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by jmyeet
1312 days ago
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Ticketmaster is a monopoly and they maintain this through monopolizing venues. The US has seen this kind of monpoly before and it led to antritrust action, notably in US v. Paramount Pictures [1], which led to the forced separation of studios, theaters and distrbituion. It should be a clear model that Ticketmaster should not be able to own or have exclusive deals with any venues. The dirty little secret of Ticketmaster is that most artists actually like that Ticketmaster exists. Why? Because they are sort of a reputational sacrificial anode. They are the token bad guys. Imagine if a band started selling tickets for $300. Fans might complain and the artists might look bad. They don't want that. But if they charge $150 and Ticketmaster charges $100 in "fees" then Ticketmaster are the bad guys. The artists take no heat from that. So the second thing we need is transparent pricing. There should be absolutely no fee sharing between Ticketmaster and artists because that's what happens now. It's the same as "fuel surcharges" on plane tickets. That too should be illegal. The ticket just costs more. That's it. The third leg of this are the ticket reselling sites that fuel demand. Another dirty little secret is that the artists themselves sell tickets directly on these sites too. On the principle of transparent pricing I'd like to see this outlawed too. But again artists like to just blame this on Ticketmaster and Stubhub. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic.... |
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Oh, it's not just artists who share in the fees. There's a bunch of different stakeholders, none of which trust each other. This is why, in a way, the fees do represent transparent pricing. Sure, it doesn't seem transparent for the consumer, but for all those different stakeholders, it makes it very transparent, right at the time of the ticket sale, how much their cut of the money is.