| 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. |