Ticketmaster obviously sucks, and their monopolistic business practices deserve a close look by regulators.
But the core of it is that an unregulated ticket market actually supports these prices. Fans keep showing that they're willing to dig deep and outbid each other to attend these events in person. Ticketmaster realizes this, and have set up a business model that extracts accordingly.
I think this is where us Americans get turned around. We tend to believe that it’s fair to charge the full market value for a thing, but we also have a sense that cultural experiences are "meant" to be shared equitably. But until we actually put a value on the latter, we're only ever going to have the former.
If you like specific acts, sure. Or maybe some cities take independent venues more seriously than others. Growing up, ok I missed out on getting Metallica tickets because I didn't want to support clear channel (or Live Nation, or TM, etc...), but I still was able to see plenty of amazing metal bands in indie venues.
Another interesting note: Weird Al is playing three venues within driving distance from me. Only one of them is selling tickets through TM.
Go see Weird Al. It was a really great show. My wife only knew one of his songs (Word Crimes, she's a professional editor), and she loved the show. I loved it too.
He also predicted the future for after the merger.
Its funny - of all the stuff people make up that was Obama's fault, no one ever mentions his admin allowing Ticketmaster and Live Nation to merge. Now they need to be broken up, probably like the Bell System back in the day. But I'll keep on dreaming about that.
My dad told tales of lining up outside a venue to buy a ticket from them directly. By the time I was old enough to be going to concerts, I had to camp out at a TicketMaster location. It made going to the show that much more memorable with the effort put into it. Screw the Baby Bell break up, break it up past the point of just ticket sales. Also break up who can own the venues in town.
One component of the total picture also is that many of these stadiums/arenas are being funded by the public / tax payer often by tax breaks etc. and the politicians / lobbies are using their relationship to monopolize that public good.
IMO every event at an area should go through a public auction / RFP of who is the ticketer for that event (maybe artist gets right of first refusal to pony up the difference for their preferred ticketer?)
This sort of thing is a strong argument (IMO) that these stadiums, arenas, theaters should be owned by the municipality they reside in.
Fine, we can call it a public good which is why they have nice tax incentives. But why stop there? If its truly a public good then why shouldn't the public simply own it? Why isn't the city operating these venues and using the ticket prices to offset tax burdens?
It might be harder to do this with a sports arena as there's a bunch of issues around the monopolies that are the MLB/NBA/etc. But when it comes to a theater style venue, I'd think most artists would be ecstatic to deal with a city rather than ticketmaster. It truly isn't the case that ticketmaster is providing almost anything of value for their venues. And for very large events they have to coordinate with the city anyways.
In the uk at least, live nation / Ticketmaster will sign exclusive deals with artists - limiting them to a summer run of (for eg) five live nation festivals and no performances at any non live nation events.
So even if alternative venues / festivals exist, live nation squeezes them out by being able to sign bigger multi venue/event deals.
They merged with LiveNation and they own half of the venues. The other half of the venues have exclusive deals with TicketMaster, who provides them with software to run venue logistics (TicketMaster for business), creating vendor lock-in.
Oh yea ticket master owns the venues. The artists can't revolt if they want to put on a big show. Software companies can't compete without dipping their toes into big money real estate property.
Software start ups are all about that 0 cost replication of software. One webserver spawns millions of threads for free. Start ups crack under the pressure of real world costs. Like sure anyone can make a website where users send tweets to each other. But if you have to spend billions of dollars constructing stadiums so Swifties can have an ex-ticket master experience... That's a hard sell to the software guys.
I felt that Amazon had the best chance to step into the ticketing game as they have the platform that can handle the volume spikes (Cyber Monday). But tech infrastructure is only a part of the puzzle.
I always wonder why ticketmaster/live nation isn't making more money? Given they are a monopoly, I'd expect them to be making a ton of profit. But it doesn't really seem to look that way: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/LYV:NYSE
Because a large proportion of the money flows out the door. Most of their revenue is pass-through revenue, due to the sports teams and concert promoters (and by extension musicians) they sell tickets for. Ticketing works as a high volume low margin business.
You need to deduct at least 70% (or more) from their topline to get a true picture of the company’s revenue vs revenue that walks straight out the door.
Ticketmaster's job is to take the heat for ticketing (high prices, BS fees, sketchy reselling, etc), but funnel enough money back to the producing parties (artist/event, venue, promoter) that nobody is going to go through the effort to try to compete.
Better to set their margins at 2-3% and keep a monopoly than be forced down in a competitive marketplace.
I try to always buy tickets on TickPick when I can (no affiliation). No fees and total prices are often much better than Ticketmaster. But my usecase is almost always buying from resellers. I never up-to-date to buy official tickets.
We already have a thriving marketplace of seating- it's called the airline industry. You can buy a seat on a plane from dozens if not hundreds of sellers online.
Ticketmaster has more vertical integration. They own the ticketing, ticket resale, the clubs, concert production, promotion and talent management. When you own the venue, you can lock out other ticket sellers. Artists are probably looking for a one stop shop for putting a tour together.
As an example, stubhub can sell/resell tickets, but that's about it.
Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow's Chokepoint Capitalism dedicates a chapter to the mechanisms through which TM enforces a virtual monopoly over live music.
> With all the hate Ticketmaster has gotten and all the other ticketing platforms out there, I'm surprised Ticketmaster still has a hold of pretty much the entire market.
That's the thing. Everyone hates Ticketmaster... but forgets that the venues and even many high profile artists could easily cancel their contracts with Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster takes the blame, rakes in the cash and distributes the cash to venues and artists. Everyone in the industry is complicit.
On top of that, I 'member the times here in Germany before the big gun Eventim took over, getting tickets used to be a clusterfuck before as your average 1000 seats venue just can't be expected to build a system that doesn't collapse under (often literally) hundreds of thousands to millions of fans.
The fix would be legislation, but given the amount of money in live events... it just won't happen.
Precisely this. Ticketmaster's entire business model is based around taking the blame. Artists don't want to set a face value for their tickets that represent a realistic market-clearing price, for fear of being seen as greedy; this leaves a lot of money on the table for scalpers. TM scrape as much of that value back for artists and venues, who get a cut of all the fees and charges and "authorized secondary resale". Selling tickets is the easy part; the secret sauce is selling tickets for as much as possible, while allowing the artists to pretend that they're being sold for a "fair" price.
When signing with TM is survival and not signing means your venue sits empty or your band has a hard time booking large venues, that's not a free choice. That's just coercion.
Rant:
Trying to buy tickets for the Knicks game at MSG. Is it really impossible to have a ticketing platform that prevents scalpers from marking up prices to an insane amount?
$10000+ for a ticket that originally costs around 2k should be illegal. Most of these tickets will go unsold I'm sure.
> $10000+ for a ticket that originally costs around 2k should be illegal. Most of these tickets will go unsold I'm sure.
I'm not so sure. See this article in the Washington Post where multiple season pass holders they talked to sold their seats for $5k+ quite quickly: "His tickets fetched more than $8,000 each within the first few hours of going up."
Without regulation, yes. Brokers (i.e. scalpers) will buy up tickets to events and take all of the risk off of TM’s plate, and reprice however they’d like. ~80% of tickets in the U.S. are sold this way. Stubhub has done a great job of lobbying for this since their existence depends on ticket brokers.
In my opinion, the scalping problem isn't really the primary problem with Ticketmaster's monopoly. Scalping is just the result of a gap between sale price and fair market value.
I also think that many of the things Ticketmaster could do to stop scalping would build further walls around their monopoly. To me, a ticket should generally be like a piece of a paper that has right of first sale. I don't want a situation where Ticketmaster has the right to hold my tickets hostage (which they're already doing quite a bit of with digital tickets).
As it relates to the resale market, Ticketmaster's main sins are:
- Making it impossible to engage in a safe secondhand ticket marketplace outside of their own platform. It would be technologically trivial to implement some kind of pre-purchase mechanism for buyers on third-party sites to verify the authenticity of resold tickets and ensure ownership gets transferred upon successful purchase, but the only real mechanism is transferring tickets somewhat blindly via email accounts. E.g., I go to StubHub and pinky promise that I'll transfer my tickets to the buyer via the Ticketmaster account when they pay, and the buyer pinky promises they won't fraudulently report that the ticket wasn't transferred. Ticketmaster could easily implement some kind of technological solution to having a more open escrow market that helps keep third-party transactions secure. There could be a buy/sell/trade API that they open up to providers like Venmo, Cash App, Zelle, PayPal, etc. But they keep it all within Ticketmaster to maintain that monopoly.
- Double-dipping on huge transaction fees on their own second-hand market. The only truly safe place to buy second-hand tickets is Ticketmaster (see above), and they take excessive fees far outside the realm of a fair transaction fee.
It's really the artists, vendors, promoters, teams who control the side that prevents scalpers from leaving seats empty. For example, I recently went to a concert where the artist/promoter simply didn't turn on ticket resale at all. I assume this was done to keep more hardcore fans in the seats rather than giving people temptations to sell.
You saw $10,000+ prices for a ticket, but the Knicks game will be filled all the way. It's just overpriced for now until game time gets closer. Or, perhaps $10,000 is just the fair market value. The building only fits 19,000 people inside. New York City has 350,000 households with over $1 million net worth.
Manhattan Scalpers won't leave unsold seats to a game like this, but they will try to offer prices far above fair market value until they figure out what that fair market value is.
It's also a situation where we either have to accept that New York City has a lot of wealthy people bringing up the fair market value, or the team has to decide to sacrifice revenue to enhance the fan experience (e.g., do a ticket lottery + named tickets that must match your ID).
> Manhattan Scalpers won't leave unsold seats to a game like this
In this situation, it is unlikely that is it scalpers with the really desirable court side seats that fetch the highest value. It is season ticket holders and people with connections. The price you see is essentially, "it's going to cost you this much to make me miss watching my team in the championship".
For the other seats that were available to the general public, sure, it's likely scalpers as with any other event.
But the core of it is that an unregulated ticket market actually supports these prices. Fans keep showing that they're willing to dig deep and outbid each other to attend these events in person. Ticketmaster realizes this, and have set up a business model that extracts accordingly.
I think this is where us Americans get turned around. We tend to believe that it’s fair to charge the full market value for a thing, but we also have a sense that cultural experiences are "meant" to be shared equitably. But until we actually put a value on the latter, we're only ever going to have the former.
https://stereogum.com/58831/trent_reznor_blasts_ticketmaster...
Another interesting note: Weird Al is playing three venues within driving distance from me. Only one of them is selling tickets through TM.
Its funny - of all the stuff people make up that was Obama's fault, no one ever mentions his admin allowing Ticketmaster and Live Nation to merge. Now they need to be broken up, probably like the Bell System back in the day. But I'll keep on dreaming about that.
IMO every event at an area should go through a public auction / RFP of who is the ticketer for that event (maybe artist gets right of first refusal to pony up the difference for their preferred ticketer?)
Fine, we can call it a public good which is why they have nice tax incentives. But why stop there? If its truly a public good then why shouldn't the public simply own it? Why isn't the city operating these venues and using the ticket prices to offset tax burdens?
It might be harder to do this with a sports arena as there's a bunch of issues around the monopolies that are the MLB/NBA/etc. But when it comes to a theater style venue, I'd think most artists would be ecstatic to deal with a city rather than ticketmaster. It truly isn't the case that ticketmaster is providing almost anything of value for their venues. And for very large events they have to coordinate with the city anyways.
In the uk at least, live nation / Ticketmaster will sign exclusive deals with artists - limiting them to a summer run of (for eg) five live nation festivals and no performances at any non live nation events.
So even if alternative venues / festivals exist, live nation squeezes them out by being able to sign bigger multi venue/event deals.
They have leverage with venues they dont own and a monopoly across industry verticals.
Sickening situation for music.
Software start ups are all about that 0 cost replication of software. One webserver spawns millions of threads for free. Start ups crack under the pressure of real world costs. Like sure anyone can make a website where users send tweets to each other. But if you have to spend billions of dollars constructing stadiums so Swifties can have an ex-ticket master experience... That's a hard sell to the software guys.
https://www.axs.com/
Some markets really are screwed.
You need to deduct at least 70% (or more) from their topline to get a true picture of the company’s revenue vs revenue that walks straight out the door.
Better to set their margins at 2-3% and keep a monopoly than be forced down in a competitive marketplace.
We already have a thriving marketplace of seating- it's called the airline industry. You can buy a seat on a plane from dozens if not hundreds of sellers online.
As an example, stubhub can sell/resell tickets, but that's about it.
That's the thing. Everyone hates Ticketmaster... but forgets that the venues and even many high profile artists could easily cancel their contracts with Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster takes the blame, rakes in the cash and distributes the cash to venues and artists. Everyone in the industry is complicit.
On top of that, I 'member the times here in Germany before the big gun Eventim took over, getting tickets used to be a clusterfuck before as your average 1000 seats venue just can't be expected to build a system that doesn't collapse under (often literally) hundreds of thousands to millions of fans.
The fix would be legislation, but given the amount of money in live events... it just won't happen.
Pearl Jam tried to tour without Ticketmaster in 1994 but several venues turned them down because of contracts. They ended up signing with TM a few years later. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taki...
When signing with TM is survival and not signing means your venue sits empty or your band has a hard time booking large venues, that's not a free choice. That's just coercion.
Related:
Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225357
$10000+ for a ticket that originally costs around 2k should be illegal. Most of these tickets will go unsold I'm sure.
see https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ontario-ticket-resale-cap-e...
The tickets have already been sold. These postings are for resales.
I'm not so sure. See this article in the Washington Post where multiple season pass holders they talked to sold their seats for $5k+ quite quickly: "His tickets fetched more than $8,000 each within the first few hours of going up."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2026/06/08/knicks-seas...
I also think that many of the things Ticketmaster could do to stop scalping would build further walls around their monopoly. To me, a ticket should generally be like a piece of a paper that has right of first sale. I don't want a situation where Ticketmaster has the right to hold my tickets hostage (which they're already doing quite a bit of with digital tickets).
As it relates to the resale market, Ticketmaster's main sins are:
- Making it impossible to engage in a safe secondhand ticket marketplace outside of their own platform. It would be technologically trivial to implement some kind of pre-purchase mechanism for buyers on third-party sites to verify the authenticity of resold tickets and ensure ownership gets transferred upon successful purchase, but the only real mechanism is transferring tickets somewhat blindly via email accounts. E.g., I go to StubHub and pinky promise that I'll transfer my tickets to the buyer via the Ticketmaster account when they pay, and the buyer pinky promises they won't fraudulently report that the ticket wasn't transferred. Ticketmaster could easily implement some kind of technological solution to having a more open escrow market that helps keep third-party transactions secure. There could be a buy/sell/trade API that they open up to providers like Venmo, Cash App, Zelle, PayPal, etc. But they keep it all within Ticketmaster to maintain that monopoly.
- Double-dipping on huge transaction fees on their own second-hand market. The only truly safe place to buy second-hand tickets is Ticketmaster (see above), and they take excessive fees far outside the realm of a fair transaction fee.
It's really the artists, vendors, promoters, teams who control the side that prevents scalpers from leaving seats empty. For example, I recently went to a concert where the artist/promoter simply didn't turn on ticket resale at all. I assume this was done to keep more hardcore fans in the seats rather than giving people temptations to sell.
You saw $10,000+ prices for a ticket, but the Knicks game will be filled all the way. It's just overpriced for now until game time gets closer. Or, perhaps $10,000 is just the fair market value. The building only fits 19,000 people inside. New York City has 350,000 households with over $1 million net worth.
Manhattan Scalpers won't leave unsold seats to a game like this, but they will try to offer prices far above fair market value until they figure out what that fair market value is.
It's also a situation where we either have to accept that New York City has a lot of wealthy people bringing up the fair market value, or the team has to decide to sacrifice revenue to enhance the fan experience (e.g., do a ticket lottery + named tickets that must match your ID).
In this situation, it is unlikely that is it scalpers with the really desirable court side seats that fetch the highest value. It is season ticket holders and people with connections. The price you see is essentially, "it's going to cost you this much to make me miss watching my team in the championship".
For the other seats that were available to the general public, sure, it's likely scalpers as with any other event.