[geodel]

Exactly right. A lot of people have tendency to simplistically choose heroes and villains. SO Disney is hero, cable TV bringing disney to home via their Coax cable is villain. Top artists are heroes, but ticket booking service which ultimately are reason for enormous payout to these artists are villains gouging fans.

[filmgirlcw]

The networks and the cable companies are both complicit with their demise. No one is arguing otherwise. I mentioned cable companies specially because they have the same legal monopoly that telephone companies had even post AT&T breakup in terms of location-based authority (it took widespread nationwide wireless for that to change in the U.S., which was like the early 2000s in terms of not having to get a regional wireless plan that could roam on a friendly network spectrum) and because like wireless carriers, cable companies have refused to acknowledge they are just a dumb pipe offering data and that they can’t continue to print money off of things that cost them nothing anymore. Oh, and because in the US, ISPs and cable companies are overwhelmingly the same companies.

The networks ruined their own businesses too — even if some were smarter than others (HBO being the smartest and also why it was the most valuable asset of the AT&T acquisition and the Discovery acquisition) — but I chose to focus on the cable companies b/c they are dumb pipes the same way wireless carriers are and they refused to disrupt themselves.

[Apocryphon]

I get your point but how is Ticketmaster not a parasitic price-gouger?

[jasode]

>I get your point but how is Ticketmaster not a parasitic price-gouger?

Ticketmaster isn't the true price-gouger. It's actually the artist + promotor + venue that collectively set the high prices. Ticketmaster is just the administrative computer system to implement the high prices that the artist/promoter/venue want to charge.

For example, top artists can negotiate to get 105% of ticket's face value from the concert promoter. Indeed, people have speculated that Taylor Swift had so much leverage in negotiating the terms of the Eras tour that she got 110% of the ticket's face price.[1]

If Taylor gets 110% of the ticket money, how does that leave anything left for the promoter and the venue?!? With those artists' financial demands, you now have a math problem: where to get the extra +5% or +10% and also pay the promoter+venue without taking a loss? By charging extra fees.

It's a very clever bit of financial sleight-of-hand. The artist/promoter/venue can all charge more money but hide the blame by embedding it in Ticketmaster's "convenience fees", "service fees", "order processing fees", etc, etc. In this way, Ticketmaster is perceived as the parasite.

Your question where Ticketmaster is already assumed to be the "bad guy" means Ticketmaster's deliberate manipulation of public perception is working exactly as designed.

[1] https://archive.is/J5Eg3

[sbuk]

Ticketmaster merged with LiveMaster, a promoter and venue owner/operator. They are the promoter + venue in your equation and have a global monopoly.

[jasode]

>Ticketmaster merged with LiveMaster, a promoter and venue owner/operator.

Yes, but when other promoters (not Live Nation) book artists at non-LN venues and use Tickemaster as the ticketing agent, all the extra convenience fees are still there.

E.g. Taylor Swift's promoter for Eras Tour was AEG, not Live Nation. And in Dallas, she performed at AT&T Stadium which is a venue owned by City of Arlington, not Live Nation. Ticketmaster was only the agent selling tickets for that Dallas show and it still had all the extra TM service fees padding out the price. In that case, Taylor Swift + AEG + AT&T Stadium got their slices of the pie by using Ticketmaster fees as the "bad guy".

Live Nation acquiring Ticketmaster in 2010 doesn't fundamentally change what Ticketmaster is designed to do: take the public relations blame for artists, etc charging the higher prices.

[carlosjobim]

They don't have any global monopoly.

[jjoonathan]

The artist is their customer, not you. If Ticketmaster didn't gouge you, give most of the gouging proceeds to the artist, and take the flak like a lightning-rod, they would quickly be replaced by a service that did.

[Apocryphon]

What if there was more competition in the space, and there were operators of that didn’t gouge quite so much.

[lotsofpulp]

There is. But the nature of popular media is that it is desired by the populous. Lots of cheap places and venues have no name bars with no name musicians and singers playing all the time.

But if you want to see someone that appeals to the whole populace, then you will have to compete with the whole populace.

[ShadowBanThis01]

Nope. Pearl Jam basically proved that TicketMaster is a monopoly.

TicketMaster is a textbook example of a consumer-harming monopoly, and yet they have gone unprosecuted for decades. No excuse.

[ShadowBanThis01]

Ha ha ha, some TicketMaster/LiveNation shill actually down-modded that.

Pathetic.

[piperswe]

A significant amount of Ticketmaster's fees go to the artist. It lets the artist make more money while fans get mad at Ticketmaster instead of the artist.

[Apocryphon]

Ticketmaster could take a smaller cut… or maybe just make their overall UX better for the end user.