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.
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.
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
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?
> 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%)
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.
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.
From the point of view of the promoters, concerts are a two-sided marketplace. Two-sided marketplaces are notoriously difficult for small players to compete in. You need to attract good acts so people will buy tickets, but to attract the top acts you need to show that you can sell lots of tickets.
Ticketmaster avoided the two-sided market problem until they reached scale. They were just a website where you buy tickets, an IT appliance for promoters.
But then Ticketmaster started buying out promoters, and that short circuited the entire system. Fans can't buy tickets from a different storefront because their favorite artists are only booking performances with ticketmaster-controlled venues. Top talent can't book high-grossing venues that aren't owned by ticketmaster, because Ticketmaster owns the promoters.
Scalpers are a symptom, the disease is consolidation of competitive markets by corporations. This kind of situation is precisely why antitrust law exists.
Just tried searching for a long-form article I read in recent years. Wish I could find it, but obviously the facts are not a secret. It explained in depth all the problems with the monopoly, but it also pointed out something very surprising to me. A few artists have spoken out angrily on behalf of their fans. However, the fact is, the artists in general do financially benefit from Ticketmaster's way of doing things. Part of Ticketmaster's business model is taking the heat from the fans who don't like paying all the extra fees so that the anger is not directed at the artists. If an artist wants to set the floor at $150 but knows fans might be upset, they can drop the price 30% and TicketMaster can help them make up the difference in fees, and Ticketmaster has nothing to lose. The artists get to keep their reputation intact instead of appearing greedy to fans.
Agree... and not defending Ticketmaster, but regarding scalpers in general, I am not sure why one would blame only the ticketing system.
If the artists are willing to say sell tickets for $50.00 and the demand is such that some resell to $400.00 the same seat. Is it the fault of the ticketing system ? Who is the victim ?
- The artist who could have make more money (but then they could have price it better)
- The fans who are basically competing to see that show ?
Scalpers are optimizing the market.
Maybe the solution to mitigate scalpers would be for ticket holders to only be able to resell their tickets through the same platform. Then the artist could decide if the fans can resell to the platform at face value, or for a profit. Then the artist could decide if the ticket can be sold by the platform with a markup or not.
Basically given the power and control to the artist.
The cure did this, we got tickets a few days before the shore, bought from reseller directly through ticket master but they could only be relisted at face value, got 8th for $75 I think, it was a great show
> Ticketmaster avoided the two-sided market problem until they reached scale. They were just a website where you buy tickets, an IT appliance for promoters.
Ticketmaster had scale before the internet was really a thing. They had a box offices at record stores (Like Tower records) where you could book tickets.
Specifically the part where he'd play at a non LiveNation/Ticketmaster venue, and right after, TM would find out and would make a deal with the venue to be their exclusive promoter. Insanity.
That was a good watch. From your comment, it seemed like this was a low-medium level issue with low-medium venues doing exclusive deals with LN/TM but Madison Square Garden is arguably the most prestigious venue in the world.
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.
My college job was at a record store that had a Ticketmaster machine. If you didn't want to pay the $2.50 fee[1] (we got only like 15 cents or something) you could go to the venue and buy tickets directly.
But since they became a monopoly that option is unavailable. Their contracts with the venues include that they get their full fee, even when bought in person.
[1] Which paid for the custom ticket printer, the ticket stock, the CRT terminal, and the central computer. We paid for the data line and donated the counter space.
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.
True, I do see a thriving ecosystem here in Europe for some more fringey types of acts. There's like resident advisor ( https://ra.co ), XCEED ( https://xceed.me ) . Probably because some events don't meet ticketmaster's T&Cs (they can be a bit spicy).
In fact I have not used ticketmaster in the last 2 years, the last time was a big ticket stadium-type thing. Most of the events I attend are doing it through resident advisor and I have about 40 tickets in my history there now. I'm glad the ecosystem hold by ticketmaster is being broken, at least here in Europe.
Though even there you do see some ticketmaster crap popping up like universe.com
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.
I just saw him a couple weeks ago. It's such a fun show, people there are from ALL walks. He's no spring chicken but he gives it his all, and his band and backups do too. Just an all-around great dude.
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.
Looking at the world cup ticket prices gives me a mini heart attack. I don't know who is responsible for such high prices (maybe a combination of FIFA and Ticketmaster?), but goddamn these prices are insane. It is going to price out most people. Either that, or people are going to get into debt, just to see a couple of matches to see their favorite teams play.
The real crime is that FIFA is allowed to interfere with mass transit schedules for venues already equipped to handle large events. Non-spectators are being unfairly disenfranchised if they need to use public services they, and not FIFA, are paying for with taxes.
> "Every match is already sold out," Fifa president Gianni Infantino said in February. "We keep some tickets back for some last-minute sales, of course, but every match is sold out."
> Like most things about this World Cup, the reality appears to be different.
> Fifa should not have a problem selling out the games featuring the marquee teams - Argentina, Brazil, England, Germany and Spain, to name a few.
> We should be able to say the same about the host nations, but Fifa has priced these games so highly that only two of the nine matches featuring Canada, Mexico or the United States are officially sold out.
> on Saturday there were close to 74,000 tickets available across 86 of the 104 matches.
FIFA has switched to "variable pricing" under Infantino. Ticketmaster's just riding his coattails.
> It is going to price out most people.
Pretty much. I guess FIFA just figured they'd make more money milking the already rich. They must've seen the Superbowl finals performance and figured that broligarchs will pay those rates.
The biggest promotor here, Mojo, a subsidiary of Live Nation, occassionally requires venues to use Ticketmaster (Live Nation-owned) for events featuring the artists they manage.
The artist is why people buy tickets, and they control that part of the market.
In the US they also own a bunch of venues. They can pressure other independent venues into using Ticketmaster, they own 80% of big venues in the US, so the venue needs the artist, not the other way around.
No independent venue wants to use Ticketmaster, but they have to to book the big names.
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.
Hi, I used to work at a startup in Toronto that did compete against ticketmaster called Uniiverse. In the end they go bought out by ticketmaster. I don't know the details because I left way before then but this is one example of a company trying.
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.
FWIW I actually prefer we simply tell private businesses that it's their responsibility to provide the environment/setting their employees work in. By that I mean if ticket master wants a monopoly they should have to build the stadiums too. No taxpayer money, incentives, land, or other interest group perks given.
Most cities have lots of venues of various sizes, I like a market place of them rather than a publicly owned monopoly. (Hence why I dont like Canada healthcare either)
I think a few providers, particularly with high fixed assets like venues, will always dominate in pricing power over many buyers (same for oil companies). The difference between oil and events is that they're elective (not a real need) and almost never substitutes (you don't go to one performer instead of another due to price). So providers really have the incentive to avoid competition (just as movies used to avoid coming out the same weekend). Altogether this drives towards provider coordination if not consolidation.
As others have pointed out, high prices and additional fees are just extracting higher prices, which is good for the providers financially.
The more interesting question is: since ticketmaster has a monopoly, why have price tickets at all?
The most efficient way to maximize price is the auction (assuming you can eliminate re-selling), particularly the dutch auction which reduces signaling.
With auctions, the performer takes no reputational hit for the outrageous price. Losing fans would have to blame the winning fans.
Also, you get a lot more information about the market, and could see softening demand or specific preferences (to, e.g., increase or decrease the luxury boxes).
That also tracks the winners/loser zeitgeist in the US, where people want to signal that they're in the 1%/10%.
My few concerts were real milestones in my life, but they were always the first shows of a great performer, relatively intimate and cheap (and always pure luck). I wish others could have that experience instead of the overpackaged hyper-produced events of today (required to support the high venue investments).
People would revolt if there were auctions, because it would make it impossible for many people to attend live events. Right now there is the hope that you can, even if that’s most not true.
For example, I did the Amex presale for US Open tickets. There were 22k people in front of me for regular day passes during the earliest rounds. So we end up with an auction-ish situation anyway, via the resale market, but can blame scalpers.
The thin illusion keeps it palatable enough, if only barely. Ticketmaster is wants to extract the most profit. Being hated is fine. Being regulated because you’re _too_ hated is not.
There's a lot of good responses here, which I agree with. Namely: it works for them and anti-trust law (enforcement) is weak. Competing with a such a well-engineered, deep (vertical integration, etc.) monopoly is extremely difficult and the smart business strategy for a ~startup in the space is to sell out to Ticketmaster. Attempting to challenge them on their turf is more or less impossible at least as a relatively small entity.
But I'm interested in the framing of the question. You say "yet", "still" ... when there was.
There was a healthy (at least healthier) market that was cynically, systematically corrupted over years/decades to get to the state its in today.
During that period, there were warning signs. There was a lack of an effective counter to the behaviour.
It's easy to say that "nobody cared" which isn't quite true, of course. Nobody in a position of power cared. The venues were in a precarious position by default -- easy to squeeze. The acts aren't your friend, they're businesses. Regular people that speak up about this sort of thing get silenced because "businesses exist to make money".
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 spent several years working for a competitor of Ticketmaster. The industry is really difficult to break into.
First, there's the chicken and egg problem of content (events) and consumers. One big part of the sales process is a venue or promoter understanding how your platform will support their sales and marketing processes. If you already have consumers with an app and push notifications, it's an easy sell.
Another issue is cash flow. Deals often depends on what advance you're willing to pay, and it's not uncommon for very large venues to get signed at a loss just for the content. You need the cash to compete, and the big boys will happily take a hit on the big venues to hold onto them. The actual take per ticket is quite a low margin, and if a venue performs worse than you'd hoped you can easily end up making a lot less than planned.
Then you've got all the usual RFP noise around feature offerings. Plus regulation in different countries (looking at you, Italy).
You need investors to fund your sales process, and your development all at very low margins. You also need all the industry connections to build an enterprise sales pipeline and secure business. All of that is to say it's a difficult industry to get any sort of a foot hold in, let alone grow enough to be a serious contender.
The company I worked at ended up doing several rounds of layoffs followed by a very poor sale with no consideration to staff options. It's limping on as it slowly gets absorbed into the company who bought them who are also in the ticketing and event space.
>With all the hate Ticketmaster has gotten [...], I'm surprised Ticketmaster still has a hold of pretty much the entire market. How are they doing this?
This question is a common mystery because you're using the perspective of the fans. E.g. "I hate Tickemaster ridiculous fees because it's price gouging, etc"
But the mystery of Ticketmaster being dominant is solved once you understand it from the perspective of the venues, promoters, and the artists. They are the true customers of Ticketaster. Ticketmaster's various "convenience fees, surcharges, etc" are just creative financial tricks to funnel more money back to venues+promoters+artists but still keep the ticket's face price artificially lower.
The alternative arrangement would be the ticket's face price being much higher to reflect the "true market price" but that means the artists would be the ones perceived as price gouging. Instead, just charge the higher price via convenience fees and let Ticketmaster take the public relations hit. The psychological manipulation of fans is working exactly as designed.
When the fans wish that there was another true competitor to Ticketmaster, what they're saying is they want "a service that charges less money". But that idea conflicts with the venues/promoters/artists that want to charge more money.
Therefore, if you really want to disrupt Ticketmaster, you need to charge even higher fees and more expensive ticket prices so that the greedy venues & artists will get more money from you and thus choose your service over Ticketmaster. I don't think that's the type of competitive disruption fans have in mind.
And the common cited reasons of vertical integration of LiveNation and owning the venues doesn't explain Ticketmaster's advantage. They were already dominant in the 1980s and 1990s before LiveNation acquired venues. Taylor Swift's tour promotor was AEG (not LiveNation) and she played at many stadiums owned by the cities (not owned by LiveNation) and she still chose Ticketmaster to be the selling agent for those locations. One of the reasons is she negotiated 110% of ticket's face price from Ticketmaster. How is extracting that type of money even mathematically even possible?!? The add-on "convenience fees".
what they're saying is they want "a service that charges less money". But that idea conflicts with the venues/promoters/artists that want to charge more money.
And it also conflicts with the other fans who are willing to pay more. There is no possible world where you can reliably get Taylor Swift tickets for $25.
>, the problem isn't actually TM, but its the big-name artists?
It's all 3 participants of venues AND promoters AND artists :
- venues (the ones not owned by LiveNation) choose Ticketmaster because they like getting the big advance payments in exchange for signing exclusive deals. Other smaller competitors don't have the financial war chest to make similar offers. They also have decades of technical expertise to handle complicated seating configurations. E.g. Madison Square Gardens can be configured as basketball, or hockey rink, or music concert with drastically different seating arrangements. Venues also like getting a revenue share of the add-on fees.
- promoters (not LiveNation) choose Ticketmaster because they're the biggest sales platform. They also have decades of technical expertise to craft various seat pricing tiers for all the desirable venues that the promoters want to use. Promoters want to achieve a "revenue target" that goes beyond the ticket's face price and Ticketmaster will craft the various add-on fees so the promoter gets more money. The add-on fees are all customizable.
- artists choose Ticketmaster because they're the biggest sales platform and also get a slice of the add-on fees.
If it's not a mega-artist like Taylor Swift, it's actually the promoters and the venues that have a bigger influence on choosing Ticketmaster.
The older I get, the less interested I am in seeing big bands. I'm lucky to live in an area with a great local music scene, plenty of independent venues.
I can't think of a single band I'd pay these extortionate prices for, I'd much rather support a local band and local venue.
I'm in Europe and i use DICE a lot, it's a great app. And most of the time tickets are on sale on multiple platforms at once here (eg DICE and Ticketmaster)
Indeed. Pick any two of Ticketmaster, Dice, AXS, Skiddle and seetickets. There are so many it's not straightforward to track down where your ticket is when you're off to the gig.
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 don’t get why Spotify didn’t inject themselves into the ticket buying pipeline. They recently announced something but it’s kind of strange.
I often find I learn about a festival or concert too late to buy tickets or they are prohibitively expensive. Spotify knows who I listen too and where I live, I don’t get why it can’t remind my to buy tickets X months before the event. I can even manually see an artists concert schedule.
It then be trivial to monetize this. If 50% of people buying tickets on Ticketmaster, actually are going through Spotify first, that gives Spotify a lot of power in an otherwise asymmetrical position.
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.
The market wont change until someone discovers a method to sell better than ticketmaster.
Yes ticketmaster sucks, but when competition pops up, it isnt like an order of magnitude better than ticketmaster.
Its like Cabcharge. The first real thing that ever challenged it was uber.
I change here needs to be similar. Maybe a presale marketplace to attract events? Tours could change to follow the money to an extent? Then the money is there on the table and the venue can make the decision whether to change its Ticketmaster only policy or not.
Nah, theres not a technical or business solution to this. Music is cultural and we'll develop new cultural technology to solve it. Vision + regulation would help things move a little faster but the pendulums swing is inevitable.
I think the problem isn't that competition needs to be an order of magnitude better, it's that if places have exclusivity agreements, it doesn't matter how much better you are.
The comment in [1] also outlines a bunch of reasons it's extremely difficult to break into.
What exactly is the problem with Ticketmaster? Scott Wiener's California junk fees law blocked them from late-revealing charges so what you see is pretty much what you get. They have a pretty good system for transferring tickets or relisting ones for sale that you already have. They've got a janky login system but I'm sure it's because they're being anti-fraud or whatever. Overall, I don't have much of a problem with Ticketmaster.
https://pretix.eu is having some success in the EU market. But other sibling posts correctly point out this is… let's just say "overall shit situation".
We also have Eventim and many other local ticket shops. I usually get my tickets right at the venue's online shop, or maybe from the artist. They use all kinds of systems.
They captured like 90% of the German ticket market by closely watching Ticketmaster and basically repeating their playbook. Eventim also owns some venues, has exclusive contracts with many of them it doesn't outright own, hosts an official fan resale site, offers promotional services and generally integrates a lot of the business around large events vertically.
What's actually interesting is that it seems to be possible to compete with Ticketmaster only by copying their playbook on a large-enough scale, and Germany appears to be large enough. The Netherlands right next to Germany don't seem to have been large enough, as Ticketmaster basically controls them.
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 don't know much about the details work (I don't buy tickets through TM), but I've wondered why doesn't TM just ban the resale of tickets? If someone buys a ticket from TM for $100 and resells it for $300, that person is pocketing the $200 difference, not TM. So why does TM allow it?
> 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.
[this is probably not the answer you want to read]
Because Ticketmaster has been a force in the market for decades (at least since the 1980’s), the simplest market based explanation is that using Ticketmaster is often obviously the economically rational choice.
For example, many people who dislike Ticketmaster choose to buy tickets through Ticketmaster rather than exercise their alternatives. The same is true for performers and venues.
Because that is how markets work.
Any potential competitor has to do some, many. or all the things Ticketmaster does…not the least of which is staying in business…and that’s non-trivial.
Or at least that is what ordinary market economic theory strongly suggests.
Ticketmaster's clients are the venues and/or promotors (or both), not the ticket buyer (i.e. you). The undesirable convenience fees and other fees collected go to the venue & promotor, not to Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster's actual service fees are just a few percent -- not the 20-30% you see when you check out. They are effectively a punching bag to allow the venues , promotors & artists to collect excessive fees while retaining goodwill with the fans.
The more you hate Ticketmaster, the better they are doing their job, really (assuming reliable service is being provided, which they do well).
Moreover, pricing , tiering, selling, lobbying , on-sales, marketing, customer support, check in / validation (often without stable internet) are really hard problems.
The lesson here : the consumer experience of a business is usually just the tip of the iceberg, and extremely biased , often missing the crux of the business.
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.
The hundreds of "travel agents" selling through GDS online have functionally no competitive pressure, they're all booking through the airline's CRS on your behalf in the end -- it's really no different than ticketmaster's reseller marketplace.
Airline price competition comes from multiple airlines running the same route.
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.
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."
If there is demand for tickets at $10,000, then people will find a way to sell them for $10,000. Any regulation that would somehow prevent that would only make it even more impossible to buy ticktets due to shortages.
Games and concerts are luxury goods. If you can't afford to go, don't go.
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.
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.
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!
DICE are owned by Fever as of 2025.
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...
What incentive would Oasis have to help bring down the prices for their own shows anyway?
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
You're basically describing my idea of hell.
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?
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
> 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%)
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.
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.
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.
From the point of view of the promoters, concerts are a two-sided marketplace. Two-sided marketplaces are notoriously difficult for small players to compete in. You need to attract good acts so people will buy tickets, but to attract the top acts you need to show that you can sell lots of tickets.
Ticketmaster avoided the two-sided market problem until they reached scale. They were just a website where you buy tickets, an IT appliance for promoters.
But then Ticketmaster started buying out promoters, and that short circuited the entire system. Fans can't buy tickets from a different storefront because their favorite artists are only booking performances with ticketmaster-controlled venues. Top talent can't book high-grossing venues that aren't owned by ticketmaster, because Ticketmaster owns the promoters.
Scalpers are a symptom, the disease is consolidation of competitive markets by corporations. This kind of situation is precisely why antitrust law exists.
Just tried searching for a long-form article I read in recent years. Wish I could find it, but obviously the facts are not a secret. It explained in depth all the problems with the monopoly, but it also pointed out something very surprising to me. A few artists have spoken out angrily on behalf of their fans. However, the fact is, the artists in general do financially benefit from Ticketmaster's way of doing things. Part of Ticketmaster's business model is taking the heat from the fans who don't like paying all the extra fees so that the anger is not directed at the artists. If an artist wants to set the floor at $150 but knows fans might be upset, they can drop the price 30% and TicketMaster can help them make up the difference in fees, and Ticketmaster has nothing to lose. The artists get to keep their reputation intact instead of appearing greedy to fans.
Was it possibly actually a podcast? https://www.npr.org/2025/10/23/nx-s1-5582775/are-concert-tic...
You know what? Might have been Freakonomics:
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-the-live-event-ticke...
I remember a Planet Money episode, but I can't find it now. Maybe it was NPR instead
Agree... and not defending Ticketmaster, but regarding scalpers in general, I am not sure why one would blame only the ticketing system.
If the artists are willing to say sell tickets for $50.00 and the demand is such that some resell to $400.00 the same seat. Is it the fault of the ticketing system ? Who is the victim ? - The artist who could have make more money (but then they could have price it better) - The fans who are basically competing to see that show ?
Scalpers are optimizing the market.
Maybe the solution to mitigate scalpers would be for ticket holders to only be able to resell their tickets through the same platform. Then the artist could decide if the fans can resell to the platform at face value, or for a profit. Then the artist could decide if the ticket can be sold by the platform with a markup or not.
Basically given the power and control to the artist.
The cure did this, we got tickets a few days before the shore, bought from reseller directly through ticket master but they could only be relisted at face value, got 8th for $75 I think, it was a great show
There were local ticket operations across the US, ticketmaster just bought them all up
> Ticketmaster avoided the two-sided market problem until they reached scale. They were just a website where you buy tickets, an IT appliance for promoters.
Ticketmaster had scale before the internet was really a thing. They had a box offices at record stores (Like Tower records) where you could book tickets.
Fixed the last sentence for you: "This kind of situation is exactly why lobbying exists"
Well put
Here's a fascinating clip that's stuck with me of Louis CK talking about trying to circumvent ticketmaster: https://youtu.be/UtoyMpR-mWY?si=LHfmofSERrQZLEj9&t=3015
Specifically the part where he'd play at a non LiveNation/Ticketmaster venue, and right after, TM would find out and would make a deal with the venue to be their exclusive promoter. Insanity.
That was a good watch. From your comment, it seemed like this was a low-medium level issue with low-medium venues doing exclusive deals with LN/TM but Madison Square Garden is arguably the most prestigious venue in the world.
Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) gave a good explanation many years ago already:
https://stereogum.com/58831/trent_reznor_blasts_ticketmaster...
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.
My college job was at a record store that had a Ticketmaster machine. If you didn't want to pay the $2.50 fee[1] (we got only like 15 cents or something) you could go to the venue and buy tickets directly.
But since they became a monopoly that option is unavailable. Their contracts with the venues include that they get their full fee, even when bought in person.
[1] Which paid for the custom ticket printer, the ticket stock, the CRT terminal, and the central computer. We paid for the data line and donated the counter space.
Worse, they are all owned by the same company now. It’s all a multi-headed hydra of suck. Live Music has been completely monopolized.
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.
True, I do see a thriving ecosystem here in Europe for some more fringey types of acts. There's like resident advisor ( https://ra.co ), XCEED ( https://xceed.me ) . Probably because some events don't meet ticketmaster's T&Cs (they can be a bit spicy).
In fact I have not used ticketmaster in the last 2 years, the last time was a big ticket stadium-type thing. Most of the events I attend are doing it through resident advisor and I have about 40 tickets in my history there now. I'm glad the ecosystem hold by ticketmaster is being broken, at least here in Europe.
Though even there you do see some ticketmaster crap popping up like universe.com
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.
Strongly agreed. He played BlizzCon a few years back and it was my favorite part of the weekend.
I just saw him a couple weeks ago. It's such a fun show, people there are from ALL walks. He's no spring chicken but he gives it his all, and his band and backups do too. Just an all-around great dude.
Will confirm, all-around great dude. He's the kind of guy you WOULD find in those independent venues. He'll happily go out of his way for it.
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.
Looking at the world cup ticket prices gives me a mini heart attack. I don't know who is responsible for such high prices (maybe a combination of FIFA and Ticketmaster?), but goddamn these prices are insane. It is going to price out most people. Either that, or people are going to get into debt, just to see a couple of matches to see their favorite teams play.
There are very limited seats (a few teens of thousands). Free market logic dictates that the 100000 richest fans get the tickets.
If you don't like it, you are not a true believer in a free market. There's a reason social democrat countries heavily subsidize culture.
Stadiums are still going to be full, that’s why it will keep happening.
People voting with their wallets goes both ways.
The real crime is that FIFA is allowed to interfere with mass transit schedules for venues already equipped to handle large events. Non-spectators are being unfairly disenfranchised if they need to use public services they, and not FIFA, are paying for with taxes.
It's not clear they will be. Or maybe not with the fans that wanted to see their teams.
https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/ckgpv7v4p9lo
> "Every match is already sold out," Fifa president Gianni Infantino said in February. "We keep some tickets back for some last-minute sales, of course, but every match is sold out."
> Like most things about this World Cup, the reality appears to be different.
> Fifa should not have a problem selling out the games featuring the marquee teams - Argentina, Brazil, England, Germany and Spain, to name a few.
> We should be able to say the same about the host nations, but Fifa has priced these games so highly that only two of the nine matches featuring Canada, Mexico or the United States are officially sold out.
> on Saturday there were close to 74,000 tickets available across 86 of the 104 matches.
FIFA has switched to "variable pricing" under Infantino. Ticketmaster's just riding his coattails.
> It is going to price out most people.
Pretty much. I guess FIFA just figured they'd make more money milking the already rich. They must've seen the Superbowl finals performance and figured that broligarchs will pay those rates.
I run a ticketing SaaS in the Netherlands.
The biggest promotor here, Mojo, a subsidiary of Live Nation, occassionally requires venues to use Ticketmaster (Live Nation-owned) for events featuring the artists they manage.
The artist is why people buy tickets, and they control that part of the market.
In the US they also own a bunch of venues. They can pressure other independent venues into using Ticketmaster, they own 80% of big venues in the US, so the venue needs the artist, not the other way around.
No independent venue wants to use Ticketmaster, but they have to to book the big names.
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.
Vendor lock-in by any other name boils down to monopoly. The moat is their lobby.
And they manage tours for bands. So it’s very hard for them to play independent venues and still have access to the big livenation venues
They also own a lot of the venue infrastructure across the industry such as catering, tour buses, security,...
They have leverage with venues they dont own and a monopoly across industry verticals.
Sickening situation for music.
Hi, I used to work at a startup in Toronto that did compete against ticketmaster called Uniiverse. In the end they go bought out by ticketmaster. I don't know the details because I left way before then but this is one example of a company trying.
were they trying to compete, or just hoping to get acquired lol
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.
FWIW I actually prefer we simply tell private businesses that it's their responsibility to provide the environment/setting their employees work in. By that I mean if ticket master wants a monopoly they should have to build the stadiums too. No taxpayer money, incentives, land, or other interest group perks given.
I'm ok with either. Though I tend to think public ownership makes more sense because a city can only support so many venues in general.
Most cities have lots of venues of various sizes, I like a market place of them rather than a publicly owned monopoly. (Hence why I dont like Canada healthcare either)
Check who owns vs manages shoreline amphitheater
:(
I think a few providers, particularly with high fixed assets like venues, will always dominate in pricing power over many buyers (same for oil companies). The difference between oil and events is that they're elective (not a real need) and almost never substitutes (you don't go to one performer instead of another due to price). So providers really have the incentive to avoid competition (just as movies used to avoid coming out the same weekend). Altogether this drives towards provider coordination if not consolidation.
As others have pointed out, high prices and additional fees are just extracting higher prices, which is good for the providers financially.
The more interesting question is: since ticketmaster has a monopoly, why have price tickets at all?
The most efficient way to maximize price is the auction (assuming you can eliminate re-selling), particularly the dutch auction which reduces signaling.
With auctions, the performer takes no reputational hit for the outrageous price. Losing fans would have to blame the winning fans.
Also, you get a lot more information about the market, and could see softening demand or specific preferences (to, e.g., increase or decrease the luxury boxes).
That also tracks the winners/loser zeitgeist in the US, where people want to signal that they're in the 1%/10%.
My few concerts were real milestones in my life, but they were always the first shows of a great performer, relatively intimate and cheap (and always pure luck). I wish others could have that experience instead of the overpackaged hyper-produced events of today (required to support the high venue investments).
People would revolt if there were auctions, because it would make it impossible for many people to attend live events. Right now there is the hope that you can, even if that’s most not true.
For example, I did the Amex presale for US Open tickets. There were 22k people in front of me for regular day passes during the earliest rounds. So we end up with an auction-ish situation anyway, via the resale market, but can blame scalpers.
The thin illusion keeps it palatable enough, if only barely. Ticketmaster is wants to extract the most profit. Being hated is fine. Being regulated because you’re _too_ hated is not.
There's a lot of good responses here, which I agree with. Namely: it works for them and anti-trust law (enforcement) is weak. Competing with a such a well-engineered, deep (vertical integration, etc.) monopoly is extremely difficult and the smart business strategy for a ~startup in the space is to sell out to Ticketmaster. Attempting to challenge them on their turf is more or less impossible at least as a relatively small entity.
But I'm interested in the framing of the question. You say "yet", "still" ... when there was. There was a healthy (at least healthier) market that was cynically, systematically corrupted over years/decades to get to the state its in today. During that period, there were warning signs. There was a lack of an effective counter to the behaviour. It's easy to say that "nobody cared" which isn't quite true, of course. Nobody in a position of power cared. The venues were in a precarious position by default -- easy to squeeze. The acts aren't your friend, they're businesses. Regular people that speak up about this sort of thing get silenced because "businesses exist to make money".
As others pointed out, it only sucks for the buying side. The actual customers instead get price gouging and taking-the-blame as a service.
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 spent several years working for a competitor of Ticketmaster. The industry is really difficult to break into.
First, there's the chicken and egg problem of content (events) and consumers. One big part of the sales process is a venue or promoter understanding how your platform will support their sales and marketing processes. If you already have consumers with an app and push notifications, it's an easy sell.
Another issue is cash flow. Deals often depends on what advance you're willing to pay, and it's not uncommon for very large venues to get signed at a loss just for the content. You need the cash to compete, and the big boys will happily take a hit on the big venues to hold onto them. The actual take per ticket is quite a low margin, and if a venue performs worse than you'd hoped you can easily end up making a lot less than planned.
Then you've got all the usual RFP noise around feature offerings. Plus regulation in different countries (looking at you, Italy).
You need investors to fund your sales process, and your development all at very low margins. You also need all the industry connections to build an enterprise sales pipeline and secure business. All of that is to say it's a difficult industry to get any sort of a foot hold in, let alone grow enough to be a serious contender.
The company I worked at ended up doing several rounds of layoffs followed by a very poor sale with no consideration to staff options. It's limping on as it slowly gets absorbed into the company who bought them who are also in the ticketing and event space.
>With all the hate Ticketmaster has gotten [...], I'm surprised Ticketmaster still has a hold of pretty much the entire market. How are they doing this?
This question is a common mystery because you're using the perspective of the fans. E.g. "I hate Tickemaster ridiculous fees because it's price gouging, etc"
But the mystery of Ticketmaster being dominant is solved once you understand it from the perspective of the venues, promoters, and the artists. They are the true customers of Ticketaster. Ticketmaster's various "convenience fees, surcharges, etc" are just creative financial tricks to funnel more money back to venues+promoters+artists but still keep the ticket's face price artificially lower.
The alternative arrangement would be the ticket's face price being much higher to reflect the "true market price" but that means the artists would be the ones perceived as price gouging. Instead, just charge the higher price via convenience fees and let Ticketmaster take the public relations hit. The psychological manipulation of fans is working exactly as designed.
When the fans wish that there was another true competitor to Ticketmaster, what they're saying is they want "a service that charges less money". But that idea conflicts with the venues/promoters/artists that want to charge more money.
Therefore, if you really want to disrupt Ticketmaster, you need to charge even higher fees and more expensive ticket prices so that the greedy venues & artists will get more money from you and thus choose your service over Ticketmaster. I don't think that's the type of competitive disruption fans have in mind.
And the common cited reasons of vertical integration of LiveNation and owning the venues doesn't explain Ticketmaster's advantage. They were already dominant in the 1980s and 1990s before LiveNation acquired venues. Taylor Swift's tour promotor was AEG (not LiveNation) and she played at many stadiums owned by the cities (not owned by LiveNation) and she still chose Ticketmaster to be the selling agent for those locations. One of the reasons is she negotiated 110% of ticket's face price from Ticketmaster. How is extracting that type of money even mathematically even possible?!? The add-on "convenience fees".
Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drip_pricing
Entirely correct.
what they're saying is they want "a service that charges less money". But that idea conflicts with the venues/promoters/artists that want to charge more money.
And it also conflicts with the other fans who are willing to pay more. There is no possible world where you can reliably get Taylor Swift tickets for $25.
>The add-on "convenience fees".
Hence the US needs 'full price up front' laws in the same manner as Australia does. This kind of law shuts this crap down fast.
so wait, the problem isn't actually TM, but its the big-name artists? (not disputing what you wrote, just surprised I guess)
>, the problem isn't actually TM, but its the big-name artists?
It's all 3 participants of venues AND promoters AND artists :
- venues (the ones not owned by LiveNation) choose Ticketmaster because they like getting the big advance payments in exchange for signing exclusive deals. Other smaller competitors don't have the financial war chest to make similar offers. They also have decades of technical expertise to handle complicated seating configurations. E.g. Madison Square Gardens can be configured as basketball, or hockey rink, or music concert with drastically different seating arrangements. Venues also like getting a revenue share of the add-on fees.
- promoters (not LiveNation) choose Ticketmaster because they're the biggest sales platform. They also have decades of technical expertise to craft various seat pricing tiers for all the desirable venues that the promoters want to use. Promoters want to achieve a "revenue target" that goes beyond the ticket's face price and Ticketmaster will craft the various add-on fees so the promoter gets more money. The add-on fees are all customizable.
- artists choose Ticketmaster because they're the biggest sales platform and also get a slice of the add-on fees.
If it's not a mega-artist like Taylor Swift, it's actually the promoters and the venues that have a bigger influence on choosing Ticketmaster.
The older I get, the less interested I am in seeing big bands. I'm lucky to live in an area with a great local music scene, plenty of independent venues.
I can't think of a single band I'd pay these extortionate prices for, I'd much rather support a local band and local venue.
Are you suggesting that others should share your musical taste in order to punish Ticketmaster?
Regardless of taste, it's mostly up to consumers to keep prices in check, by saying No at some point
Yes
I'm in Europe and i use DICE a lot, it's a great app. And most of the time tickets are on sale on multiple platforms at once here (eg DICE and Ticketmaster)
Indeed. Pick any two of Ticketmaster, Dice, AXS, Skiddle and seetickets. There are so many it's not straightforward to track down where your ticket is when you're off to the gig.
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.
“They” (shareholders, etc.) also own the venues and promoters, so much of the pass-through revenue is captured by the same interests that own TM.
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 don’t get why Spotify didn’t inject themselves into the ticket buying pipeline. They recently announced something but it’s kind of strange.
I often find I learn about a festival or concert too late to buy tickets or they are prohibitively expensive. Spotify knows who I listen too and where I live, I don’t get why it can’t remind my to buy tickets X months before the event. I can even manually see an artists concert schedule.
It then be trivial to monetize this. If 50% of people buying tickets on Ticketmaster, actually are going through Spotify first, that gives Spotify a lot of power in an otherwise asymmetrical position.
Same issue with Match.
Competition emerges and Match/Ticketmaster just buys them out.
Just the other day I went to a non Ticketmaster show and I’ll go to another next week.
I go to a lot of hyper small shows, shows where the artist sells their own merch. So many opening acts it feels closer to an open mic.
I’d rather that, the 30 to 100 person shows than KENDRICK LAMAR in a mega venue.
I really hope to find small shows the next time I travel. I’ve no interest in BTS, but I’d love to see an underground Korean rap concert.
I frequent a small venue that sells all its tickets through this vendor. They have other venues as well, also using this vendor.
https://www.axs.com/
One detail I haven’t seen in other comments.
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.
We have to let go of old artists stuck in these patterns and find new, ideally local artists.
The burning man org has kind of famously used a non-Ticketmaster vendor every year, and it’s almost always a shitshow.
Secretparty.io is another ticket vendor that has a great user experience. Easy transfers, handles large spikes in traffic, etc.
Ticketmaster just has a really solid moat, it’s not that alternatives don’t exist.
FWIW the most popular and renowned venue in my town doesn't use Ticketmaster — it uses a domestic alternative, as do a lot of venues where I am.
It is the same question of: "why hasn't there been a real competitor to Facebook Events and why many people post events information only there?"
I’m not that old but Partiful and other sites have completely consumed Facebook events for me for personal stuff
Fwiw I have never heard of facebook events
The market wont change until someone discovers a method to sell better than ticketmaster.
Yes ticketmaster sucks, but when competition pops up, it isnt like an order of magnitude better than ticketmaster.
Its like Cabcharge. The first real thing that ever challenged it was uber.
I change here needs to be similar. Maybe a presale marketplace to attract events? Tours could change to follow the money to an extent? Then the money is there on the table and the venue can make the decision whether to change its Ticketmaster only policy or not.
Nah, theres not a technical or business solution to this. Music is cultural and we'll develop new cultural technology to solve it. Vision + regulation would help things move a little faster but the pendulums swing is inevitable.
I think the problem isn't that competition needs to be an order of magnitude better, it's that if places have exclusivity agreements, it doesn't matter how much better you are.
The comment in [1] also outlines a bunch of reasons it's extremely difficult to break into.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48452308
Because monopolies have a lot of power.
What exactly is the problem with Ticketmaster? Scott Wiener's California junk fees law blocked them from late-revealing charges so what you see is pretty much what you get. They have a pretty good system for transferring tickets or relisting ones for sale that you already have. They've got a janky login system but I'm sure it's because they're being anti-fraud or whatever. Overall, I don't have much of a problem with Ticketmaster.
Regulatory failure
https://pretix.eu is having some success in the EU market. But other sibling posts correctly point out this is… let's just say "overall shit situation".
We also have Eventim and many other local ticket shops. I usually get my tickets right at the venue's online shop, or maybe from the artist. They use all kinds of systems.
Eventim is pretty much "Ticketmaster in Germany".
They captured like 90% of the German ticket market by closely watching Ticketmaster and basically repeating their playbook. Eventim also owns some venues, has exclusive contracts with many of them it doesn't outright own, hosts an official fan resale site, offers promotional services and generally integrates a lot of the business around large events vertically.
What's actually interesting is that it seems to be possible to compete with Ticketmaster only by copying their playbook on a large-enough scale, and Germany appears to be large enough. The Netherlands right next to Germany don't seem to have been large enough, as Ticketmaster basically controls them.
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.
There are several? Venues around here use AXS, Seetickets/Eventim, Opendate. I buy more non-TM tickets than TM.
It seems like it would be very easy to blacklist any artist/venue that works with the competition and make it practically crazy to do.
Everyone involved benefits from Ticketmaster, and in exchange all Ticketmaster has to do is be the bad guy
https://www.hoopla.no/
I heard they had a real good employee that was the smartest programmer to ever live and built his own OS by divine command.
Vertical integration: they own the venues
Why hasn't there been a real competitor to youtube yet? Similar question.
Some markets really are screwed.
TikTok and Instagram have YouTube worried for sure.
Maybe because of a paradigm shift to short videos, but neither can replace Youtube's actual long-form video service.
Watch the Last Week Tonight segment.
Basically, Ticketmaster owns all the concert halls too.
New Yorker had a good write up on this many moons ago: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/10/ticketmaster-l... (non-paywalled: https://archive.ph/5ILdG
I don't know much about the details work (I don't buy tickets through TM), but I've wondered why doesn't TM just ban the resale of tickets? If someone buys a ticket from TM for $100 and resells it for $300, that person is pocketing the $200 difference, not TM. So why does TM allow it?
> 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.
The problem isnt that I don't have enough money. It's that so many have so much more.
Complicity assumes every venues has the same options, but they don't.
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.
[this is probably not the answer you want to read]
Because Ticketmaster has been a force in the market for decades (at least since the 1980’s), the simplest market based explanation is that using Ticketmaster is often obviously the economically rational choice.
For example, many people who dislike Ticketmaster choose to buy tickets through Ticketmaster rather than exercise their alternatives. The same is true for performers and venues.
Because that is how markets work.
Any potential competitor has to do some, many. or all the things Ticketmaster does…not the least of which is staying in business…and that’s non-trivial.
Or at least that is what ordinary market economic theory strongly suggests.
Ticketmaster's clients are the venues and/or promotors (or both), not the ticket buyer (i.e. you). The undesirable convenience fees and other fees collected go to the venue & promotor, not to Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster's actual service fees are just a few percent -- not the 20-30% you see when you check out. They are effectively a punching bag to allow the venues , promotors & artists to collect excessive fees while retaining goodwill with the fans.
The more you hate Ticketmaster, the better they are doing their job, really (assuming reliable service is being provided, which they do well).
Moreover, pricing , tiering, selling, lobbying , on-sales, marketing, customer support, check in / validation (often without stable internet) are really hard problems.
The lesson here : the consumer experience of a business is usually just the tip of the iceberg, and extremely biased , often missing the crux of the business.
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.
Bono, Geldof, livenation, cartel.
Exclusive contracts
Distribution.
They're a monopoly.
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.
The hundreds of "travel agents" selling through GDS online have functionally no competitive pressure, they're all booking through the airline's CRS on your behalf in the end -- it's really no different than ticketmaster's reseller marketplace.
Airline price competition comes from multiple airlines running the same route.
Yeah, sure, if you don't care what route you fly that's true. Otherwise you may not really have options.
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.
Tho not exactly a direct solution,
Related:
Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225357
Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow's Chokepoint Capitalism dedicates a chapter to the mechanisms through which TM enforces a virtual monopoly over live music.
Corruption.
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.
It's not impossible - in Ontario, it required a law. Resale ticket prices capped at original ticket face value.
see https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ontario-ticket-resale-cap-e...
> $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."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2026/06/08/knicks-seas...
> Most of these tickets will go unsold I'm sure.
The tickets have already been sold. These postings are for resales.
If there is demand for tickets at $10,000, then people will find a way to sell them for $10,000. Any regulation that would somehow prevent that would only make it even more impossible to buy ticktets due to shortages.
Games and concerts are luxury goods. If you can't afford to go, don't go.
No, they will not go unsold. People aren't buying up $2,000 tickets and then trying to resell them at prices where they will lose their investment.
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.
Great point, I totally forgot about that angle.
I used to have season tickets to a team with a championship drought. Those priority season tickets were sold pretty close to regular season pricing.
Someone offering me $500 or $1,000 wouldn’t have been enough to stop me from going.
> Most of these tickets will go unsold I'm sure.
They go to the cousin for $3k two hours before game time, worst case.