stage. It's a mountain climbing term related to suffering literal nosebleeds at high altitude.
Ticketmaster: oh the tragedy, our shareholders..they might not get as much profit! housing! think of the homeless! if you build this arena, it will sit dormant 95% of the year, this space could be used to house homeless, so VOTE NO! on question 45 to protect $CITY's homeless!
> "Taylor swift is big enough that she could build a venue in each location if she wanted, so that not an issue."
ABBA actually built their own venue for their ongoing "ABBA Voyage" shows in London[1]. That's a residency, though. I'm not sure about the viability of doing it for a world tour!
They obviously don't need to be multi-billion dollar stadiums. They can be temporary structures or outdoor areas. 120k people watched Elton John on the main stage at Glastonbury last year, twice as many as attended most of the dates for the Eras tour. While not everywhere will have a space that's suitable for a 40-60k outdoor stage, a good number will.
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.)
That's still not a reason for the government to not bust up their rackets. It's about time someone stepped up and did something. I was hoping would be state based like Texas or California, but I'll take action from the feds I guess.
Perhaps not, but your comment was a bit ambiguous as written. Telling an artist "tough luck" if they can't book a larger venue without TM/LN feels like saying there isn't really a problem to be solved here.
> Companies end up bankrupt with your line of thinking
The point is artists want to have their cake and eat it too. Any artist performing at a stadium could make a solid profit performing at non-TM 5 to 20k-seat arena while charging a similar (or lower) price. They don't because it's more lucrative to perform at a 70,000-seat stadium.
LiveNation is a monopolist. But they also give many market participants cover to charge more without offending their fans.
It would probably need to be a different show. Playing to a large stadium means you can afford more trucks and a bigger spectacle. If you're playing for 5,000 people, you've got to tone it down, or you won't make a profit.
who determines what is "a solid profit"? If an artist can sell 70,000 tickets, why should they limit themselves to 20,000? Do you work for 2/7 of your potential salary? And what about the 50,000 fans shut out of the show?
> Then perform smaller venues and ration tickets to your most-devoted fans. Unfortunately, if you do that, it's tough to become a billionaire.
If you do that, it's tough to make any money at all. If you're, say, Dave Matthews Band and you have 50,000 people who want to come to each show, and you start saying you'll only play to 1,000 people at a time, the economics start going sideways. The size of the band has to shrink and/or the cost per ticket has to go way up. The secondhand/scalper market sends tickets sky high.
Ticketmaster/LiveNation allows big acts to fill big venues, which (despite how it may feel sometimes) actually makes the show available to more people at a lower price.
> If you're, say, Dave Matthews Band and you have 50,000 people who want to come to each show, and you start saying you'll only play to 1,000 people at a time, the economics start going sideways
There are plenty of 5 to 20k-seat venues that would be fine.
I don't know about your city, but Live Nation has been eating those up around here. I go to these kinds of venues exclusively, and over the last decade have gone from zero shows sold through Ticketmaster to maybe 50/50. At least the bar shows are safe, but those economics are obviously not fine.
> 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.
This is a pretty good write up. It's off the mark on one point.
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...
> 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.
That's fine, though, and arguably better. Right now the consensus among concert-goers seems to be, "man, this is all expensive, but looks like I'm getting screwed by [TicketMaster | the venue]; I bet $ARTIST thinks this sucks too". For artists who want to charge an arm and a leg to see them perform live, pricing a lot of people out, that ire should be directed at the artists, where it truly belongs.
And maybe that drives some fans away, and that's what artists need to see happen. But I don't believe that all artists who play ball with LN/TM are greedy like that. Certainly some are, and maybe even most are. But those who are not... well, they should be able to play in huge venues across the country and charge less for admission if they want to.
Chris Brown is 1000 bucks too... (you can find that link with ease, and the funny blow back)
I know you're looking at that and thinking "these must not be that popular".
The concert industry has been harpooning whales since the 90's and the internet only made it more lucrative.
>> But I don't believe that all artists who play ball with LN/TM are greedy like that.
Touring, merch, licensing... These are the ways artists make money. Music is basically free. Price is a function of popularity, no one is going to leave money on the table, ever.
>> charge an arm and a leg to see them perform live, pricing a lot of people out ... be able to play in huge venues across the country and charge less for admission if they want to
Sometimes the prices are so dam high that you only even care about half the venue and then you paper over the rest... It's kind of common for a large venue to just get asses in seats and sell beer and tshrits if they can.
An artist might want to opt out of this, though. They might think, and reasonably so, that the optics of having affordable tickets - even if they make less overall - is better for their brand identity and long—term benefit.
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.
Affordable tickets requires a way to combat scalping, which in turn butts up against freedom to resell/transfer tickets after purchase. It's a hard game to win whenever scarcity and economics are involved.
And this is another area they're part of the problem. Not only do they have a resale platform, they've also been caught placing tickets directly on the resale market.
Current ticketmaster tickets are electronic and often can be resold only on their system (depending on what the artist/venue has chosen as a restriction). Of course their system could limit the resale prices of the ticket, to the original price or a set percentage above it. They already take a bite of each resale I believe.
They have already built the electronic ticketing and transfer system that would allow them to prevent resale of tickets at a profit, the system is done. They just choose not to use it that way (and I'd guess artists/labels/venus are in on this too -- what the ticketmaster system does make possible is for them all to take a bite of the scalped ticket resale price!)
Not only does their system make it possible, they teach their "partners" (scalpers) how to buy and sell more tickets, and the fees are usually even higher on those secondary sales, so this is very lucrative for tickermaster (and the scalpers).
afaik, scalpers will often be selling tickets that have been bought speculatively in large blocks during pre-sale or when sale starts. this is a whole very complex side industry in itself, and being able to get those large chunks of cash up-front/early is beneficial for the artists/promoters/venues for lots of reasons. obv. this doesn't really apply to a super popular artist who is going to sell out on the first day, but there are very few artists/performers who do that.
so. as mentioned above. it's a hard problem to solve. if you think about it purely as a market/exchange then it's not dissimilar to how market-makers, arbitrageurs and HFT systems keep the market "efficient".
yeah, as i understand it - i did a lot of research on this for a service i was building way back - these third parties (like scalpers) are useful because they actually find the "true" price of the tickets and, through the resale services, a good chunk of that extra money makes it back to the ticketing companies/promoters/artists. i wouldn't be at all surprised if a lot of these scalping operations are actually being run (secretly) by the ticketing companies and promoters themselves, or at least with their tacit approval and some revenue sharing.
so, it's a hard one to solve because it actually ends up generating more revenue for the promoters/venues and (sometimes) the artists. but the audience, who have the least power in the relationship, get screwed. well, my feeling is we/they get screwed, but many others would say this is "just capitalism".
Combatting scalping is the easiest thing ever. Just put the name of the attendee on each ticket and if you want to be nice you can have a buyback period until a certain date before the show, where the venue purchases back your ticket if you can't go.
The work of checking IDs is mostly done in US venues already, for 21+ drinking wristbands. It would have to be done differently, for sure, but a good portion of that labor is already being incurred.
More likely, the venues don't have much economic incentive, if any, to reduce ticket reselling and scalping.
nope, they would check like 20% to 30% of them. i’ve done work for a few non-profit performance organizations and this seems to be fairly effective in putting a large dent in reseller markets for non-transferable tickets.
resellers really don’t enjoy cc charge backs to pile up on their accounts.
Yes, absolutely. Adding an ID check to a ticket check and often a bag check and sometimes metal-detector wand check seems pretty minimal to me. Or have people scan their IDs themselves when they scan their tickets; pretty much every driver's license and state ID in the US has a barcode thing on the back. Of course have enough staff at the gates to deal with the exceptions or when things don't work right.
Regardless, this already happens: I went to a concert at Chase Center last year, and they were checking everyone's IDs, not even just a random sampling of them. When I went to EDC in Vegas last year, they were checking IDs at the shuttle stops on the strip. I believe they were only doing that for age verification, but if the ID is already out, that can easily turn into identity verification.
Why not? They check hand bags anyway. Even if you don't check everybody it is a huge deterrent to scalpers if the buyer can not be sure that they will be allowed in. Imagine paying for expensive tickets, travelling a long distance, paying for a hotel room etc. And then you're not getting in to see the show.
Radiohead does this, banning scalping and limiting prices/supply. It seems to work out pretty well with the fan base. May be due to the band having obsessive and largely left-wing fans
They have tried a bunch of methods like demand based pricing, ID verification, electronic tickets, and lotteries. I suspect these things only work a little and each has its own problem side-effects.
Bands with the clout and fans lined up down the block the day before ticket sales open (e.g. Radiohead, The Cure, Pearl Jam) can do these things, and I'm glad they do. For the vast majority of acts– even well-known ones– it's absolutely not an option.
I think pretty much any act popular enough to headline at a large LiveNation venue can do this. Not even all that is necessary: just ID verification. Require each ticket to be associated with a real person's name at the time of purchase (and the ticketing platform should make it easier for people to find tickets next to or at least near their friends when they have to buy in separate orders).
Tickets aren't transferable. Ticket purchasing platform has a marketplace where people can resell tickets to others if they can't attend, and sale price is capped at whatever they paid in the first place. (Or the ticket issuers can partner with something that already exists, like StubHub, and contractually require the price caps.)
Each attendee must present their ID to enter the event. Names must match, no exceptions. I don't love the idea that you can't anonymously attend a concert (by walking up to the ticket counter and paying in cash, assuming any large venues even have box offices anymore), but I think the benefits of this scheme for the majority of purchasers far outweigh that negative.
This isn't hard. It's almost as if someone in the chain likes scalpers...
Indeed, the problem would not be difficult for LiveNation to solve.
Those acts are still the minority of things they book. Within maybe 30 miles of where I live, there are probably 15 big venues that house huge acts like that, but hundreds of smaller clubs, event spaces, halls, theaters, etc that use LiveNation. I used to work at a bouncer at a little rock club with like a 250 person capacity and they used them for ticketing.
Most venues in NYC seem to use an app called dice for ticket distribution. You can only resell on the app and only at or below the original price. Not foolproof, but seems to work pretty well in nyc, but in a less populated area might be hard if people cant sell the tickets and start complaining.
You are correct, the ticket prices will be agreed between the promoter/venue (LN) and artist/manager via the booking agents.
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.
Fire insurance in California is moving towards control by a government-mandated cartel. All the insurance companies have to take partial ownership of the California FAIR plan company, and they share in its profits.
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.
You are right, but in in his "cartel", everyone was working for him. Kind of a monarchy. I feel these cartels are more of an actual oligarchy where each player has a separate role that gives it power instead of just reporting up to Pablo.
Taking the insurance example you have the "suppliers" (doctors, drug companies and device companies), the "venue" (hospital) and the "extractor" (insurer).
Similarly you have the "suppliers" (musicians), the "venue" (the venue I guess) and the "extractor" (Live Nation and Ticketmaster). No obvious mapping to the record labels, recording studios or (biggest of all) streamers but hopefully some similarities are present.
I feel like Escobar, the Sinaloa Cartel, etc, are much more top-down.
>In other words, the artists, venues, producers, and Ticketmaster are in cahoots to fleece fans for as much money as possible
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.
Yes, but also, many of those venues ARE Ticketmaster. From the Ascend Ampitheatre in Nashville to the Gorge in Washington, Live Nation owns like 150 major and minor concert venues. They're often kicking back to themselves.
Yes, it seems like in 1985 Ticketmaster and the couple of big competitors they gobbled up (I recall there was at least one other called Bass) could justify their existence decently. The operated brick and mortar locations where you could buy tickets, as well as a call center where you could call in to buy tickets. Today though, arguably without their many tentacles like Live Nation that guarantee them a cut of everything, they have no moat at all. Oh gee, if only we could figure out how to charge credit cards, show a seat map for you to pick your seat, and print barcodes on paper / email a barcode to attendees. So yes, I would expect that relative to verticals where things require actual ingenuity or skill to do a good job, it would be easy for people who operate venues to either just roll their own ticketing systems, or contract with dozens of vendors who would compete on their value. Of course, venue owners who are not themselves part of Live Naton itself could do this today, but the gross agreements where ticketmaster inflates fees and splits them with everybody in order to gain an exclusivity contract makes this uncommon. The whole thing is so corrupt and greedy it's sickening.
"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?
Well something is going on. I used to go to concerts all the time when I was younger and they were far far cheaper than what they cost today even when accounting for inflation.
>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.
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.
They aren’t just fleecing fans they’re also ripping off other participants in the market especially competitors. Matt Stoller has written a lot of detail about this.
It might have changed in the last 10 years, and it might be different in the USA, but in 2010 when I put on a large theatre production and had to use Ticketmaster, there was no way a ‘kickback’ was part of the equation.
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.
Concerts aren't a necessity. As much as Ticketmaster/LiveNation "fleece" fans, secondhand sellers a/k/a scalpers do it even more. The demand is there, if the prices were too high the tickets would not sell.
If you don't like what a concert ticket price costs, don't go.
Oh yeah. I remember Trent Reznor writing an angry social media post about this probably ten years ago, more or less explaining it all. Ticketmaster only sells a small portion of a show's tickets through their official website. Most go straight to "aftermarket" outlets that Ticketmaster indirectly controls, and artists know about this and take their share of the markup.
When this merger was first announced over a decade ago, it became like mandatory teaching in Competition Law classes for Law students in the UK.
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.
Finally. Between the market dominance via Live Nation and Ticketmaster merge. The venue exclusivity contracts they insist upon. They are a grotesque monopoly.
If the Live Nation one could be undone, and we could ban TM from operating venues and LN from selling tickets, and ban TM from having exclusive deals or sharing any of their "fees" with anyone else in any way, it'd be a start.
It will allow room for ticketing companies to actually exist though. Right now it's basically just livenation and a long tail of smaller companies, many of which got swallowed up by eg; eventbrite.
If they get split up, I predict we'll see everyone from AXS to Seatgeek to some Stanford blockchain bros with VC funding jumping into the market immediately.
I'm glad to see this. I run jumpcomedy.com which provides ticketing/event management services for comedy shows (or pretty much anything but focused on comedy) and this industry is dominated by a few big players that charge exorbitant service fees which customers have no choice to pay because these are exclusive deals.
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.
What’s interesting here: 14 years ago, the US Justice Department green lit the merger under the assumption live nation and Ticketmaster would place nice
> On January 25, 2010, the U.S. Justice Department approved the merger pending certain conditions.
move as much money onto their books and increase ticket prices and margins
If we assume their actions don't reduce the supply of shows+seats, the impact might fall only on artists and venues. i.e. it's possible that prices paid by fans would be same with or without these schemes.
Consumers care about the final ticket price. So if TM charges less fees the artist can just charge more face value until they reach the same equilibrium. Anyone that thinks consumers will be paying less is deluded.
You're missing the point. Live nation's control over the infrastructure of live music means they increase the costs of tours. Increased security, transport, and venue costs increase ticket prices.
All of these price increases have margin, which goes to Live Nation in the end.
TM will then say "ticket prices are increasing due to increase costs!" and skirt scrutiny of the fact that they're just diverting higher monetary amounts to companies they own and control.
It's a cartel of vertical integration.
They also squeeze artist's revenue by doing the same. They can only do this because they control so much of the market. Control that is anti-competitive and prevents the free-market pricing you describe.
The picture is bleak. The last 3 gigs I have been to, Live Nation owned:
Ticket supply and distribution (Ticket Master), the venue, the security (ShowSec), the tour buses and logistics, the catering at the venue, the promoter, ...
They control all the costs and competition in the market. If Showsec do the security for all their venues, nobody can compete on cost. Same with everything else.
Let's go the other way! Any of these corporate entities that control am entire vertical were produced by the centralizing logic of the US economy and legal landscape. Boeing is but the USG's plane manufacturing division, masquerading as a public company. Live Nation is the defacto ticketing provider. As government (created, controlled) entities, it's entirely reasonable to me to call this a tax.
Boeing is not the only airplane manufacturer in US. If you look how it operates, it runs the government’s civil aviation, not the other way around. FAA has basically trusted Boeing to self-certify everything. It looks like without government interventions the only outcome is total monopolization.
It’s really funny that anti-governmental slogans of the ideological fights of the Cold War during which US Government was way more powerful than it was not got into the brains of so many people. As someone who grew up in USSR that’s really funny to observe.
It's a cheap example, banks might have been better what with the obviously costly AML/KYC and bookkeeping requirements (not that these are bad, merely that they tend to centralize and concentrate actors so the fixed costs can be amortized more efficiently over a greater number of clients).
Airframe certification is so costly that nobody's making new ones would be the counterargument re Boeing, but like I said they're a cheap example.
More broadly, "regulatory capture" is another driver of the centralizing black hole at the heart of the USG.
> They’re just charging exorbitant fees to a customer base with no alternatives.
The term for that is “monopoly rent”, it is a subtype of economic rents (which are distinct from, but overlap, “rents” of goods or services for a finite time as distinct from sales.)
Actions taken in pursuit of economic rents are called “rent-seeking”.
Rent-seeking is profiting from position without adding value.
Rent-seeking is not merely pricing your product as high as the market will bear.
Ticketmaster adds value. They just charge exorbitant fees.
...
Edit: But OK, you can argue that their full vertical integration (ticketing-venue-artist management) is maximizing their position for the furtherance of increasing their fees, and that would be rent-seeking. I don't see it that way, but I won't argue against interpreting them as a coercive monopolist, which is close enough.
How's that working out for the realtor's association these days with recent court decisions? I think those show that it's a bad idea as well. A nominal fee is one thing, but ticketmaster has been milking it for decades and continuously getting worse and worse about it.
Probably pretty well, IIUC they're "just" dropping from 6% to 4% for in many cases just opening a door. Hell, Ticketmaster is probably happy that Realtors can still maintain their listing monopoly.
I'm not going to claim Ticketmaster is charging a "honest" amount but I will claim it should be called a "fee" and not a "tax".
That's an interesting distinction. You shouldn't be able to call it a "fee" if the cost that it purports to cover does not increase with the cost of a ticket.
Why not? Is there a definition of “fee” that dictates this?
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.
Tips kind of makes sense though. Cost is generally related to number of dishes/amount of work/level of service expected. It's hard to imagine how Ticketmaster does anything more for more expensive tickets. I mean, credit card fees would be a sliver of it, and I guess fraud costs could be proportional?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: kill the secondary market. Live nation should be broken up but a big driver of cost is the scalpers/hedgers who buy out everything and put it on StubHub.
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.
> a big driver of cost is the scalpers/hedgers who buy out everything and put it on StubHub
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.
> Empirically, markets with scalpers have lower ticket prices [2]
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?
> Do they analyse the prices actually paid by the average attendee, which includes prices paid to scalpers?
Unclear--the source describes the price variable as the "weighted average of seats normally available to the public" [1]. (It's also from 1992.)
> if scalpers don't cause attenders to pay more overall, then why do they exist?
Same reason underwriters do: they reduce risk for the seller and increase convenience for the buyer. You can absolutely have a situation where a minority of buyers pay more, thereby allowing the remaining 90% to pay less.
The scalper is trading volatility (they may or may not sell the ticket for a higher price) for the opportunity of a return. The venue is getting the opposite side of the deal. Guaranteed income now.
> if, on average, scalpers didn't get their payout, then they wouldn't take the risk
The point is they can get their pay-out while the venue/artist and consumers win. Scalper gets paid. Venue and artist get stability. Consumer who buys from the scalper gets availability. And the other 90% of consumers get cheaper prices.
Yeah, I used to get great tickets and good prices from scalpers for football and basketball games. Scalpers only work when the demand is so far above the supply. See Taylor Swift. The way to kill scalpers is to do more shows, but she doesn't want to play to a 1/2 full stadium. She'll never do enough shows to completely satisfy demand which will keep prices high.
When was the last time the Justice Department actually broke up a monopoly?
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?
Yes this is basically correct. The lawsuits can also drag out for years. They can be avoided by late changes - for example Microsoft just removed Teams from Office bundles, and will get away with having caused damage to users and competitors for years. Congress has avoided the responsibility of passing new harsher antitrust legislation that simply skips the lawsuits and goes straight to fines.
yeah, these geniuses are really doing a good job there. last time they "blocked" a grocery merger, the divested stores were sold to basically a mom and pop operation (haggen) who had no idea how to run a large chain and immediately went bankrupt, and most of the stores either stayed empty or were later re-bought by the big bad merged company they were supposedl reining in! Wow, big win for consumers who now have not only fewer chains to shop at, but literally fewer stores too! The same will happen again. Consumers will be the only ones to suffer.
Sorry for the long delay, but: Defining the grocery market as just supermarkets is the foolish thing I disagree with. Walmart, Target, Amazon, even Dollar General — along with Blue Apron and their ilk - and ethnic grocers - are all competitors of the supermarket. Kroger and Albertsons, even as a single unit, can’t simply jack prices up because Walmart and Target would LOVE to take all their customers, and easily will if they aren’t price-competitive. We already have competition and the notion that we wouldn’t if 2 supermarkets merged is lunacy. Honestly, I have a choice of either of the supermarket chains in question and I primarily frequent the one closest to me. I don’t cross-shop them against each other, but there are some things I buy at Walmart because I’ve learned it’s a better deal.
And yes, when regulators are so ham-fisted as to literally destroy many neighborhoods’ only grocery store with their dumb divestiture demands, yes, that was bad for consumers!
Which is nuts. The DoJ needs to take a battle ax to Ticketmaster to set an example. They need to prove that they are still willing and able to throw down if necessary. TM is a disposable target, they don't build anything critical to the economy or national security. They could be deleted from the earth and dozens of replacements would spring up in a week.
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.
So true. I wish that we could just have corporate death penalty by referendum. If 85% of the voting public agrees your company is net bad for our society, and there is no national security reason to save it, nationalize it and liquidate it and use the proceeds to fund consumer protection regulation. Perhaps if shareholders stood to lose their entire investment by being deleted like this, they would find themselves hesitant to do outright evil things.
> Monopolies aren't just anti-consumer. They can strangle the country's ability to innovate and compete in a global marketplace.
This. As a small business owner I'm much more interested in the effects of monopoly on industries than on consumers. After all, most people have jobs, right? They feel the effects of monopoly at work, as well as at home.
My horror story of Ticketmaster; I recently bought standing-room-only tickets on short notice (<1wk) for an event near me, declining the additional fee to be able to refund my tickets. After more discussion with the others I was going with, I bought seated tickets instead through SeatGeek. Understanding I declined the ability to refund, I attempted to sell my tickets, but their system kept encountering an internal error preventing me from selling the tickets.
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.
> 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.
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.
Subjectively, I've seen a lot more conversation on the internet in the last few years about people using chargebacks, often in contexts where it's obvious to me as an outside observer that they're abusing the system by doing chargebacks compulsively without even trying to resolve things with the merchant.
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.
100% chargebacks have changed in the last 2-3 years. I had a vendor send me the wrong part and refuse a refund. Even showing that they sent the wrong part despite ordering the correct part, my chargeback was denied.
I think a lot of banks have gotten weary of chargeback scams and taking the brunt of Amazon's binning practices.
Frankly, I'd think it better if they just cut off those bad retailers from the system, which is where the failing is. Alas, monopolies in -that- sector as far as I know prevent a single bank from doing a whole lot, especially when it's a vendor that does so much volume that all the legitimate chargebacks won't risk their standing with the payment processors.
Amazon has a lot of flaws, but I've never once had an issue returning an item for a full refund. I'm sure chargebacks are up in recent years, but I'm not sure it's Amazon that's to blame.
i think this is a reference to amazon's co-mingling of inventory regardless of where it came from, which results in businesses selling legitimate items having customers that get sent counterfeit goods.
Chargebacks are only as aggressive as the bank's customers are willing to enforce by leaving / suing against the vendor's level of customer expectation of service. Outside of a vocal minority, no one is going to want a card that doesn't work on amazon.
The playing field has been rapidly shrinking, and the customer base is much more stressed and unwilling to fight.
Not to mention that's also roughly around the timeframe that binding arbitration really got pervasive.
I'm not sure why. In many cases the merchant is charged a chargeback fee regardless of whether they are in the right or not. The bank gets paid either way.
I think a lot of people have been abusing chargebacks (e.g. "I didn't like the item, so I chargedback rather than returning it") and they clamped down on it, and it affects us normal people moreso.
They most definitely have some BS in the fine print about how they're not responsible for their awful system, as CYA for things like this. Truly scum of the earth.
If I had to guess, it is probably in their fine print, and the ability to pay for a refund would be a further refutation in a chargeback case.
That the ticket could not be sold via their system for whatever reason, is not a 'simple' act, although TBH maybe they should write to the DOJ or whatever... given some of the other stuff they've been caught doing, it would not at all surprise me to see some `if (!ticket.HadRefundOption) throw` hidden in their sales system.
TBH OP (Not a lawyer, not legal advice) you could always try small claims, they might not even show up and then you can collect a default judgement
Isn't this where the hilarious "sheriff showed up at the office, graciously giving them 30 minutes to cut a check before he started to confiscate the chairs" stories come from?
> how they're not responsible for their awful system,
Yea, this is something that has to be protected by consumer rights laws. Otherwise companies will be like "It's unfortunate we have a monopoly, but fuck off and give us your money. Thank You. Your case has been closed".
So you didn’t purchase ticket insurance, you got the tickets you paid for (which they can allow you to sell, at their discretion) and you filed a chargeback… why is that Ticketmaster’s problem? Like it sucks, to be sure, and Ticketmaster is awful, but I’m not sure why that chargeback would be considered legit.
If the tickets were sold as marketable (it sounds like they were) but were not in fact marketable, that's a problem.
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.
Time and potentially some filing/service costs. You may be able to claim some of those as well (When I almost had to sue for a security deposit, in that Jurisdiction I could get some filing fees but not service costs for whatever reason...)
That said, if they don't show up, you'll get a default judgement. And if TM doesn't pay, they can have fun with it if there is an office nearby. A while back someone got a judgement against a bank, they didn't pay out. He came by with the sheriff and they started loading up chairs/etc when they hesitated to cut a check. :)
Or, whatever other 'collection' action you may have to motion for after the fact if they don't pay.
At least where I live (Texas, United States) from what I saw it's allowed to have legal counsel, although it may be uncommon. I'll have to look into the process more and see if there's anything I can pursue.
I vaguely recall in california you can opt-out of arbitration within 30 days of a contract. don't know if there are details or if that is still the case.
> Legal counsel isn't allowed in small claims courts.
That's only true in a handful of states. Most allow you to bring a lawyer.
Small claims courts will generally have simpler and friendlier procedures so that even if a lawyer is allowed you will be fine without one in most cases.
I'm as glad as anyone else to see an abusive company get some scrutiny, B U T . . .
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.
> Potentially, a big player with money to burn can undercut them
I guarantee you that Ticketmaster's pockets are much deeper. They have entrenched themselves. This romantic notion that consumers should strike against situations like this or that smaller players should find edges in are just not realistic to me because of the entrenchment, coercion and scarcity at play here.
A very popular band in the 90s tried to fight Ticketmaster. They failed. So I just don't understand this narrative in the face of all the evidence that these tactics just don't or won't work.
I’m talking about someone like a big venture capital fund or a big bank. Or someone like Saudis. That’s a lucrative field.
Ironically, any company doing this will want to take the place of monopoly, not increase competition in the long run.
I don't see it. There are far better investments than going after Ticketmaster. As soon as you enter this market you are fighting a giant that has a $1 Billion war chest not to mention very favorable venue holdings that they can immediately use as leverage to destroy you.
> a big player with money to burn can undercut them
Unclear. There are limited cities that can support a 30,000+-seat stadium. Most of them have some already. Unless there is way more demand for these venues than I realise, I'd also guess they're close to saturation, i.e. adding another venue would result in lower utilisation.
This natural monopoly in large concert venues creates a condition where winning is Pyrrhic, since it results in no profits for everyone playing.
Apologizing on behalf of exploitation is unbelievably weak.
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?
people somehow feel like the they have right to see a Taylor Swift concert for $40 but if you suggested that SuperBowl tickets should be $40 everyone would look at you like youre crazy.
Seeing a live event is not a luxury. Seeing the most popular entertainer in the world in a giant stadium is a luxury.
Sure, but the economist would say that Taylor Swift should have made every penny of the $300 ticket cost. Live Nation getting even a penny is the market failure, not the cost of the ticket itself.
But why would Swift (or other artists for that matter) want to start their own ticket processing companies? They're not, they're going to want to contract that out. And if you're going to contract out the ticket processing from the get-go, they're the ones literally collecting the money from people buying tickets in the first place.
And I really don't get your example with credit card fees. You're suggesting the credit card processor not collect the fee at the point of sale and instead send all the money straight to Swift's bank account and then expect her to turn around later and cut a check? How is that more efficient than just having them collect their fee at the point of sale? It is just shuffling money and complicating it unnecessarily.
And once again, would most artists really even want to personally get involved in handling all the mechanics of who pays who when and how? I doubt it, they'll once again probably just contract that part out as well. They have a lot of work they need to do as the performer to get ready for the show. So once again it'll still just be some middleman they hire to do all this financial plumbing.
I agree, it looks like there's a certain level of monopoly with TM/LN in this space, and it sounds like artists pretty much need to take the whole package or none of if the artist wants to play at major venues. Maybe allowing these things to split up and be a bit more competitive will reduce prices, make things better for the artists, or whatever. Maybe forcing these people to separate just creates more friction and it gets harder to put on a big show or ends up more expensive overall.
In the end, these middlemen will continue to exist in some form because they do provide value, especially at the scale of putting on a show for many tens of thousands of people.
It's what people want, so they feel better about things. It's pointless and silly, because it's all fungible.
In general the public doesn't like how the sausage is made, and if you reveal parts of the making they get angry about it - even if everyone involved basically agrees it's for the best.
(Ask the random Swift fan how much the A/V company is paid to manage the equipment and they'll probably be off by an order of magnitude or more - the most famous example of this kind of thinking is "I can make eggs at home, how come a restaurant is so expensive?")
Ok, so the government smashes LiveNation to bits. There's still going to be some contractor that gets paid to handle the ticketing and promoting and dealing with venues and what not. Its not like Taylor Swift alone is the one printing out the tickets, scanning them, managing the online marketplace for resales/transfers of digital tickets, dealing with venue contracts, managing concessions agreements, etc.
Maybe TM/LN are an abusive monopoly in their current position. Maybe they're too integrated in the whole market. Sure sounds like it. But even then Swift isn't getting the full $300 of the ticket cost while the hundreds of other people involved in getting the show together get $0.00.
There are people in the comments here giving you a hard time.
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.
totally agree. I think one other angle to potentially consider is that, like many other things in the industry, this has an outsized impact on smaller artists. singers make most of their money through touring so fans might be more inclined to wade through live nation's scheming in order to support artists with a smaller base.
Smaller artists don't make any money. There is no long tail. There's no working artist. For every 1 person you are thinking of, in the 10k to 300k monthly listeners range, there are 19 who are taking money they inherited or earned somewhere else, and transferring it to "music," and sometimes that transfer winds up as surplus to their fans, and sometimes that transfer goes to Spotify and LiveNation/Ticketmaster. You could abruptly stop going to shows of smaller artists, and nothing would economically change. It's a complete fantasy. I mean, it's an attractive narrative, it has some arithmetic to it, but c'mon, this is the status quo for all non-guilded creatives: the money that they earn is so little, it doesn't really matter. It matters from the point of view of the aesthetics of being A Consumer Who Supports Small Artists, but it doesn't matter economically in any sense.
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.
> 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.
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.
You have a choice to not buy the ticket. This is like hating De Beers yet buying diamonds from them. Monopoly on a non-necessity: anyone can opt out.
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.
> You have a choice to not buy the ticket. This is like hating De Beers yet buying diamonds from them. Monopoly on a non-necessity: anyone can opt out.
I fundamentally disagree with your characterization of a consumer's options. Is your argument that I should have the fortitude and knowledge to opt out of coercive economic relationships? Why should I, as the consumer, bare the brunt of the responsibility for holding a corporation responsible for their misdeeds when they utilize their scale and volume to nullified my actions? Do I, as an individual, have any sway over corporate decision making when my fellow consumers do not have that fortitude or knowledge?
I do not agree that every scenario of corporate abuse should fall on the consumer to hold the corporation accountable because we are on unequal footing. This is regardless of the product being offered. These particular companies are taking advantage of shell games to keep customers in the dark on how they are being abused. I, as a simple consumer, withdrawing my dollars have no weight on the scale.
You really should read up on how Pearl Jam tried to fight Ticket Master in the 90s and lost popularity because they were effectively unable to host a show for years.
If Pearl Jam wasn't able to defeat Ticket Master, I find it laughable that you think individual consumers have any more weight in this matter.
I've indeed refused to use TM since 2020 or so, due to their auction pricing raising good ticket prices ~400%, eliminating the option of paper tickets, and making it increasingly impossible to see a show anonymously.
Know what effect it has had on them? That's right, zero. As consumers, we're not even gnats on an elephant's toenail in our ability to affect the outcome. Maybe you'd like to brainstorm another solution.
I don't buy tickets from them. I'd like to go to shows, and I do go to some smaller shows where I can buy tickets directly from the venue. But I don't support Ticketmaster. So I go to less shows than I like.
...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.
Japan has fantastic ticketing system that has reasonable ticket price that is fixed, and no scalpers can buy all the tickets because it is a lottery system.
So rationing? I wouldn't call that fantastic. Why should someone who's barely interested but willing to go for $10 more deserving of a seat than a super fan willing to save up to shell out $150 for a seat?
Lotteries aren't rationing, but are similarly useful when supply growth is constrained and are both considered more fair ways of distribution that letting the price spike limit access to only the rich.
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.
The best systems are the points based systems where fans are rewarded for being fans. E.g. people who had seen all Chiefs games for 3 seasons would be allocated a higher chance of getting a Superbowl ticket. What you don't want is people flying in for finals and paying $10k to see just the final game.
My point is that it depends what you are optimizing for.
Your system is fantastic if you want to make sure that people who have invested the most money in the past get priority over those willing to pay the most for a future game. It still works against fans who can't afford season tickets. With your system a corporate lawyer that buys season tickets to hand out as perks to clients will get priority over a "true" fan who can only afford to go to three or four games a year.
Yeah there is no perfect system. And money will always give an advantage. Compensating for that and validating that people not just bought 3 seasons worth of tickets but actually watched the games, would mean checking id:s (Which also has downsides).
I do think the loyal fan systems with their drawbacks are still much better than the purely market economic approach. In the example of Super Bowl, the people who wanted to be sure to get tickets would need to have season tickets to all teams. The only resource we are awarded fairly is time. Estimating how much time we dedicated to the team/artist is fair game.
I spent many all-nighters in freezing cold temps in Buffalo NY waiting in line on a sidewalk for the ticket office to open in the mid 80s. It was unpleasant, but fair.
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 merger was completed in 2010, so the Obama administration. However, the country was coming out of the great recession and the last thing the administration needed was bad PR for "stopping a merger that would prevent people from losing their jobs".
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.
> The Obama administration was pro-monopolist basically across the board for eight straight years.
It might be more accurate to say that rubber-stamping mergers maxed-out under the Obama DoJ.
Comcast - NBCUniversal (2011)
AT&T - T-Mobile (2011)
Express Scripts - Medco Health Solutions (2012)
Google - Motorola Mobility (2012)
Anheuser-Busch InBev - Grupo Modelo (2013)
US Airways - American Airlines (2013)
Oracle - Sun Microsystems (2010)
Comcast - Time Warner Cable (2014)
Heinz - Kraft Foods (2015)
AT&T - DirecTV (2015)
Administrations before and after were almost-but-maybe-a-tiny-bit-less eager to approve competition+job killing mergers.
What DoJs were not eager to do was push back against pressure from Elected Congresspeople who 1) held DoJ purse strings and 2) had elections that needed funding.
The policies were largely unchanged before and after. What was unique about this period was quantitative easing & lowering of interest rates to ~0. Companies were suddenly flush with cash and had nothing to do with it, because keeping it in the bank wasn't an option. So they went on a shopping spree.
Yup. We are in our current predicament because the previous 4 or 5 administrations, whether D or R, have let corporations run amok with M&A and general anticompetitive behavior, offering only token resistance. Biden has finally signaled a shift in the last year or two, but it remains to be seen how far these actions will go (and how much Congress and the courts will allow).
Really wish they'd bring back hard tickets. Over the past 20 years I've simply shown up at a concert or sporting event day-of dozens of times and managed to score good-to-great seats, often for very fair prices, with a success rate that I would estimate around 75-80%.
In the past year, I've tried this a few times and there is simply nobody selling tickets near the venues at all.
I would like to see a picture too, but it wouldn't surprise me. The highest I've actually paid is $44.58 per ticket in fees. But I've seen $50 fees and not purchased.
Actual prices for golden knights Playoff game 1 (check stubhub right now if you want a proof point): $407.09/ticket x2 because going alone isn’t as fun, and $290.91 in fees. So my numbers above are a bit low from what I actually paid.
Edit: cardinals tix were $135.91ea x2 and $100.09 in fees.
Seems harsh to blame somebody for simply paying to do something they enjoy when the alternative is just not doing it. Blame the monopoly, not the consumer.
High prices and high profit margin are not in and of themselves anti-consumer, otherwise every luxury brand would be considered anti-consumer. If people will buy the tickets at the prices marked, why should they lower them? If they push prices high enough that the demand curve starts to dip, they will rationally correct for that.
The only anti-consumer force at play is the monopoly power Live Nation is granted to dictate the price of tickets. There's very little that can be done via boycott when it comes to monopolies.
It’s not like there’s another option, which is why the DOJ probably has a case. If you want to attend certain games it’s a) be a season ticket holder or b) pony up to a monopoly.
It takes two to tango. You're conflating this with victim blaming. This is a willing party willing to continue the cycle of the problem. For those making the decisions on "is it too expensive", then by definition it is not has stadiums continue to be filled by people participating in the fleecing.
Someone with money can spend their money however they want. They can gamble it, they can snort it up their nose, they can invest it, they can do WTF they want. If what they do with the money contributes to the problem, then they are still part of the problem.
What is the actual problem here? If someone is willing to pay more for a ticket than you are, by what principle should the venue or performer be obligated to instead sell it to you at a lower price?
Throw away account or i'll probably get sued. I have worked for both Ticketmaster and Viagogo (on the record, fuck Eric Baker!). I lasted 2 days at Ticketmaster and a whole morning at Viagogo and decided I'd be better off being unemployed. Both companies in the early days were out there to scam people and make as much money as possible by strategically ignoring claims and driving costs down. One is less visibly scammy than the other now and that's the one you're all complaining about. They know what they will get away with.
The whole ticketing space is run by narcissistic assholes who should be in jail.
While I 100% support this action, I feel like people are going to be disappointed to find that if/when the dust settles and Live Nation is reined in (big if), tickets for the Taylor Swift concert or the NBA finals aren't suddenly coming down to $50. With a growing population, people with more disposable income and more interest in such events in general the fundamental economy of live events is very different than what it was 30 years ago. The sticker price is usually very close to the market value of the ticket, and often a lot less (hence all the scalping).
I think we'd still be happy enough if the ticket prices were disclosed up front, and if they weren't being inflated by everyone (artists, venues (Live Nation), and Ticketmaster) all working together to raise prices. If this gross company were smacked down hard enough, there would be meaningful competition possible. With TM owning most venues or having exclusive rights to them under contract, no serious competition is possible, so markets don't exist. Therefore no market pressures to correct excessively high prices.
Yep. I despise TM and think this needs to change, but the only thing it's going to fix (from the consumer's perspective, not the artists et al) is the abysmal and abusive customer service (that doesn't really exist), not the high prices. The prices are pretty much exactly what the market will bear, and that will be true no matter who the middleman is.
no they arent. the prices are significantly below market value which is why scalping exists. If Taylor Swift actually used market pricing then tickets would be thousands of dollars, but then people would whine that Taylor Swift is greedy, so instead they set some arbitrary "acceptable" ticket value and pawn all the blame on scalpers and Ticketmaster.
Yes that's a fair point, although Taylor Swift is somewhat of an exception/corner case. Some of the huge acts do sell cheaper than market rate for other reasons, but most of the events they sell for are not.
It's also worth noting that sometimes things change after prices have been set. For example, a baseball game in which tickets were sold but now there's a lot of attention/love suddenly and unexpectedly on the team (maybe they just pulled off a big upset or something) so "market rate" for tickets jumps much higher than what it was immediately before that when the tickets were sold. They weren't originally trying to price lower than market rate. Also the pricing they do for market rate is calculated to optimize for maximum revenue which includes some balance of selling max number of seats but only until the delta of additional sales means a net loss of revenue (i.e. you can sell every seat for $1 but that would make a lot less money).
Concivably the number of shows/tickets might increase and the price decrease, since setting the price above the market rate is one of the inefficiencies that monopolies introduce.
For artists who are maxing out their # of shows and selling out you're right though.
Except there are only 3 venues in the metro area that can accommodate such a concert and all of them have exclusive contracts with Live Nation. So what are Taylor Swift and her fans supposed to do?
True in theory, but because of exclusivity deals with venues, they can't use "any venue". Basically at the level of Taylor Swift, she would have to create her own arenas for this to work. She could well do it one day though...
Of all the people to do so, I wouldn't put it past her motivation nor her persistence to accomplish this. If there's anything she seems to hate to the point of outright spite, it's unfairness. Look at how she re-recorded her entire library basically out of spite just in order to systematically devalue what Scooter Braun managed to (pretty shadily) wrest from her control. I thoroughly admire that level of revenge.
I don't see why exclusivity deals with the venues have anything to do with the price customers pay though. That only changes how this revenue gets distributed. The price of a good is generally going to be the intersection between supply and demand. If Taylor Swift really wanted to, I'm sure she can negotiate with Ticketmaster and venues to cap tickets at $100 and take measures to prevent scalping.
She is big enough to build her mega-church like venues, or just rent a mega church. The has way to many of those anyway, so some actual use might come from them. The important thing would be for Taylor and a few others to give the middle finger to live nation / ticketmaster, but like mentioned earlier, its not in her or her labels interest.
Even if it is in her interest to not deal with Ticketmaster, her business is performing life music. She as her team aren't trying to create work for themselves to screw TM, they want to do what they do. Imagine trying to set up logistics at a venue/church which has never held a large concert before.
Have you ever been to a mega church? They basically are a large concert. Not the 80,000 people kind, but of the size that would rival a decent percentage of touring acts. Lakewood church in Houston has 45,000 attendees a week.
I think the church idea is a brilliant TM workaround, until they lock that up too.
Lakewood Church isn't a normal church building. It literally was multi-purpose sports arena (Compaq Center, hosted the Rockets, Areos, and arena football, hosted concerts for ZZ Top, Shakira, Kid Rock, Nelly, AC/DC, Metallica, Prince, Michael Jackson, and many other notable artists) until 2003. So its got more in common in its bones to a sports arena than a typical church.
Also, yes, a giant ultra megachurch like Lakewood might get 45,000 attendees a week. That's usually split between a few services each of which is like 90 minutes long. So like maybe 18k people peak. The average Taylor Swift concert has 72,000 people in the stadium for several hours.
Also, while yes a large church probably has a cafe or something similar, its usually not equipped to provide food for 70,000 people. Nor bathrooms for said 70,000 people, as most people going to the church are once again only there for like 90 minutes instead of several hours.
Average Taylor swift concerts are 80000+, your example of the biggest available facility is both atypical (it was originally a non-church facility) and it’s still smaller than small concerts.
This is before we get to the notoriously censorious and fragile beliefs of the people operating those facilities.
Mega churches do not have anything like the capacity required for folk like Taylor swift, etc
Not in capacity of people nor production facilities.
The whole reason for this suit is that essentially the same outfits doing ticketing have exclusive licenses with the majority of facilities that can support the big acts.
They may be a monopoly, but fans are willing to pay to see LiveNation concerts. Acts and venues go with it. I’ve found there so many other options out there for entertainment lately that I haven’t gone to a concert in 20 years! In a way I kind of like what Ticketmaster is doing, I wish I could get a cut.
(Seriously though, we have so many olig/monopolies I’ve lost count. Sad.)
this is all well and good but i know from personal experience that all the secondary marketplaces (stubhub, seatgeek) are pushing to do this (literally lobbying the government actively) because it helps them more easily do their secondary market selling. ticketmaster is a grotesque monopoly, but the secondary marketplaces are worried that ticketmaster will consolidate too much industry control through their vertical integration and make it harder for them to play a role in the industry as well.
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.
This needs to be seen more widely and is entirely true. I had friends who worked in ticket brokering and the depth and collusion of that market is a fascinating rabbit hole. In fact a lot of what happens is probably illegal.
just in time for an election year
I'm sure its just my imagination, but seems like the moment tickets go on sale most of the good seats are being resold through an official reseller. Its almost like live nation might be scalping their own tickets.
So, a little context as to how the live events industry works, because it is not how most would assume.
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.
Can you expand on this? It seems to me that a major difference between flight tickets and concert tickets is that when an airline overbooks they can switch you to a later flight. However, most concerts only perform once in a given city.
I think they are referring to the ability to resell your ticket.
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.
The venue is necessarily a centralizing agent, whereas airlines necessarily have to use decentralized agents (or did when GDS was invented). The decentralizing of event tickets is artificial.
There isn't a lot of obvious utility in allowing anyone in the world to buy a concert ticket (unless you want speculative resellers in your ecosystem). For people travelling to an event, that's what the will-call window is for, and it requires a matching ID. Whereas airlines cannot reasonably maintain a network capable of selling a ticket to anyone worldwide despite their being a very good set of reasons for that to happen.
This probably also explains why airlines allow independent agents, but no reselling. The original market (pre-internet) required it, but the airlines didn't really want to sacrifice their margin to speculative resellers (scalpers).
Concerts used to be sold in a centralized way (you could buy tickets to a specific show at one of a few authorized venues, in person). This worked fine before the internet, since it meant that fans stood on equal footing with speculative resellers. If I want to scalp tickets, I have to go stand in the rain with the fans, and I can't buy 50 tickets since the sellers won't sell more than a few at a time.
Contextualized with how the different industries were created, we can see why GDS made sense at one point, but doesn't really anymore, and why it would never make sense for event ticketing.
Could sell two classes of tickets, one that is garunteed and one that might be overbooked. If you show up and find out you're overbooked you get a credit for another show (maybe even at some multiplier?). Basic Supply/Demand suggests that reducing the price means more demand, ie: more people going to go see shows, but would need to see it in practice to know for sure.
No, I'm not talking about the TSA. I'm talking about how you can buy airline tickets through a number of different entities because they've cooperated on a system.
So in my opinion, the fans suing ticketmaster should sue Taylor Swift for using ticket master. Then she can sue her music company for doing business with ticket master. its not like selling tickets is not a solved problem, so why are we even bothering with this BS and just not using another service? O the music labels like them because they get sweet deals? Well again, sue Taylor Swift and the label, not the shitty ticket sales company.
I think it would be easier to get some Taylor Swift fans to chew their own arms off than it would to get them to sue her for anything. I've never known a group of people that better fit the word "fanatic" :-)
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.
This exists today... you can buy several tiers of tickets on Ticketmaster and the ability to even access those tickets depends on other status.
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.
>> So what makes it better? Should we be thankful for the current status quo?
Taylor Swift cleared a billion dollars at the box office (that's tickets) she's gonna walk away with half that.
There are countries with GDP's that small. Taylor Swift made so much money selling tickets that she could be a micro nation. Thats not t-shirts, that's not concessions, that's not kickbacks. Thats half a bill on just tickets.
Look at an artist like Dave Mathews. Who went out of his way to have his own ticketing and merch platform (Music Today)... Now it is a "presale" for Citi Customers...
When money fell out of the sales of physical media concerts, merch and licensing were the only avenues left to make money. When artists get big they cash out, the fans pay for that...
I dont think the status quo is going anywhere, sadly. Like loot boxes and pay to win games the genie is out of the bottle, the only thing you can control as a consumer is your own spending. That might mean going to local shows or staying away from major artists...
Excellent, you agree that it is bad now. The only thing that will make it better is non-exclusivity with venues and no monopoly power in ticketing systems. Then people can iterate and appeal to customers for their purchasing power.
As I said before, no problem paying more for tickets if artists feel this is how they make money, but none of this scammy fee-based structure where I am charged 20% of my ticket value as a convenience fee due to getting it virtually (lol?)
> "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."
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.
>> 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.
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.
It wouldn't be hard to use some combination of auctions and lotteries to give everyone a legitimate chance at getting a ticket at a reasonable price, and extract maximum money from the people that have money to burn.
I just stopped going to big shows. I’ll see a crappy cover band for a fraction of the price and have about as much fun. I think I’ve seen everyone still alive that I care to see!
Even if I take at face value everything you put in your comment, what is the problem? You seem to be arguing "Popular artists will want to be paid what the market is willing to bear!!" And??? I'd rather the artists get paid than Ticketmaster.
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?
Even if they don't break them up, there needs to be some limits and regulations as this scene is getting obscene:
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.
Another issue: the venues, the artist, etc sometimes get a piece of the fees, the resale tickets, etc. The ticket seller should not be allowed to share revenue from anything besides the initial ticket sale.
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.
I think the real issue is the limited supply of tickets to the most popular shows. Supply and demand dictates that the prices for these limited goods be very high, yet social norms discourage artists from charging the true market value for their tickets (fans will rebel against their favourite artist for perceived greed). So TM provides an effective reputation-laundering service to the artists and collects a hefty fee for it. If the DoJ were to win their case and succeed in breaking up the TM monopoly then I bet the extra revenue would go to some other ticket brokers, not to the artist or into consumers’ pockets.
Tell me more about how the “TV Service Provider” Xfinity (a subsidiary of Comcast) is separate from the various TV networks run by NBC Universal, LLC (a subsidiary of Comcast).
But then there was a drastic change in approach to anti-trust during the Reagan era:
"Bork argues that the original intent of antitrust laws as well as economic efficiency makes consumer welfare and the protection of competition, rather than competitors, the only goals of antitrust law. Thus, while it was appropriate to prohibit cartels that fix prices and divide markets and mergers that create monopolies, practices that are allegedly exclusionary, such as vertical agreements and price discrimination, did not harm consumers and so should not be prohibited."
"From 1977 to 2007, the Supreme Court of the United States repeatedly adopted views stated in The Antitrust Paradox in such cases as Continental Television, Inc. v. GTE Sylvania, Inc., 433 U.S. 36 (1977), Broadcast Music, Inc. v. CBS, Inc., NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, Spectrum Sports, Inc. v. McQuillan, State Oil Co. v. Khan, Verizon v. Trinko, and Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS, Inc., legalizing many practices previously prohibited."
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox)
https://www.justice.gov/atr/paramount-decree-review
https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/1473571/united-states-...
https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2311543/united-states-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/lcy7zc/a...
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.
Freedom of association is an essential part of freedom of speech because, in many cases, and as the US Supreme Court has stated, people can engage in effective speech only when they join with others.
The only way you can take this position is IF one of the parties is subject to antitrust action. Which in this case, it is. So we have to trust antitrust!
That being said, I think that is certainly valid to argue for antitrust action to be automatic - so enforcement is not wholly dependent on subjective criteria.
I'd like to see what you think is viable.
I'm not the person you're replying to, but I do live in the US, and unenforceable/illegal contract provisions are pretty common. What is fundamentally different between banning non-compete agreements, and banning exclusivity clauses?
Also I feel like you kinda have it backwards: an exclusivity clause restricts someone's freedom of association. While that's not automatically illegal (since 1A only applies to the government), exclusivity agreements like the ones we're talking about go against the spirit of the idea of freedom of association.
So yes, I'm totally fine with banning exclusivity clauses in contracts (maybe not in all cases; I'm sure there are times when they might be appropriate), and I don't think there's really any conflict with 1A. IANAL, of course.
The 1st amendment is not absolute if there's competing laws against it. Which i believe is your point, or at least helps your argument as you will see below.
>>> unenforceable/illegal contract provisions are pretty common.
Agreed, for the same reason that it is illegal to sell your body parts. This is because the illegal provisions (freely entered between consenting adults) would be in direct conflict with another established law, and the constitutionality of said law would have been brought up in front of (higher) courts to debate whether X type of association does not run afoul of other rights.
>>> What is fundamentally different between banning non-compete agreements, and banning exclusivity clauses?
There's nothing fundamentally different except the former is now law, under the 13th amendment [1]. The latter has yet to do so. So you could be correct. The 13th amendment is a better pillar vs going strictly against the 1st amendment for (reasons).
[1] https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2023/02/rebecca-zietlow-13...
Freedom of association like... an exclusivity clause?
It was a hit with their fans, but the problem is that only so many acts have the ability to do so (and as you say - it's actually not in their best fiscal interest, so you're going to self-select even further).
Ticketmaster willingly plays the bad guy role, and makes a fuck ton of money in the process.
That said, the vertical integration it has with Live Nation should be considered a monopoly, and trust-busted as such.
But to build / buy thousands with a real estate value in the 100s of billions you would need something like a EFT.
A venue is more than having a place, it's having everything necessary to handle an immense volume of people gathering, acting, and dispersing from a single location in a safe and orderly fashion.
That's a 70,000-seat stadium [1][2]. Arenas (5 to 20k) can be built for a few hundred million [3].
Unfortunately, that would mean either nosebleed ticket prices or rationing tickets to fans. The former would earn the fans' ire. The latter reduce the artist's revenue.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoFi_Stadium
[2] https://uk.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/5174...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/business/concert-halls-li...
Ticketmaster: oh the tragedy, our shareholders..they might not get as much profit! housing! think of the homeless! if you build this arena, it will sit dormant 95% of the year, this space could be used to house homeless, so VOTE NO! on question 45 to protect $CITY's homeless!
ABBA actually built their own venue for their ongoing "ABBA Voyage" shows in London[1]. That's a residency, though. I'm not sure about the viability of doing it for a world tour!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABBA_Voyage
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.)
Nobody in this thread has argued against enforcement.
Companies end up bankrupt with your line of thinking. Assuming infrastructure is sufficient for each situation to be profitable is magical thinking.
The point is artists want to have their cake and eat it too. Any artist performing at a stadium could make a solid profit performing at non-TM 5 to 20k-seat arena while charging a similar (or lower) price. They don't because it's more lucrative to perform at a 70,000-seat stadium.
LiveNation is a monopolist. But they also give many market participants cover to charge more without offending their fans.
There you go, magical thinking again.
If you do that, it's tough to make any money at all. If you're, say, Dave Matthews Band and you have 50,000 people who want to come to each show, and you start saying you'll only play to 1,000 people at a time, the economics start going sideways. The size of the band has to shrink and/or the cost per ticket has to go way up. The secondhand/scalper market sends tickets sky high.
Ticketmaster/LiveNation allows big acts to fill big venues, which (despite how it may feel sometimes) actually makes the show available to more people at a lower price.
There are plenty of 5 to 20k-seat venues that would be fine.
> 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's fine, though, and arguably better. Right now the consensus among concert-goers seems to be, "man, this is all expensive, but looks like I'm getting screwed by [TicketMaster | the venue]; I bet $ARTIST thinks this sucks too". For artists who want to charge an arm and a leg to see them perform live, pricing a lot of people out, that ire should be directed at the artists, where it truly belongs.
And maybe that drives some fans away, and that's what artists need to see happen. But I don't believe that all artists who play ball with LN/TM are greedy like that. Certainly some are, and maybe even most are. But those who are not... well, they should be able to play in huge venues across the country and charge less for admission if they want to.
https://harrystylestour.us/vip/
Chris Brown is 1000 bucks too... (you can find that link with ease, and the funny blow back)
I know you're looking at that and thinking "these must not be that popular".
The concert industry has been harpooning whales since the 90's and the internet only made it more lucrative.
>> But I don't believe that all artists who play ball with LN/TM are greedy like that.
Touring, merch, licensing... These are the ways artists make money. Music is basically free. Price is a function of popularity, no one is going to leave money on the table, ever.
>> charge an arm and a leg to see them perform live, pricing a lot of people out ... be able to play in huge venues across the country and charge less for admission if they want to
This is from 89, from a mid level artist at a small venue: https://archive.is/moWdH
Sometimes the prices are so dam high that you only even care about half the venue and then you paper over the rest... It's kind of common for a large venue to just get asses in seats and sell beer and tshrits if they can.
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.
https://pitchfork.com/news/live-nation-admits-placing-concer...
They have already built the electronic ticketing and transfer system that would allow them to prevent resale of tickets at a profit, the system is done. They just choose not to use it that way (and I'd guess artists/labels/venus are in on this too -- what the ticketmaster system does make possible is for them all to take a bite of the scalped ticket resale price!)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ticketmaster-resellers-las-...
so. as mentioned above. it's a hard problem to solve. if you think about it purely as a market/exchange then it's not dissimilar to how market-makers, arbitrageurs and HFT systems keep the market "efficient".
there's a good writeup here. https://www.404media.co/why-scalpers-can-get-olivia-rodrigo-...
TicketMaster ~ bookrunner/sponsor; scalper ~ underwriter;
The general population cannot participate in IPOs, just like we cannot buy primary-market tickets to popular shows.
so, it's a hard one to solve because it actually ends up generating more revenue for the promoters/venues and (sometimes) the artists. but the audience, who have the least power in the relationship, get screwed. well, my feeling is we/they get screwed, but many others would say this is "just capitalism".
More likely, the venues don't have much economic incentive, if any, to reduce ticket reselling and scalping.
resellers really don’t enjoy cc charge backs to pile up on their accounts.
Regardless, this already happens: I went to a concert at Chase Center last year, and they were checking everyone's IDs, not even just a random sampling of them. When I went to EDC in Vegas last year, they were checking IDs at the shuttle stops on the strip. I believe they were only doing that for age verification, but if the ID is already out, that can easily turn into identity verification.
Also, in the US, your driver's license has a 2D barcode on the back which encodes your name.
The venue ticket has a QR code or similar which could also encode your name.
They already scan the venue ticket QR code. They could also scan your ID barcode, and beep differently if the names do not match.
Tickets aren't transferable. Ticket purchasing platform has a marketplace where people can resell tickets to others if they can't attend, and sale price is capped at whatever they paid in the first place. (Or the ticket issuers can partner with something that already exists, like StubHub, and contractually require the price caps.)
Each attendee must present their ID to enter the event. Names must match, no exceptions. I don't love the idea that you can't anonymously attend a concert (by walking up to the ticket counter and paying in cash, assuming any large venues even have box offices anymore), but I think the benefits of this scheme for the majority of purchasers far outweigh that negative.
This isn't hard. It's almost as if someone in the chain likes scalpers...
Those acts are still the minority of things they book. Within maybe 30 miles of where I live, there are probably 15 big venues that house huge acts like that, but hundreds of smaller clubs, event spaces, halls, theaters, etc that use LiveNation. I used to work at a bouncer at a little rock club with like a 250 person capacity and they used them for ticketing.
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...
https://www.cfpnet.com/about-fair-plan/
Taking the insurance example you have the "suppliers" (doctors, drug companies and device companies), the "venue" (hospital) and the "extractor" (insurer).
Similarly you have the "suppliers" (musicians), the "venue" (the venue I guess) and the "extractor" (Live Nation and Ticketmaster). No obvious mapping to the record labels, recording studios or (biggest of all) streamers but hopefully some similarities are present.
I feel like Escobar, the Sinaloa Cartel, etc, are much more top-down.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Nation_Entertainment
It's just using their vertical integration and monopoly to move as much money onto their books and increase ticket prices and margins.
Shady.
Or ticket prices and fees will stay the same, and artists' share of fees will go up (it's not zero today).
All of these price increases have margin, which goes to Live Nation in the end.
TM will then say "ticket prices are increasing due to increase costs!" and skirt scrutiny of the fact that they're just diverting higher monetary amounts to companies they own and control.
It's a cartel of vertical integration.
They also squeeze artist's revenue by doing the same. They can only do this because they control so much of the market. Control that is anti-competitive and prevents the free-market pricing you describe.
The picture is bleak. The last 3 gigs I have been to, Live Nation owned:
Ticket supply and distribution (Ticket Master), the venue, the security (ShowSec), the tour buses and logistics, the catering at the venue, the promoter, ...
They control all the costs and competition in the market. If Showsec do the security for all their venues, nobody can compete on cost. Same with everything else.
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.
It’s really funny that anti-governmental slogans of the ideological fights of the Cold War during which US Government was way more powerful than it was not got into the brains of so many people. As someone who grew up in USSR that’s really funny to observe.
Airframe certification is so costly that nobody's making new ones would be the counterargument re Boeing, but like I said they're a cheap example.
More broadly, "regulatory capture" is another driver of the centralizing black hole at the heart of the USG.
This is actually equally as cancerous - there is a reason realtors have one of the biggest lobbying groups in America.
They're rentseeking
They're just charging exorbitant fees to a customer base with no alternatives.
Like prison phone companies.
> They’re just charging exorbitant fees to a customer base with no alternatives.
The term for that is “monopoly rent”, it is a subtype of economic rents (which are distinct from, but overlap, “rents” of goods or services for a finite time as distinct from sales.)
Actions taken in pursuit of economic rents are called “rent-seeking”.
Rent-seeking is not merely pricing your product as high as the market will bear.
Ticketmaster adds value. They just charge exorbitant fees.
...
Edit: But OK, you can argue that their full vertical integration (ticketing-venue-artist management) is maximizing their position for the furtherance of increasing their fees, and that would be rent-seeking. I don't see it that way, but I won't argue against interpreting them as a coercive monopolist, which is close enough.
No, that's “economic rent”, of which monopoly rent is an extensively-studied subtype. (Monopoly is position.)
Rent-seeking is pursuing economic, including monopoly, rents.
I'm not going to claim Ticketmaster is charging a "honest" amount but I will claim it should be called a "fee" and not a "tax".
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.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fixed%20charge
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...
[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/27698042
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?
Unclear--the source describes the price variable as the "weighted average of seats normally available to the public" [1]. (It's also from 1992.)
> if scalpers don't cause attenders to pay more overall, then why do they exist?
Same reason underwriters do: they reduce risk for the seller and increase convenience for the buyer. You can absolutely have a situation where a minority of buyers pay more, thereby allowing the remaining 90% to pay less.
[1] https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.jstor.org/stable/2487999
The point is they can get their pay-out while the venue/artist and consumers win. Scalper gets paid. Venue and artist get stability. Consumer who buys from the scalper gets availability. And the other 90% of consumers get cheaper prices.
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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMERICA_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Innovation_and_Choice...
https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/26/investing/kroger-albertsons-m...
Historically, what do monopolies do when they capture a market is the opposite of lower prices and increase choice for the consumer.
And yes, when regulators are so ham-fisted as to literally destroy many neighborhoods’ only grocery store with their dumb divestiture demands, yes, that was bad for consumers!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
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.
This. As a small business owner I'm much more interested in the effects of monopoly on industries than on consumers. After all, most people have jobs, right? They feel the effects of monopoly at work, as well as at home.
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.
Frankly, I'd think it better if they just cut off those bad retailers from the system, which is where the failing is. Alas, monopolies in -that- sector as far as I know prevent a single bank from doing a whole lot, especially when it's a vendor that does so much volume that all the legitimate chargebacks won't risk their standing with the payment processors.
Amazon has a lot of flaws, but I've never once had an issue returning an item for a full refund. I'm sure chargebacks are up in recent years, but I'm not sure it's Amazon that's to blame.
The playing field has been rapidly shrinking, and the customer base is much more stressed and unwilling to fight.
Not to mention that's also roughly around the timeframe that binding arbitration really got pervasive.
That the ticket could not be sold via their system for whatever reason, is not a 'simple' act, although TBH maybe they should write to the DOJ or whatever... given some of the other stuff they've been caught doing, it would not at all surprise me to see some `if (!ticket.HadRefundOption) throw` hidden in their sales system.
TBH OP (Not a lawyer, not legal advice) you could always try small claims, they might not even show up and then you can collect a default judgement
Yea, this is something that has to be protected by consumer rights laws. Otherwise companies will be like "It's unfortunate we have a monopoly, but fuck off and give us your money. Thank You. Your case has been closed".
For the record I'm very pleased with USAA overall and I think quite highly of them.
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.
edit: Ha! Here is a guide on how to sue Ticketmaster: https://fairshake.com/ticketmaster/how-to-sue/
That said, if they don't show up, you'll get a default judgement. And if TM doesn't pay, they can have fun with it if there is an office nearby. A while back someone got a judgement against a bank, they didn't pay out. He came by with the sheriff and they started loading up chairs/etc when they hesitated to cut a check. :)
Or, whatever other 'collection' action you may have to motion for after the fact if they don't pay.
Did you possibly agree to binding arbitration for all disputes?
I can't believe I forgot -that- loophole facepalm
That's only true in a handful of states. Most allow you to bring a lawyer.
Small claims courts will generally have simpler and friendlier procedures so that even if a lawyer is allowed you will be fine without one in most cases.
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.
I guarantee you that Ticketmaster's pockets are much deeper. They have entrenched themselves. This romantic notion that consumers should strike against situations like this or that smaller players should find edges in are just not realistic to me because of the entrenchment, coercion and scarcity at play here.
A very popular band in the 90s tried to fight Ticketmaster. They failed. So I just don't understand this narrative in the face of all the evidence that these tactics just don't or won't work.
https://news.yahoo.com/1994-pearl-jam-took-ticketmaster-2300...
Unclear. There are limited cities that can support a 30,000+-seat stadium. Most of them have some already. Unless there is way more demand for these venues than I realise, I'd also guess they're close to saturation, i.e. adding another venue would result in lower utilisation.
This natural monopoly in large concert venues creates a condition where winning is Pyrrhic, since it results in no profits for everyone playing.
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 it is, those get funneled off earlier in the process, and people get annoyed.
And I really don't get your example with credit card fees. You're suggesting the credit card processor not collect the fee at the point of sale and instead send all the money straight to Swift's bank account and then expect her to turn around later and cut a check? How is that more efficient than just having them collect their fee at the point of sale? It is just shuffling money and complicating it unnecessarily.
And once again, would most artists really even want to personally get involved in handling all the mechanics of who pays who when and how? I doubt it, they'll once again probably just contract that part out as well. They have a lot of work they need to do as the performer to get ready for the show. So once again it'll still just be some middleman they hire to do all this financial plumbing.
I agree, it looks like there's a certain level of monopoly with TM/LN in this space, and it sounds like artists pretty much need to take the whole package or none of if the artist wants to play at major venues. Maybe allowing these things to split up and be a bit more competitive will reduce prices, make things better for the artists, or whatever. Maybe forcing these people to separate just creates more friction and it gets harder to put on a big show or ends up more expensive overall.
In the end, these middlemen will continue to exist in some form because they do provide value, especially at the scale of putting on a show for many tens of thousands of people.
In general the public doesn't like how the sausage is made, and if you reveal parts of the making they get angry about it - even if everyone involved basically agrees it's for the best.
(Ask the random Swift fan how much the A/V company is paid to manage the equipment and they'll probably be off by an order of magnitude or more - the most famous example of this kind of thinking is "I can make eggs at home, how come a restaurant is so expensive?")
Maybe TM/LN are an abusive monopoly in their current position. Maybe they're too integrated in the whole market. Sure sounds like it. But even then Swift isn't getting the full $300 of the ticket cost while the hundreds of other people involved in getting the show together get $0.00.
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.
I fundamentally disagree with your characterization of a consumer's options. Is your argument that I should have the fortitude and knowledge to opt out of coercive economic relationships? Why should I, as the consumer, bare the brunt of the responsibility for holding a corporation responsible for their misdeeds when they utilize their scale and volume to nullified my actions? Do I, as an individual, have any sway over corporate decision making when my fellow consumers do not have that fortitude or knowledge?
I do not agree that every scenario of corporate abuse should fall on the consumer to hold the corporation accountable because we are on unequal footing. This is regardless of the product being offered. These particular companies are taking advantage of shell games to keep customers in the dark on how they are being abused. I, as a simple consumer, withdrawing my dollars have no weight on the scale.
You really should read up on how Pearl Jam tried to fight Ticket Master in the 90s and lost popularity because they were effectively unable to host a show for years.
If Pearl Jam wasn't able to defeat Ticket Master, I find it laughable that you think individual consumers have any more weight in this matter.
Know what effect it has had on them? That's right, zero. As consumers, we're not even gnats on an elephant's toenail in our ability to affect the outcome. Maybe you'd like to brainstorm another solution.
...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.
Your system is fantastic if you want to make sure that people who have invested the most money in the past get priority over those willing to pay the most for a future game. It still works against fans who can't afford season tickets. With your system a corporate lawyer that buys season tickets to hand out as perks to clients will get priority over a "true" fan who can only afford to go to three or four games a year.
As I said, EVERY system has its tradeoffs.
I do think the loyal fan systems with their drawbacks are still much better than the purely market economic approach. In the example of Super Bowl, the people who wanted to be sure to get tickets would need to have season tickets to all teams. The only resource we are awarded fairly is time. Estimating how much time we dedicated to the team/artist is fair game.
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.
It might be more accurate to say that rubber-stamping mergers maxed-out under the Obama DoJ.
Administrations before and after were almost-but-maybe-a-tiny-bit-less eager to approve competition+job killing mergers.What DoJs were not eager to do was push back against pressure from Elected Congresspeople who 1) held DoJ purse strings and 2) had elections that needed funding.
The more money you allow into politics, the more politics becomes about money.
In the past year, I've tried this a few times and there is simply nobody selling tickets near the venues at all.
Here's a screenshot of my receipt from that one: https://i.imgur.com/7mesmdj.png
Edit: cardinals tix were $135.91ea x2 and $100.09 in fees.
The only anti-consumer force at play is the monopoly power Live Nation is granted to dictate the price of tickets. There's very little that can be done via boycott when it comes to monopolies.
Someone with money can spend their money however they want. They can gamble it, they can snort it up their nose, they can invest it, they can do WTF they want. If what they do with the money contributes to the problem, then they are still part of the problem.
IE/Netscape bad or this apparently.
The whole ticketing space is run by narcissistic assholes who should be in jail.
It's also worth noting that sometimes things change after prices have been set. For example, a baseball game in which tickets were sold but now there's a lot of attention/love suddenly and unexpectedly on the team (maybe they just pulled off a big upset or something) so "market rate" for tickets jumps much higher than what it was immediately before that when the tickets were sold. They weren't originally trying to price lower than market rate. Also the pricing they do for market rate is calculated to optimize for maximum revenue which includes some balance of selling max number of seats but only until the delta of additional sales means a net loss of revenue (i.e. you can sell every seat for $1 but that would make a lot less money).
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.
I think the church idea is a brilliant TM workaround, until they lock that up too.
Also, yes, a giant ultra megachurch like Lakewood might get 45,000 attendees a week. That's usually split between a few services each of which is like 90 minutes long. So like maybe 18k people peak. The average Taylor Swift concert has 72,000 people in the stadium for several hours.
Also, while yes a large church probably has a cafe or something similar, its usually not equipped to provide food for 70,000 people. Nor bathrooms for said 70,000 people, as most people going to the church are once again only there for like 90 minutes instead of several hours.
This is before we get to the notoriously censorious and fragile beliefs of the people operating those facilities.
Not in capacity of people nor production facilities.
The whole reason for this suit is that essentially the same outfits doing ticketing have exclusive licenses with the majority of facilities that can support the big acts.
(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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system
Why not this but for concert seats?
There isn't a lot of obvious utility in allowing anyone in the world to buy a concert ticket (unless you want speculative resellers in your ecosystem). For people travelling to an event, that's what the will-call window is for, and it requires a matching ID. Whereas airlines cannot reasonably maintain a network capable of selling a ticket to anyone worldwide despite their being a very good set of reasons for that to happen.
This probably also explains why airlines allow independent agents, but no reselling. The original market (pre-internet) required it, but the airlines didn't really want to sacrifice their margin to speculative resellers (scalpers).
Concerts used to be sold in a centralized way (you could buy tickets to a specific show at one of a few authorized venues, in person). This worked fine before the internet, since it meant that fans stood on equal footing with speculative resellers. If I want to scalp tickets, I have to go stand in the rain with the fans, and I can't buy 50 tickets since the sellers won't sell more than a few at a time.
Contextualized with how the different industries were created, we can see why GDS made sense at one point, but doesn't really anymore, and why it would never make sense for event ticketing.
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.
So what makes it better? Should we be thankful for the current status quo?
Taylor Swift cleared a billion dollars at the box office (that's tickets) she's gonna walk away with half that.
There are countries with GDP's that small. Taylor Swift made so much money selling tickets that she could be a micro nation. Thats not t-shirts, that's not concessions, that's not kickbacks. Thats half a bill on just tickets.
Look at an artist like Dave Mathews. Who went out of his way to have his own ticketing and merch platform (Music Today)... Now it is a "presale" for Citi Customers...
When money fell out of the sales of physical media concerts, merch and licensing were the only avenues left to make money. When artists get big they cash out, the fans pay for that...
I dont think the status quo is going anywhere, sadly. Like loot boxes and pay to win games the genie is out of the bottle, the only thing you can control as a consumer is your own spending. That might mean going to local shows or staying away from major artists...
As I said before, no problem paying more for tickets if artists feel this is how they make money, but none of this scammy fee-based structure where I am charged 20% of my ticket value as a convenience fee due to getting it virtually (lol?)
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.