[peteforde]

Many of the other commenters have explained how the ownership structure of Ticketmaster gives them near monopoly control because they also own the radio stations and the venues and the promoters. (I'm using "they" and "own" very liberally in this paragraph.)

The simple fact that there's an ownership link between Ticketmaster and the scalper I mean totally legit resale sites is so wildly corrupt that, well, it's textbook stuff.

What I haven't really seen discussed in the comments is that the role and objective of Ticketmaster is poorly understood. They seem like the people who sell tickets, but in reality they are "blast shield for consumer rage" as a service. Their role is to industrialize the conversion of anger into waste heat while leaving the musicians looking like neutral parties.

They also do a lot of catch-and-kill; once competitors get too big, they use bully tactics to starve them until they can acquire them cheaply.

There's an app called DICE. I like it a lot. I'm rooting for them.

[iamben]

Go to a lot of smaller shows, been using DICE for a long time - I think they dominate the smaller venues (in the UK at least). They've made tickets as easy as Amazon made ecom.

Alerts when for when tickets go on sale, (almost one click!) buy for friends and share, bans if you sell over face value, and (for a lot of places) you can return tickets to the pool to resell if you can't go (so there's often last minute waitlist tickets). It's all super smooth and a genuinely delightful experience.

Rooting for them too!

[philipwhiuk]

DICE are owned by Fever as of 2025.

[FireInsight]

DICE is a great experience, but I hate that they have no option to buy tickets without installing and using their app. It should at least be possible from a website, come on...

[RileyJames]

Awesome.

Everything you're stating sounds alot like Tixel in Australia.

Tho I'm not sure they manage the venue / original ticket sale. More of a scalp free marketplace.

Only place I will buy or sell tickets.

[maleldil]

DICE is awesome. I'm bummed when I need to use anything else. I rarely ever need to use Ticketmaster.

[marysol5]

OASIS did that one when they announced their return tour. "We have no control over the ticket prices"

Yeah you do, there's no show without you...

[jorisw]

What incentive would Oasis have to help bring down the prices for their own shows anyway?

[gregoriol]

Having seen shows with super-premium prices at the front, with half the place being non-reactive to the show because people paying extra are not actually huge fans but huge wallets, yeah you need to put down prices and get those front tickets to fans if you want to have nice shows

[palmotea]

> Having seen shows with super-premium prices at the front, with half the place being non-reactive to the show because people paying extra are not actually huge fans but huge wallets, yeah you need to put down prices and get those front tickets to fans if you want to have nice shows

Probably depends on the band. An older "legacy" band like Oasis may not (my speculation) be affected by that, because it will have a lot of wealthy, older fans that both like the band and can pay super-premium prices.

What you talk about probably applies more to newer, hotter bands where the enthusiasm is with younger and/or poorer people.

[peteforde]

You're basically describing my idea of hell.

[QuantumNomad_]

Idk about Oasis specifically, but there have been multiple examples of other bands fighting to keep the concert tickets affordable for their fans. Nirvana did that for example.

And even if you explicitly want to charge as much as possible from your fans, why claim that you have no influence over the price?

[darkwater]

> but there have been multiple examples of other bands fighting to keep the concert tickets affordable for their fans. Nirvana did that for example.

Tickets price landscape radically changed in the last 30 years. They incremented between 3x to 5x (or even more) in that lapse of time, depending on the artist and venue, and accrued inflation doesn't explain it (quick search says that in the last 30 years in the Eurozone inflation grew ~85% and in the US ~110%)

[ojdon]

Here is an interview with MTV where Nirvana are doing the maths of how much money they earn from ticket sales to their shows: https://youtube.com/shorts/anI0NT-_DRQ?si=abX0sy_C-XzxCIjG

[peteforde]

I remember Oasis. They're the ones who literally pissed on the audience here back in the 90s.

The idea that they care if their fans live or die really comes down to whether they could get sponsors on board or not.

[trumpdong]

Can't find any evidence of this urination incident, got a link?

[peteforde]

Mea culpa: upon waking up and being challenged, I realized that I had conflated the Shannon Hoon story and the [very real] Oasis "piss bomb" story into one.

If I'm really and truly honest, I still remember this happening quite clearly so consider this my own personal Mandela Effect moment.

However, there's an unforgiveable gap between fans throwing urine bottles around and my claim [that I very clearly remember Liam as the brother who pissed on an audience at Molson Park but can't prove it and now look like a dumbass] so I do sincerely apologize.

[jorisw]

I think the word 'literally' has gone the way of the emdash

[ghaff]

The em-dash has a fairly specific use. It's just that some people have decided that it indicates AI and can't resist trumpeting that supposed insight at every opportunity.

[trumpdong]

Well, they have some horror stories about them, so it's plausible, I just didn't find any evidence they specifically urinated on the audience.

[iso1631]

literally has had two meanings for decades, maybe centuries

1) Literally Literally

2) Figuratively

It's semantic bleaching

[cush]

They don’t have control over the margins. They could set the MSRP as low as they want - the customer will still pay the same amount.

[Y_Y]

Presumably the don't want only old rich people and empty seats. Otherwise you could self-scalp all the tickets at the highest price possible, maximisung revenue for a single gig but making it so unfun/bad press that you come off worse.

[KeplerBoy]

I think a majority of old rich people is pretty much unavoidable at a return tour.

[fortran77]

Why does Hacker News hate us old people so much? Of course, I usually only see old acts (the B52s / Devo show was great!) and most of the audiences for those are 60+ years old, like me. Next week, I'm seeing Steve Forbert!

[ndepoel]

Which is complete nonsense anyway. Robert Smith from The Cure famously went against TicketMaster before their last world tour several years ago, pointing out the ridiculous prices and demanding that they be lowered to make their shows more accessible. He managed to get TicketMaster to budge and even got them to refund some of the marked up resale prices, costing them millions but generating a lot of goodwill among fans in the process. It's not that artists do not have control, but they do need to put in a good amount of effort to make change happen.

[lelandfe]

DICE has poured gas on the NYC electronic music ticket scene and I loathe them.

The most bad thing they enable is increasing ticket prices for each ticket sold. It has ratcheted up show prices across New York dramatically.

Complaining about DICE (“all my homies hate DICE”) is a common thing in my friend group.

[zer00eyz]

> link between Ticketmaster and the scalper

Except this was going on back in the 90's. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-27-ca-579-st...

Then it was an informal, local, criminal enterprise. Local promoters, would get tickets from management, to drop to local re-sellers (scalpers, and brokers) and make money on the back side (for management).

With the death of album sales, concerts became the main revenue driver for making money... Formalizing the old system, centralizing it, turning it into a business was just "cleaning up" the mess that used to be there. Look at the Altimont stabbing, and the Rolling Stones role in that (demanding even MORE money and upfront).

Live Nation / TicketMaster is "Bill Graham Presents"... it was his dream and he is a product of that era (go read up on how his partner got stabbed).

Is Live Nation awful... sure. But breaking them up wont change the economics or the system (sadly). Artists are just as much a part of the problem as any fan.

[wilkommen]

Ticketmaster uses their monopoly power to unfairly squeeze the venues and the artists too. They're using their monopoly power to squeeze all sides of the live music marketplace - fans, artists, venues, and promoters. So the bad guys are really Ticketmaster, not the artists.

[Spooky23]

They also buy rivals. I worked for a small, out of the way company that added a really good ticketing app for some niche scenarios.

They basically bought us for the tech and integrated the rest of the company into various other companies that were spun off. I ended up with stock in several of them.

[ipaddr]

They own the venues. And the artists are to blame because without them ticketmaster would have no product. Pearl Jam took a huge career hit trying to fight them.

[wilkommen]

Yeah Pearl Jam did take a huge career hit trying to fight them, and that's admirable, but they shouldn't have had to do that. Why should artists carry the burden of having to sacrifice their careers to fight an illegal monopoly? That's the role of government. You may as well say that fans are to blame for going to ticketmaster-promoted concerts and buying tickets on ticketmaster because they were enabling ticketmaster. Both fans and artists are being harmed by the ticketmaster monopoly.

[dfxm12]

Does dice require that you buy tickets through their app and you're required to present the app as your ticket? That sucks too.

[ghaff]

No idea about the specifics in this case. But, unfortunately, it's an increasingly common trend. Especially when going on vacation I like to have backup paper printouts of tickets but, these days, it's not uncommon to have a "We'll email you or the ticket will be available in this app 48 hours before."

[dbbk]

Yes

[gamblor956]

in reality they are "blast shield for consumer rage" as a service. Their role is to industrialize the conversion of anger into waste heat while leaving the musicians looking like neutral parties.

That isn't discussed much because it's not true. Artists get paid a fixed amount for each performance and only get a share of ticket revenue if the # of tickets sold exceeds a contractual threshold. Artists don't get a portion of the fees; those are entirely TM's revenue regardless of the number of tickets sold.

Ticketmaster gets crap for its business practices because they are crap business practices.

[gosub100]

> while leaving the musicians looking like neutral parties.

Then why wasn't Pearl Jam able to shake them in the mid 90s?

[peteforde]

Several things can be true at the same time.

I truly believe that Pearl Jam and many others who have been harshly critical of TM and Live Nation genuinely want to fight back.

However, a person much more cynical than me could make the argument that a band can fight Ticketmaster, still get their bag AND look like folk heroes in the process.

[FrustratedMonky]

" leaving the musicians looking like neutral parties."

Isn't this giving Ticketmaster too much credit, for helping artist profit.

When part of the problem is the artist also does not get as much from the high ticket price. Since Ticketmaster owns the venues, and the entire supply chain, the artist is also enthralled and must take whatever 'lower payout' that Ticketmaster feels like giving.

So, tickets might be high, the artist also gets a fraction.

The ticket buyer only has one option, the artist only has one option. Both sides of the equation are losing while the grifter in the middle is taking a mad fat cut.

This is such a well documented clear cut case of monopoly, it makes me really sad that nobody is breaking it up. Just generally, that the system is failing.

[peteforde]

If monopoly laws were applied to Live Nation, who would pay the lobbyists? And if the lobbyists weren't paid, who would pay the politicians?

Your argument works on paper, but the ground truth is that the base price of tickets is 5x what it was when I was in high school. If you're a big enough artist to fill venues, trust that you've done just fine under this arrangement.

Recorded music is literally just a loss leader to sell tickets now.

And when you sell tickets, you can sell merch. Did you know that venues usually take a (large) cut of merch sales? The same venues that are owned by the same company that owns Ticketmaster, the venue, the promoter and the radio stations?

What monopoly? No monopoly here!

[tclancy]

It wouldn’t be HackerNews without the top comment explaining how the real fault lies with labor and not the rent seekers who showed up afterwards and sucked up all the excess value from consumer and supplier.