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
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?
> 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.
> 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.