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.
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.
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.
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.
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.