Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?

[jnac]

It seems there are a variety of solutions to prevent value from being transferred from artists/fans/venues to resellers. Why does it seem like there have been no significant attempts to implement an alternative?

The only YC company[1] I can find in this space seems to be DOA.

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/the-ticket-fairy

[koolba]

TicketMaster has exclusive contracts with the vast majority of venues and just about every large one. These contracts include kickbacks where TicketMaster will add $X of fees to each ticket it sells and pass back Y$ (Y < X) to the venue.

It's essentially the venues and artists outsourcing the job of "being the asshole" to TicketMaster as a large chunk of the money eventually flow back. They get to publicly blame TicketMaster, claim they have no involvement, and still get their slice of the "processing fees".

If you are attending any event and you can actually buy the tickets directly at the box office then go that route. You'll likely save anywhere from 25-60% off the price of the tickets. Plus you'll get actual physical tickets.

Sure this doesn't work for some crazy in demand show, but nobody goes to those anyway right?

[Justsignedup]

So much this. And just to add, any startup that even attempts this, EVEN WITH 100% ARTIST SUPPORT, cannot work out because venues have the exclusivity contracts.

And worse, you can't split a venue up to 2 different sellers. They don't have a communication protocol for which seats are sold, so you end up in a position of double-booking. Also bad.

Basically the only way for this to work is:

a) a system exists where venues publish an event and seating

b) the system does nothing but keep track of sales and seats. They don't care who sold, just tracking that it was sold. Also allow full API access so any service can reserve and claim the seat, the service is now on the hook for that seat.

c) allow venues to indicate which services can sell their tickets

This will commodotize ticketmaster, but at the same time, there will very little value add, so who would compete. It'll be a race to the bottom with barely any money. And the service you build could take a small fee at best otherwise nobody would use you. AND you'd be competing against ticketmaster with almost no money.

And don't forget, the double booking problem... Your service will have to basically integrate with ticketmaster, who will never willingly do this given that you'll commodotize them, and they will not simply sacrifice themselves just to make some sort of positive outcome, and then also be completely beholden to another company.

Its a perfect monopoly field.

[batmaniam]

Sounds like the gov needs to step in and break it up. Anyone have any idea on getting that process started? This is probably a better path than trying to disrupt Ticketmaster as another random startup.

[ryanchants]

I saw this being passed around the other day: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-the-department-of-jus...

[pedalpete]

It isn't just that the venues have exclusive contracts, its also that if they break the exclusivity contract with TicketMaster, they can't use a competing service for 2 years (though I can't find proof of this, when I worked in venues 20 years ago, this was the case).

SongKick took a stab at breaking TicketMaster, as did PearlJam, and a few others. Everyone has failed so far.

This is clearly monopolistic and harmful to concert goers, and StubHub (also a Ticketmaster/LiveNation company) was fined a few years ago for selling tickets at a premium which were never made available to the public.

The whole industry is so shady, it's pathetic that this is allowed to continue.

[KptMarchewa]

> It isn't just that the venues have exclusive contracts, its also that if they break the exclusivity contract with TicketMaster, they can't use a competing service for 2 years (though I can't find proof of this, when I worked in venues 20 years ago, this was the case).

How is that legal under Sherman Act?

[georgeplusplus]

It's probably not along with many other industries that sorely need the Sherman act, but the DOJ would have to bring charges and sometimes it's not politically popular especially during periods of bad economy to do so

[pedalpete]

This isn't the first time LN/TM have been been through this process.

Ian Hogarth of SongKick describes how he first fought the anti-trust.

https://twitter.com/soundboy/status/1593549611431493632

[KptMarchewa]

Well, it actually happened right now. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-opens-antitrust-probe-in...

[georgeplusplus]

Happy to see.

[idunno246]

You still get hit with fees at the door in my experience. Considering most venues bigger than a bar are owned by livenation which is the same company as Ticketmaster…

[e_y_]

Last couple times I went this year, it was a $5 fee at the box office, which was still considerably less than the $18 in fees online (for a $35 ticket). After I paid, they asked for my number and texted me a Ticketmaster link.

[tomcam]

I’m old enough to remember when it was free to purchase at the box office

[valarauko]

> If you are attending any event and you can actually buy the tickets directly at the box office then go that route. You'll likely save anywhere from 25-60% off the price of the tickets.

I've bought Broadway tickets at the box office to save on processing fees, and they just printed out TicketMaster tickets.

[skeeter2020]

The artists can do better too, if they have the power to make TM share the upside (most don't) because TM controls much of the resale market and is also moving towards surge pricing. This is why they're pushing into virtual ticketing so hard (Ticket-less Master?)

TM also has huge vertical integration. If you want to perform a live show at almost any mid/large venue your tour is likely to be managed by Live Nation, and they are integrated down to artist representation.

[toomuchtodo]

Sounds very anti trusty.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/act...

https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

[cyanydeez]

Unfortunately, monopoly laws are enforced like the rules in monopoly: entirely arbitrarily

[agotterer]

How was Live Nation able to get as big as they did prior to TicketMaster acquiring them?

[Tangurena2]

> If you are attending any event and you can actually buy the tickets directly at the box office then go that route.

I used to try that - in order to avoid ticketmaster fees. For most venues, even if you buy tickets at the venue, it is a ticketmaster terminal/printer that prints the tickets out. And you still pay the ticketmaster fees.

[ChildOfChaos]

Not even contracts, but they own the venues via Live nation who own ticketmaster, they essentially have a monopoly, at least here in the UK, all the main concert venues of scale are owned by Live Nation.

Live nation also runs most of the major music festivals too as they bought them up.

[bsimpson]

I've been buying my tickets at The Greek in Berkeley since Ticketmaster started requiring 2FA and rejecting my Google Voice number.

They charge a $5 fee for physical tickets now. It's less than their online bullshit, but it's still bullshit.

[musicale]

> you can actually buy the tickets directly at the box office

Last time I tried that the venue processed the sale through TicketMaster and I got a TicketMaster ticket.

[mksherif]

the only way this will work is if the venues can potentially get more money from another source besides Ticketmaster.

[wilsonnnn]

Is Y <<<< X?

[anm89]

No body goes to those shows anymore, they are too crowded

[thedangler]

I am so pissed at my 2004 self. I was in 2nd year university and won a bid to create the website and ecommerce platform for a local event. The website was for: Event information, Team Schedules, Buying merhcandise, and event tickets.

My partner and I created, to our knowldge, the first ticketting system with live purchasing for seats at a stadium where you could choose your seats. Ticket master was not doing this at the time.

We drew the stadium with squares. It showed reserved, and purchased seats while selecting. It even picked the best possible seating so it wouldn't leave one spot vacant if you choose the "get me the best availble seats for N people option".

It was a huge success for a stadium that seated 8k people.

After the event was over, the main attraction host team asked us if we could do the ticketing system for their games. Their games were at the ACC. After a couple weeks they came back and told us it wasn't possible because Ticket Master had the rights to the stadium.

So what did we do? University was stating up soon so we went back to school. My business mind didn't even think to turning it into a service back then because we assumed ticket master controlled everything.

Forever facepalm.

[wdr1]

I worked at Ticketmaster as an Engineering Director for a few years. I'd be happy to share my perspective.

- Selling tickets is hard. I mean really hard. By coincidence, I just hit my 14 year mark at Google. I also spent 5 years at Yahoo! in the early 2000s. I'd like to think I've seen hard technical problems over my career. And again, ticketing is hard.

- There's not that much money it. Especially relative to the technical challenge.

- Most of the thoughts here are how to build a ticketing system that fans want. Ticketmater could already do that.

There's a few things about ticketing people don't realize:

(1) Ticketmaster doesn't own tickets. They don't see the prices. They don't set the fees. These are typically by the promoter or the artist.

(2) Ticketmaster doesn't keep much of the fees. Read LiveNation's financials. Last time I checked, I think Ticketmaster was keeping about $3 per ticket on average (i.e. revenues / tickets sold). Almost all the fees go to other parties in the value chain -- venues, promoters, artists.

[syndacks]

What's so hard about selling tickets? Is it a technical challenge? A sales challenge? An operational challenge? I'm having a hard time understanding how selling tickets to a concert is so hard.

[wdr1]

Tickets aren't fungible. You can never sell the same seat twice.

You have complex business rules. How venues are laid out change. How tickets are marketed is very dynamic.

Bad actors have a strong incentive for fraud.

You have an insane delta between median traffic & traffic spikes. You need to be able to sell out the staple center in under 4 minutes to an audience of millions.

[egorfine]

> a ticketing system that fans want. Ticketmater could already do that.

What are the reasons they don't?

[benji-york]

My guess: the customer isn't the fan; the customer is the ticket seller.

[citizenpaul]

From a technical standpoint outsider it would seem similar to payment processing/gateways. Any chance you can expand on why it is harder? I'm sure I'm not the only one that would like to know more.

[CabSauce]

I heard that ticketmaster has exclusive agreements with basically every large venue. So if performers want to play venues of over a medium size (large theaters, arenas), they're forced to use ticketmaster.

[treepunch]

That's because most of the major venues are owned by LiveNation... which is the same company. When they merged in 2010 everyone saw this coming.

[fuzzylightbulb]

Tickemaster was terrible even before the Live Nation merger. The issue is that everyone is making money hand over fist at the expense of the consumer, while Ticketmaster is absorbing all the negative attention. Artists love selling out shows at a particular ticket price; it doesn't matter to them if the venue is full of true believers or if the true believers paid extra to be there so long as the "extra" is still within the price people are begrudgingly willing to pay. The venues love it because they get a portion of the ticket sales and the fees, and they don't need to manage the sale of tickets or employ folks to do so. No one in the chain is going to stick their neck out to kill the golden goose for the sake of the consumer. It's a mess.

[bena]

Ticketmaster was just as bad and just as monopolistic in the 80s and 90s.

[chitowneats]

Yes and they used the insane amounts of money they made in those days to close a potential vector of attack by purchasing LiveNation. Feds still should have prevented that merger.

[rchaud]

How did they do algorithmic pricing then? Send updated price lists every morning to all ticket vendors via fax?

Ticketmaster today is significantly worse than even the entity I remember in the 2000s. The worst they'd do is charge 20% out of thin air for a "processing fee", and in any case, there were alternatives available, like buying paper tickets from record stores or directly at the venue.

[bena]

They just charged a shitton and tacked on bullshit fees.

The fact that they're now algorithmically predatory does not mean they are any less predatory than before. They have always used every tool available to them to extract as much money as they could from people.

Those paper tickets from record stores and those directly at the venue were purchased through Ticketmaster. For anything of note. It's why Pearl Jam tried to fight them in 1994.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taki...

Their next concert is at Innings Festival in Tempe, AZ. You can buy your tickets at Ticketmaster. So that's how well that went.

[theturtletalks]

Now they have a moat too

[tfang17]

Read the book Ticket Masters. Explains how they've basically formed a monopoly via their merger with LiveNation - Ticket Master controls all major venues and thus all ticketing systems.

https://www.amazon.com/Ticket-Masters-Concert-Industry-Scalp...

[WarOnPrivacy]

>they've basically formed a monopoly via their merger with LiveNation

Having a DoJ that absolutely adores mergers - that might not be working out for us.

[godshatter]

So, given that, is it possible to disrupt LiveNation instead?

[ID1452319]

The reason resellers exist is because people are prepared to pay many multiples of the face value for tickets. If people stopped buying tickets on the secondary market, the resellers would be left with worthless paper they paid thousands of dollars for and the secondary market would disappear.

[mikewebkist]

If artists and venues used market clearing prices there would also be much less demand for a secondary market. The "problem" Ticketmaster solves is that for someone like Taylor Swift the supply of tickets is VASTLY lower than the demand for tickets. But Taylor, reasonably, doesn't want to be seen selling tickets for thousands of dollars each. Instead you get presales and lotteries and "ticketmaster fees" and a secondary market.

[randomdata]

> The reason resellers exist is because people are prepared to pay many multiples of the face value for tickets.

And below that, artists sell their tickets at wholesale prices to ensure that they are sold, providing some guarantees about how much money will be made for a given performance. They have better things to do than waste their time trying to eke out every last possible penny, along with the risks associated with that. It's best to let someone else put in that work, and that's where resellers enter the picture. The same reason why you find a wholesale/retail divide in pretty much every industry.

[skeeter2020]

TM is actively dismantling the secondary ticket market by (a) being a secondary market themselves, (b) pushing paperless tickets so they are very hard to transfer, (c) surge pricing to capture the margin the secondary market needs.

There's both pros and cons to this outcome, but I don't believe havig TM as the single owner of the entire live event industry is on the whole, a good one.

[hnburnsy]

You are correct but you are missing that TM is doing this in collaboration with the promoters and artists, which of course means sharing the profits with them too.Example, The Black Keyes told TM to invalidate secondary market tickets to one of its.shows.

https://variety.com/2019/music/news/black-keys-hundreds-turn...

[datapolitical]

The answer is that Ticketmaster gives 50% of their revenue to the venue, which is a pretty good deal for the venue, so they have every incentive to keep that relationship going

[sf4lifer]

Venues also sign multi-year contracts and ticketmaster also has multi-year contracts with all the talent agencies as well.

[robrenaud]

They run a not that complicated website. As someone who loves live music, they take way too much in ticket fees for the value and difficulty of the service they provide. Legitimately, it feels like expertsexchange.

Economically, it doesn't seem to make sense for artists and venues to be giving so much money to a partner who is delivering so little value. Even if the venue is getting half of the ticket master fee, the tickets selling with the fee included is proof that the customer is willing to pay that much, why share more than a small fraction of the ticket price with a website?

[oblio]

It's not about the tech. It's rarely about the tech.

The sooner techies understand this, the better.

Read this: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-bill-gates-line/

Ticketmaster is a large aggregator.

[ars]

> They run a not that complicated website.

That's not entirely true, the surge demand on their site is enormous. They pay for enormous capacity that is used only sporadically.

[coder543]

> They pay for enormous capacity that is used only sporadically.

In this day and age? I am highly skeptical.

Any large, upcoming surge of traffic is planned in advance, as in the case of the Taylor Swift Era Tour ticket sales, so they can easily preemptively scale up infrastructure ahead of that. There is zero reason to hold onto that infrastructure all year long, and dynamic scaling works fine for this type of service the rest of the year.

[Denvercoder9]

> Economically, it doesn't seem to make sense for artists and venues to be giving so much money to a partner who is delivering so little value.

Artists and venues receive a part of the fees that TicketMaster charges. TicketMaster's essentially being paid by artists and venues to be the bad guy.

[angryasian]

I think its so naive for anyone to think that this problem won't exist within the same rules that are currently set for any company.

As long as there is an arbitrage opportunity and its incredibly profitable this will always exist. Tickets are priced too low, and there are very sophisticated companies who's only purpose is to buy and resell. This was SeatGeek's original premise to optimize when to sell and buy.

I'm not really even sure what the complaints are... yes theres limited quantity and incredible demand. The only real solution is you limit who can buy by price or exclusivity.

[zeroonetwothree]

I think it’s not so straightforward what your competitive advantage is. Charging customers lower fees isn’t so simple because Ticketmaster splits the fees with the venue. So I guess you need to take an even smaller cut than 50%. But can you afford to run a profitable business off of smaller margins than that?

In a sense this situation came about because people want ticket prices to be ‘fair’. They don’t want to pay $500 for some concert even if that should be the market price. So it gets priced at $100 instead and Ticketmaster allows venues to recoup part of that with fees.

[angryasian]

thats the reality, Taylor Swift tickets would probably be priced at $1k a ticket and would still sell out

[pjlegato]

Ticketmaster works "well enough" that venues have no compelling reason to switch.

A startup may offer a "10% better" set of features, but that's not enough for the venue to justify the large switching costs and large risk that would be involved in trying out a competing product.

For such a switch to be justified, the alternative product's feature set would have to be 100x better -- a "gamechanger" that fundamentally alters the way the venue does business, not merely offers minor improvements.

[noahtallen]

The thing is, their product is fine — NFC tickets, for example, are really convenient. Transferring tickets to a friend works great.

The problem is just that they have a monopoly. They suck because of the ridiculous fees. They suck because they enable a secondary resale market. Etc etc. With no competitors, they have a captive market.

[shmatt]

In short: the anger over what happened yesterday is overblown. If a commodity is sellable, people will sell it. The ONLY option here is to make tickets non-transferable, full ID check to verify the name on ID is the name on the ticket

Point 1: Let her sell it on a different website.

Yesterday, Ticketmaster said millions, but it was probably more than 10 million people, logged in to try to buy hundreds of thousands of products. Each product has inventory=1, and you're not allowed to double sell a product. Try pushing this to any other website and it would crash for days.

This used to happen when sneaker reselling was at its peak. People would get angry at the terrible way Adidas or Nike would sell a sneaker, but when the same shoe was sold on a small website owned by some small store in Paris, the website would completely shut down until the owners could convince people via social media that the shoe will not be sold online, ever. Everyone loses. This problem was later solved by all stores either moving to Shopify, who has its own ticketmaster-like system, or just not selling popular sneakers online. Another thing that can happen is a seat could be sold to 100 people, then 99 get cancellations later. Would that make people happier?

Point 2: Bot protection. It's hard. I've worked on reseller/bot protection, you either go too light, and let bots in, or go too strong, and block non-bots. Especially when millions are hitting the website at once, and every seat can be sold once.

Point 3: It's not all professional resellers.

Someone can be a huge Swift fan, but if they see people spending thousands, or tens of thousands on StubHub, and it can pay for rent or half a new car, they'll sell it, even though they're not professional resellers. As long as Swift didn't block transferring tickets, and some rich people are willing to spend thousands, this will happen 100% of the time.

Ticketmaster, to try to fix this, has also attempted to sell the tickets themselves for resell prices, cutting out the middle man. But then people get mad at them. As long as the rich people are willing to pay, either Ticketmaster or resellers will charge them the high price

When you buy a ticket on stub hub, you see the buyers original name. Some times itll be some LLC, but most times its just some regular shmoe looking to make a buck

Are you looking to disrupt fees on a concert that never sold out? Sure, someone could do that, thats mostly politics internal to the entertainment world. Are you trying to sell out 20 stadiums at the same minute? It's either raffle, or queue, and not allowing anyone not on the paying credit card to enter concert

[zwkrt]

I worked in the industry for a while and I agree with your points. I would add though that Ticketmaster is incredibly entrenched because Live Nation (parent company) is also a promoter and also owns many venues or has exclusive contracts with venues and they also have contracts with artists specifying that they will tour to venues affiliated with LN. Vertical integration.

[aj7]

Not true on StubHub. No information on original purchaser. Also effectively not transferable as you can’t print the ticket. Must use mobile device, not optionally use.

Stubhub prices appear to be significantly lower, but I had to call them to figure out how to retrieve my tickets, the UI is so confusing. Selling was a breeze though.

[ripe]

> the anger over what happened yesterday is overblown

Much of the anger is about Ticketmaster’s terrible website, which made it impossible for fans to reliably buy tickets even when they spent the whole day hitting refresh. There can be no excuse for that.

[ironick09]

You mean there is never any good reason or excuse excuse you’ll accept for any website to crumble under the pressure of nearly 15 million people clicking add to cart, or checkout at the exact same instant?

People clicking refresh the whole day to get tickets? Let’s be real here unless you were in queue before the tickets even went on sale, the chances of getting a ticket were nearly zero.

[chrishare]

ID verification + limited transfers + pre-election via lottery?

[jnac]

My thought too- charging higher prices in the first place & passing the same % on to the venue would allow you to offer the venues a better deal while still allowing fans to pay less than they would to resellers.

Limited/no transfers - returns offered instead - offer flexibility to customers.

However as others have said I think the real obstacle is the venue relationships that came from the purchase of LiveNation. These are difficult to replace although maybe it would be possible to start with smaller venues and acts....or using public places a la music festivals.

[riteshpatel]

We are very much alive :)

https://www.ticketfairy.com/event-ticketing

[bombcar]

Let's see. LYV is the parent company (including venues, etc).

They are worth $16 billion (or about 1/4th an Elontwitter).

They had revenue of $6 billion and made a EBITDA of $573m.

So disruption of the Ticketmaster monopoly is going to result in $500 million? Perhaps?

They don't seem to be printing money as much as everything thinks they are. Someone could buy LYV and show people how you really milk a market to death.

[jnac]

That's a good data point, the market is surprisingly small which could account for lack of competition. But the last annual report has the ticketing org alone at 37% EBITDA margin [1] (they call it AOI). No expert on benchmarking this # but wouldn't say they're not milking it.

[1] https://d1io3yog0oux5.cloudfront.net/_6fc34851c72a6087b32b93... p47

[bombcar]

37% EBITDA is in line with APPL (31%) and relatively low when you consider that APPL produces a ton of actual physical goods.

It seems that companies that go much above 35% start "investing" in stupid shit (FB hit 50% EBITDA margin in 2018 and then went nuts with Meta, dragging themselves back down to the 30s).

I'd say that these are rookie numbers and they could get that stuff to 50% or more (though some of it they wash into the venue and book on another part of the ledger).

[lotsofpulp]

Livenation has a zero percent profit margin for 10+ years.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/LYV/live-nation-en...

Why are investors buying its stock? Do they want to capture more of the market before they start ratcheting up prices?

[noodle]

I briefly worked on starting a small competitor to TM as a contractor (which is incidentally still around and doing fine). The reason TM is hard to disrupt boils down to this:

Everyone makes more revenue when they go with TM - artists, venues, etc - everyone except for the ticket buyers, who pay out the nose. And TM plays the "bad guy" role in the equation to cover for all of those other people. Yes, TM holds a lot of contracts with venues, even owns some venues outright. But those contracts wouldn't exist if they weren't very juicy for the venue.

[jmkr]

related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kShIppJtHiY

Every Phish tour starts the same way. Enter the lottery and hope to win tickets in some random spot.

Don't win lottery and join the Ticketmaster queue. Watch the site fall apart for an hour. Crashes at checkout and you're back to the end of the queue.

Go on Stubhub and pay 2x or more for the "big" shows (Halloween, NYE, etc).

But hey, also crashed chess.com.

[standardly]

Such a travesty, everyone should be given an equal opportunity to see Phish. There's an idea that floated around that the band should either start their own venue or festival grounds. I am not sure how logistically viable that is, but it would totally solve the issue of ticket distribution if they could just do it organically.

[eschneider]

I spent a fair bit of time researching this space as it seemed like an obviously good startup idea. It turns out that almost everyone who you think would benefit from a better system have already been coopted by the current players. It's definitely an uphill battle.

[zwkrt]

To put it into perspective I work for two years at Amazon to try to create a competitor to Ticketmaster. Our ticket sales infrastructure wasn’t quite as polished as Ticketmaster is but it was passable. What killed the product though is that we couldn’t get any reasonably sized contracts in the United States. So even a company with the motivation to burn capital the size of Amazon couldn’t swing competing with Ticketmaster.

[eschneider]

You have to look at it this way: Ticketmaster's job isn't so much "selling tickets", as being the "designated bad guys" so artists and venues don't have to be. Everyone gets their cut.

[nunez]

Now that you mention it, Apple has the best shot at this given their relationships

[srfvtgb]

I think big artists need to start doing what some large sporting events do and sell a significant proportion of tickets on a ballot system. Instead of being first come first served, anyone who registered to buy a ticket (possibly paying a deposit to disincentivize duplicate entries) would go in the draw for the opportunity to buy a ticket, preventing things turning into an auction benefiting those who have the fastest bots.

[angryasian]

Thats what these presales were. They were limited to Taylor Swift fans that essentially were entered in a lottery

[aj7]

The Grateful Dead had a system where you just bought the tickets. If you didn’t make it in the lottery, your envelope was returned unopened. Don’t remember what the method of payment was.

[rchaud]

Vertical integration.

They acquired the independent ticket sellers, then went on to acquire the physical venues themselves. Now if the artist wants to play at those venues, they deal with Ticketmaster from start to finish.

That means that even if artists wanted to buy a block of tickets to sell to their fans, their allotment would be whatever Ticketmaster themselves deem appropriate.

[not1ofU]

Indeed.

Andrew Schulz's Beef with Ticketmaster | Joe Rogan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS8a1rnPGGo

[twiddling]

Luxottica is another example of vertical integration that needs to be broken up.

[carlosdp]

They own most of the largest music venues in the world, after their acquisition of Live Nation in 2012. So, if Katy Perry goes on tour and needs to choose a ticketing provider, she pretty much has no choice because several of those venues will only use Ticketmaster, period.

It's one of the most quietly intractable monopolies on the planet.

[egypturnash]

Ticketmaster's a very vertical monopoly, if you go with anyone else then a ton of venues simply will not work with you. If you open a venue that works with anyone besides Ticketmaster then you won't be able to book any acts that do work with TM, which is "pretty much fucking everyone". There's a lot more to this, Doctorow and Giblin's recent book "Chokepoint Capitalism" has a couple of chapters that examine this whole setup in great detail.

https://craphound.com/chokepoint/2022/09/27/twitch-does-a-ch...

[wolpoli]

This is where free market fails, and to fix this, government would needs to outlaw these types of exclusive agreements.

[theturtletalks]

I can’t believe they went after Microsoft for IE, but all of this is fair game. It regulatory capture and it’s rampant in every industry.

[aj7]

We’ve had 50% Republican administrations. Regulatory capture is their technology as they can’t pass anti-competitive legislation, no matter how much they are bribed.

[ISL]

If they do it in an egregiously anticompetitive way, it is already outlawed.

[BoiledCabbage]

People need to stop calling inherent flaws in unregulated capitalism, "regulatory capture".

Unregulated capitalism has flaws - this is one of them. Vertical monopolies are a huge issue period.

[AlanYx]

What I don't understand is how this doesn't fall afoul of US antitrust legislation, especially the rules on tied selling?

[francisofascii]

But the acts don't have exclusive rights with TM, do they?

[zwkrt]

It’s complicated. Live Nation is a promoter. For those of you not in the industry a promoter is basically like a mini VC that funds a tour or a live event. The promoter invests the capital necessary to put on the show and in turn gets to dictate what the ticket prices will be where the show will be what acts will be performing together and who will sell the tickets.

So if Taylor Swift promoter for her to her is Live Nation than the answer is no she does not get to choose the venues.

[hedora]

Even before the live nation acquisition, they were a monopoly. At the height of their careers, Pearl Jam tried to tour without using them to sell tickets. They failed. I doubt any current bands have as much market leverage as Pearl Jam did back then.

[Xcelerate]

Why is there a secondary market anyway? I don’t understand why ticket prices don’t just rise to the optimal balance of supply and demand. Same question I have for the allocated bourbon market actually...

[ForHackernews]

Some artists and performers have goals separate from "extract the maximum revenue possible on every sale", they may want to price their tickets so that young fans or other people not in the 1% of income distribution can attend their shows.

[citizenpaul]

People will work an extra 100hrs to afford the ticket for "promoted big band" instead of just for visiting a local band show that would be not as flashy but still very fun. You just have to do a bit of research on your own. All it would take for people to defeat ticketmaster(if they are indeed so bad) is just stop choosing them for their entertainment for a little while, but they don't. Entertainment is not a scarce resource.

[Apreche]

Because it's not Ticketmaster you have to overturn, it's the venues. They have exclusive deals locked in for several years.

Can you convince a small venue to use your new system? Maybe? But since the big venues use Ticketmaster, it's advantageous for the smaller venues to use the same thing.

Can you convince a big venue to use your new system? Absolutely not. You're some unproven little company.

Example: Broadway theaters. There are three organizations that collectively own the vast majority of the Broadway theaters, Shubert, Nederlander, and Jujamcyn. These are very wealthy and very old fashioned organizations. Even when it's time for them to renew their contracts, do you think you can convince any of them to leave Ticketmaster/Telecharge? Not a chance in hell.

Lastly, Ticketmaster already covers all of the use cases that these venues have. It doesn't do the best job, but it does the job. Even if you do a great job of covering 90% of the use cases, they won't switch to you if there's even one thing they need that your alternative can't handle. Even these small and rare edge cases are absolutely essential to their business. To even come close you will need to hire several experts in the ticketing industry to learn that business to even know what these cases are.

Ok, so let's say you hire ticketing experts and you build a system better than Ticketmaster that does indeed cover 100% of the use cases the venues have. And you have perfect timing, the venue's exclusive deal with Ticketmaster is coming to a close and you have the opportunity to sell to them. Can you do it? Can you convince them to take a huge risk to use your platform? What's the upside other than the fact that its nicer for ticket buyers? Sticking with Ticketmaster is a safe bet for them. If you fail to convince them in that one window, you won't be able to try to sell to that venue again for several years.

TL;DR: Ticketmaster's customers aren't the ticket buyers, it's the venue.

Source: I have worked in ticketing in the past.

[Terretta]

There are some ideas for how to disrupt Ticketmaster in Prince's Musicology Tour.

Granted, it was challenging to build and operate tech to sell exactly 300 tickets for a venue like Webster Hall at a scheduled time to all of greater New York City area and the half of USA fans willing to travel for such an intimate concert.

But it's possible. Pearl Jam did the same back in the day.

[colesantiago]

Do we need to disrupt Ticketmaster?

[hellotoby]

Most tickets I buy these days seem to be through Humanitix (https://humanitix.com/au). The shift seems to have happened fairly recently though.

[yuy910616]

Yeah like other comments have said - agreements with venues. In the real world, it is still relatively easy to control the supply, especially given there are so few big venues and only a number of big artists that can fill those venues.

[musicale]

Eventbrite seems to be catching on for smaller events at venues that don't have deals with TicketMaster.

Also AEG/AXS owns or has deals with some 30 venues in the US (not to mention London's O2) and also owns some sports teams.

[hnburnsy]

Because they work with venues, promoters, and artists behind the scenes by sharing the profits and playing the bad guy to the public.

[photochemsyn]

But mah free market ideology says competition will produce the best outcome for everyone, we just need more deregulation to fix things.

[HDThoreaun]

Ticketmaster exists because they kickback to artists and venues. This is is the best outcome for them. Supply of tickets is so limited that fan perspective is completely ignored, the tickets sell out anyway.

[vintermann]

Kickback? I wouldn't exactly call it that, since it's the venue's seats, and the artist's acts it's selling.

The problem is more that they own the venues, and aggressively punish anyone who works with their competitors.

[HDThoreaun]

Half of the fees go to the artist and venue. Ticketmaster takes the position of the “bad guy” to take all the blame for high prices while artists can say “the tickets only cost $40” even though the real price is easily double that.

[comprev]

In the same way it's so hard to disrupt Google.

They are such a powerful monopoly the average Joe rarely thinks there is an alternative.

[rieTohgh6]

Ticketmaster is nowhere close to Google's monopoly. If anybody want to buy a ticket, they will use whatever site sells them, users just don't care, they will follow any link from band's webpage. In case of search results you would have to fight to get and keep each user. I mean Google pays Firefox $400M a year, to be default search engine, despite its dwindling market share.

[nervousvarun]

This has been discussed a few times before (see link below).

It's difficult to do a TLDR for such a complex issue, but from what I remember the biggest problem seems to be that Ticketmaster is extremely vertical to the degree it either owns or has exclusive contracts with venues.

Seems like a pretty strong argument that they have a monopoly (so gov. regulation might be the only way to change anything).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18025209

[floor2]

This is why it's frustrating that America has no right-wing political party.

Every freshman-level economics 101 course when discussing the basic mechanisms required to have a functioning free market has "no monopolies, no cartels, no anti-competitive agreements between market participants" as necessary conditions.

But functionally, in America today, the Republicans are happy to have money-printing monopolies because their donors are profiting. And the Democrats are happy to have money-printing monopolies because their donors are profiting and large stable incumbents are easier to control with regulation than many small, changing entities.

In a better world, we'd break up the monopolies, and have thousands middle-class-owned small-businesses operating competitively, rather than one corporation.

[vintermann]

Right-wing? When did a right wing party, anywhere in the world, go through with a strong smash-the-monopolies policy?

[skyyler]

Could you give an example of a true right-wing political party, in your eyes? Anywhere in the world.

[pier25]

Ticket Fairy is not DOA they're doing fine. I don't work there but know people that do.

[aj7]

Because it actually works.

[anuvrat1]

The vertical integration, from venues to ticket reselling.

[chpatrick]

It's a monopoly, the same group owns the venues.

[jtode]

I used to play in a Z-list bar band that booked gigs through an agency. The agency took a healthy cut off the top of our pay and that stung a bit when the time came to collect the money, but what really ground my gears was that playing any agency show at any agency bar was a three-way contract between the parties (band, agency, bar) with an agreement, renewed each show, that for the following 18 months the band and the bar agreed to only book shows through the agency. Sure, in theory you can wait it out while playing other bars, but does anyone? Nah.

If your band builds enough profile and sticks around long enough, you can always approach bars yourself that you have no history with, and we did actually do shows without the agency at a couple of places that we had never booked through them, it was fine, but involved a lot of hustle on the drummer's part as well. TANSTAAFL.

Now, I'm not actually comparing the above to Ticketmaster's shenanigans. For starters, there is a good argument for the role of the agency, in that every single gig we ever played, we got paid in full, on time, with zero hassle, and I boil that down to the implicit threat of losing access to the agency's bands. A similar dynamic guarantees to the venues that the bands they book will show up on time, play for the required amount of minutes, not be on bad drugs, etc.

Would I prefer that we had split up that extra two hun rather than hand it to those sharks? Sure, but I'm also a wimp and would not be able to do anything about it if some scumbag club owner told me, flanked by his bouncers, that it was a bad night and we can't get paid. It's far from perfect, but they're our sharks too.

But I bring up this very typical contract for a working band to say that it goes way way back through the centuries that the music business (not the industry - the business, as in the promoters, club owners, circus operators, Vaudeville stages, village Inns, etc) has spent literally centuries figuring out how to keep the talent from controlling anything. Opinions about this are fine, but it also means there's always been some reliable work for talented people who just want to provide a service for folks who want to do something involving music, rather than Be An Artist or whatever.

But Ticketmaster, and later the streaming platforms, really amped up that process of predatory contracts to levels previously unseen. I have always been a bit cynical when "artist" type musicians, people who exclusively play their own compositions I mean, complain about their lack of ability to make a living at that; I have a lot more concern about the ability of music teachers and wedding/event/bar bands to make a living with their craft, because they are the ones I consider to be "working" musicians, but even stipulating that, things have clearly turned into a free for all at this point.

We do actually need artists, as annoying as they can get.

[hulitu]

> Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?

Because speculation is at the core of capitalism.