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by Retric 1001 days ago
Extra transactions mean extra credit card fees, the artists would strictly be better off with demand based pricing. Ticketmaster however gets to double dip and play contract shenanigans.

As a general rule more complex contracts favor the side with more experience. For example many people get hosed when leasing a car, there’s simply more levers a dealership can adjust to favor themselves.
1 comments
lolinder 1001 days ago
You're looking at this from a strictly monetary lens, but the entertainment industry lives and dies on reputation. It's worth a lot of money to have someone else take the fall for the inevitable results of high demand.

Ticketmaster's one job is to launder the artist's reputation. They find ways to milk the show for more money than fans think is fair and keep a chunk of that extra cash as their fee, which from the artists' perspective is well-earned. Ticketmaster gets the blame for the scalpers and fees, the artist stays clean, and everyone makes more money than they would have if there was no one willing to be the bad guy.

You blame Ticketmaster for the double-dipping because that's what the artists are paying them for: to take the blame.

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Retric 1001 days ago
That’s a common theory, but artists like Taylor Swift are willing to take the blame and avoid Ticketmaster.

Ticketmaster has a monopoly position and is exercising monopoly power here.

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lolinder 1001 days ago
Taylor Swift explicitly put the blame on Ticketmaster for the entire 2022 fiasco [0][1]. There was no taking responsibility, and she certainly wasn't avoiding Ticketmaster during that event. If she's avoiding a relationship with them in the future (I can't find any evidence of that), I'd wager it's because of their technical incompetence in handling her volume, not the sale price and the scalpers.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/arts/music/taylor-swift-e...

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/18/taylor-swift-slams-outside-e...

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Retric 1001 days ago
Ticketmaster is still a monopoly.

What I meant is she’s avoiding the resale/scalping thing via Verified Fan to minimize the impact of scalpers. It’s still run through tickmaster.

https://help.ticketmaster.com/hc/en-us/articles/978700273934...

But Verified Fan isn’t universally applied. The individual artist make separate deals requiring it or not and they take the blame for the hassle of requiring it. I suspect but don’t know that Tickmaster also takes a larger cut for the “overhead” of Verified Fan, making this a classic monopolist lose lose situation.

PS: Rereading what I said I really wasn’t clear.

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