Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by CodingJeebus 57 days ago
It's long been speculated that they clandestinely participate in the resale market. If the goal of a business is to maximize profit and they control the market and technology around it, they have everything they need to push prices to the absolute limit that a customer is willing to pay.

Based on what came out during the course of the trial, it would not surprise me at all if they are double-selling tickets.
2 comments
sally_glance 57 days ago
It's wild that everyone seems to have forgotten that Ticketmaster acquired TradeDesk and actively marketed to scalpers [1] just a couple of years ago. Seems they shut down the platform last year, maybe the "ticket bank" [2] idea worked better... Pretty clear to me that they will use any chance to monetize their monopoly.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/competition-bureau-ticketma...

[2] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/judge-signals-hell-le...

link
doctorpangloss 57 days ago
it's all an aesthetic experience, no? for the live entertainment business, it is aesthetically important to fans of Bruce Springsteen that his tickets have a number on them that appears on a website that feels good, and that number happens to be "price of ticket," even if hardly anyone is actually paying that number - they are usually paying more.

personally, i don't think any of this legal shit matters. the sherman antitrust act is 1 paragraph long, so it is flexible in terms of how you want this stuff to work, from a, "I would like the world to work as though it were governed by a priesthood" point of view. so it's reductive to talk about, what does the law say? very little of interest.

how should it work? live nation should be able to do whatever the hell it wants. it would make more money for everyone, at the cost of nothing. it would be good for the music industry to make more money. apple should not have lost the antitrust case over books either. nobody forces you to go to concerts! if you have a problem with ticket prices, make tiktoks complaining about it targeted at the artists. stop listening to their music. but IMO, the live performance cultural phenomenon, it doesn't benefit from this kind of regulation.

link