Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- >With all the hate Ticketmaster has gotten [...], I'm surprised Ticketmaster still has a hold of pretty much the entire market. How are they doing this?
This question is a common mystery because you're using the perspective of the fans. E.g. "I hate Tickemaster ridiculous fees because it's price gouging, etc"
But the mystery of Ticketmaster being dominant is solved once you understand it from the perspective of the venues, promoters, and the artists. They are the true customers of Ticketaster. Ticketmaster's various "convenience fees, surcharges, etc" are just creative financial tricks to funnel more money back to venues+promoters+artists but still keep the ticket's face price artificially lower.
The alternative arrangement would be the ticket's face price being much higher to reflect the "true market price" but that means the artists would be the ones perceived as price gouging. Instead, just charge the higher price via convenience fees and let Ticketmaster take the public relations hit. The psychological manipulation of fans is working exactly as designed.
When the fans wish that there was another true competitor to Ticketmaster, what they're saying is they want "a service that charges less money". But that idea conflicts with the venues/promoters/artists that want to charge more money.
Therefore, if you really want to disrupt Ticketmaster, you need to charge even higher fees and more expensive ticket prices so that the greedy venues & artists will get more money from you and thus choose your service over Ticketmaster. I don't think that's the type of competitive disruption fans have in mind.
And the common cited reasons of vertical integration of LiveNation and owning the venues doesn't explain Ticketmaster's advantage. They were already dominant in the 1980s and 1990s before LiveNation acquired venues. Taylor Swift's tour promotor was AEG (not LiveNation) and she played at many stadiums owned by the cities (not owned by LiveNation) and she still chose Ticketmaster to be the selling agent for those locations. One of the reasons is she negotiated 110% of ticket's face price from Ticketmaster. How is extracting that type of money even mathematically even possible?!? The add-on "convenience fees".
by jasode - so wait, the problem isn't actually TM, but its the big-name artists? (not disputing what you wrote, just surprised I guess)
- The mystery is regulation. Other countries have better regulations in this space (re-selling rules, anti-scalping rules, anti monopoly regulation, fee caps, general consumer protections).
If you want to disrupt ticketmaster, you need to vote for it, not build another ticketmaster.
by ikr678 - Entirely correct.
what they're saying is they want "a service that charges less money". But that idea conflicts with the venues/promoters/artists that want to charge more money.
And it also conflicts with the other fans who are willing to pay more. There is no possible world where you can reliably get Taylor Swift tickets for $25.
by orangecat - >The add-on "convenience fees".
Hence the US needs 'full price up front' laws in the same manner as Australia does. This kind of law shuts this crap down fast.
by pixl97 - Hi, I used to work at a startup in Toronto that did compete against ticketmaster called Uniiverse. In the end they go bought out by ticketmaster. I don't know the details because I left way before then but this is one example of a company trying.by bendangelo
- were they trying to compete, or just hoping to get acquired lolby Marciplan
- As others pointed out, it only sucks for the buying side. The actual customers instead get price gouging and taking-the-blame as a service.by christina97
- Oh yea ticket master owns the venues. The artists can't revolt if they want to put on a big show. Software companies can't compete without dipping their toes into big money real estate property.
Software start ups are all about that 0 cost replication of software. One webserver spawns millions of threads for free. Start ups crack under the pressure of real world costs. Like sure anyone can make a website where users send tweets to each other. But if you have to spend billions of dollars constructing stadiums so Swifties can have an ex-ticket master experience... That's a hard sell to the software guys.
- I spent several years working for a competitor of Ticketmaster. The industry is really difficult to break into.
First, there's the chicken and egg problem of content (events) and consumers. One big part of the sales process is a venue or promoter understanding how your platform will support their sales and marketing processes. If you already have consumers with an app and push notifications, it's an easy sell.
Another issue is cash flow. Deals often depends on what advance you're willing to pay, and it's not uncommon for very large venues to get signed at a loss just for the content. You need the cash to compete, and the big boys will happily take a hit on the big venues to hold onto them. The actual take per ticket is quite a low margin, and if a venue performs worse than you'd hoped you can easily end up making a lot less than planned.
Then you've got all the usual RFP noise around feature offerings. Plus regulation in different countries (looking at you, Italy).
You need investors to fund your sales process, and your development all at very low margins. You also need all the industry connections to build an enterprise sales pipeline and secure business. All of that is to say it's a difficult industry to get any sort of a foot hold in, let alone grow enough to be a serious contender.
The company I worked at ended up doing several rounds of layoffs followed by a very poor sale with no consideration to staff options. It's limping on as it slowly gets absorbed into the company who bought them who are also in the ticketing and event space.
by bluehatbrit - One component of the total picture also is that many of these stadiums/arenas are being funded by the public / tax payer often by tax breaks etc. and the politicians / lobbies are using their relationship to monopolize that public good.
IMO every event at an area should go through a public auction / RFP of who is the ticketer for that event (maybe artist gets right of first refusal to pony up the difference for their preferred ticketer?)
by maerF0x0 - This sort of thing is a strong argument (IMO) that these stadiums, arenas, theaters should be owned by the municipality they reside in.
Fine, we can call it a public good which is why they have nice tax incentives. But why stop there? If its truly a public good then why shouldn't the public simply own it? Why isn't the city operating these venues and using the ticket prices to offset tax burdens?
It might be harder to do this with a sports arena as there's a bunch of issues around the monopolies that are the MLB/NBA/etc. But when it comes to a theater style venue, I'd think most artists would be ecstatic to deal with a city rather than ticketmaster. It truly isn't the case that ticketmaster is providing almost anything of value for their venues. And for very large events they have to coordinate with the city anyways.
by cogman10 - They merged with LiveNation and they own half of the venues. The other half of the venues have exclusive deals with TicketMaster, who provides them with software to run venue logistics (TicketMaster for business), creating vendor lock-in.by byoung2
- They also own a lot of the venue infrastructure across the industry such as catering, tour buses, security,...
They have leverage with venues they dont own and a monopoly across industry verticals.
Sickening situation for music.
by sirsinsalot - And they manage tours for bands. So it’s very hard for them to play independent venues and still have access to the big livenation venuesby lokar
- Vendor lock-in by any other name boils down to monopoly. The moat is their lobby.by testbjjl
- Here's a fascinating clip that's stuck with me of Louis CK talking about trying to circumvent ticketmaster: https://youtu.be/UtoyMpR-mWY?si=LHfmofSERrQZLEj9&t=3015
Specifically the part where he'd play at a non LiveNation/Ticketmaster venue, and right after, TM would find out and would make a deal with the venue to be their exclusive promoter. Insanity.
- That was a good watch. From your comment, it seemed like this was a low-medium level issue with low-medium venues doing exclusive deals with LN/TM but Madison Square Garden is arguably the most prestigious venue in the world.by jimbob45
- Ticketmaster obviously sucks, and their monopolistic business practices deserve a close look by regulators.
But the core of it is that an unregulated ticket market actually supports these prices. Fans keep showing that they're willing to dig deep and outbid each other to attend these events in person. Ticketmaster realizes this, and have set up a business model that extracts accordingly.
I think this is where us Americans get turned around. We tend to believe that it’s fair to charge the full market value for a thing, but we also have a sense that cultural experiences are "meant" to be shared equitably. But until we actually put a value on the latter, we're only ever going to have the former.
by alexose - Yes. A lot of people have this sense that you should be able to attend the World Cup, a Taylor Swift concert, or the Indianapolis 500 without taking out a second mortgage. But there are only so many seats. You can have a lottery which is actually fairly common for many, especially government, permits but doesn't actually increase the number of slots. Whether luck or money is the better way to allocate a scarce resource presumably depends on your personal philosophy and the goals of the organization doing the allocating.by ghaff
- Looking at the world cup ticket prices gives me a mini heart attack. I don't know who is responsible for such high prices (maybe a combination of FIFA and Ticketmaster?), but goddamn these prices are insane. It is going to price out most people. Either that, or people are going to get into debt, just to see a couple of matches to see their favorite teams play.by akudha
- Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) gave a good explanation many years ago already:
https://stereogum.com/58831/trent_reznor_blasts_ticketmaster...
by nemoniac - Worse, they are all owned by the same company now. It’s all a multi-headed hydra of suck. Live Music has been completely monopolized.by reactordev
- He also predicted the future for after the merger.
Its funny - of all the stuff people make up that was Obama's fault, no one ever mentions his admin allowing Ticketmaster and Live Nation to merge. Now they need to be broken up, probably like the Bell System back in the day. But I'll keep on dreaming about that.
by jmuguy - From the point of view of the promoters, concerts are a two-sided marketplace. Two-sided marketplaces are notoriously difficult for small players to compete in. You need to attract good acts so people will buy tickets, but to attract the top acts you need to show that you can sell lots of tickets.
Ticketmaster avoided the two-sided market problem until they reached scale. They were just a website where you buy tickets, an IT appliance for promoters.
But then Ticketmaster started buying out promoters, and that short circuited the entire system. Fans can't buy tickets from a different storefront because their favorite artists are only booking performances with ticketmaster-controlled venues. Top talent can't book high-grossing venues that aren't owned by ticketmaster, because Ticketmaster owns the promoters.
Scalpers are a symptom, the disease is consolidation of competitive markets by corporations. This kind of situation is precisely why antitrust law exists.
by ryukoposting - Well putby skeptrune
- I expect ticketmaster has what should by any reasonable court be deemed illegal contracts that prevent venues from hosting non blessed artists and artists from frequenting non blessed venues, and this type of contract lets them maintain their monopolyby wrsh07
- Fixed the last sentence for you: "This kind of situation is exactly why lobbying exists"by swader999
- > Ticketmaster avoided the two-sided market problem until they reached scale. They were just a website where you buy tickets, an IT appliance for promoters.
Ticketmaster had scale before the internet was really a thing. They had a box offices at record stores (Like Tower records) where you could book tickets.
by seanmcdirmid - There were local ticket operations across the US, ticketmaster just bought them all upby mixdup