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Ask HN: Why has no one replaced Ticketmaster?
196 points by cuuupid on Oct 20, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 162 comments
I constantly see people complaining about ticketmaster with scalping, nasty business tactics, broken interfaces, etc. and they get sued left and right after countless big events.

Yet even with all that, it seems no competitor has been able to reasonably get off the ground and poise a viable alternative. What gives? What's their moat/why do they have a monopoly?




Ticketmaster has exclusive deals with artists and venues.

Artists not signing deals with Ticketmaster lose access to venues, and venues not signing exclusivity deals with Ticketmaster lose access to artists.

There are enough of these on both sides that neither wants to lose the other so they sign.

Side note: I worked at a small ticketing software shop circa the Ticketmaster/LiveNation merger. The CEO got a call from the feds(FTC?) doing background work on the industry's view on how it might affect competition. For the life of me I can't imagine why he said it wouldn't really matter, but I have to assume that Ticketmaster was already so locked in to the industry that perhaps it didn't.


^ This.

~15 years ago, I was working with venues to see how we could handle ticketing, etc. They ALL had exclusive deals where the venue could ONLY sell online through TicketMaster and then TM would handle ~100% of the back office reporting, tracking, etc and even the onsite credit card processing for walk up sales.

It was one end to end system/suite and to replace any of it, you had to replace ALL of it once the contract was up. Not a fun space at all.


If this were the 1920s, antitrust enforcement would come down with an iron fist. The consolidation and control of the market is insane. I hope we can see some government movement about this at some point..


Congress has had hearings on this exact issue[0]. I don't think we've had any legislation come from it yet.

[0] https://congressionaldish.com/cd267-the-monopoly-powers-of-l...


> hope we can see some government movement about this at some point.

I do too! I get so sick of Ticketmaster's fees upon fees upon fees and "sorry, your browser isn't Chrome" junk.


Both venues AND artists want it this way, who's going to complain?

TM makes more money for everyone, that's why they use it.


> Both venues AND artists want it this way, who's going to complain?

Consumers?


These days, Ticketmaster would probably be the ones selling the tickets to the FTC hearings to begin with.


Hah!


[flagged]


It’s the exclusivity piece that’s the problem.


So where’s Lina Kahn pressuring to break up these exclusive agreements? She made hay talking about them in 2022 but what has been done recently? https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/big-firms-lik...


> but what has been done recently?

Specifically about Ticketmaster or what has FTC done more broadly?

Proposed a rule against hidden fees (10 days ago). It's also supposed to give FTC enforcement mechanism so that it'd be more effective than state laws that were passed and basically ignored.

Also filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon (less than a month ago) for how they're treating third-party sellers. And if I remember correctly a lawsuit against Facebook is supposed to proceed in December, in which the FTC is asking the court to force Facebook to sell Instagram and WhatsApp (I wouldn't get my hopes up on this one).

FTC definitely has some teeth now, but they can't wish monopolies out of existence, they have to go through a years-long court process against an army of lawyers employed by tech companies with a budget that's orders of magnitude higher than FTC's.


>FTC definitely has some teeth now, but they can't wish monopolies out of existence

Monopolies are not inherently illegal.

If a business obtains a monopoly by offering superior products or innovation, or through superior business acumen, the monopoly is legal. Antitrust issues arise when a monopoly is achieved or maintained by exclusionary or predatory acts.


Against Ticketmaster specifically.


Bigger fish to fry

Ticketmaster is big but it’s not Amazon or banking.


Let's hope that strategy plays out. They (FTC) only have anti trust defeats to show so far.

A string of losses will set precedent that will get harder and harder to overturn. It's not clear from the outside if Ticketmaster would be a stronger case but something to ponder.


Has the FTC actually managed to effect any regulatory power in the past 10 years? Why should we hope they would succeed here.


Can't wait for EU commission to notice this and add them to the "gatekeepers" list.


Ticketmaster isn't huge in Europe. I think CTS Eventim is the closest equivalent, with a similar share of tickets sold in a few countries, including their home turf, Germany. But I don't think it's comparable, as they're not similarly vertically integrated.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTS_Eventim


Ticketmaster are enormous in Europe. Pretty much every major artist uses them, and every festival uses them (aside from Glastonbury apparently). If that's not your definition of huge I don't know what is.


I think the lock-in is nowhere near what ticketmaster is doing. Bands don't have to make deals with Eventim, for venues Eventim is typically just an additional way to sell tickets.


Ticketmaster is gigantic in the UK


That's a bit confusing when gigantic.com is "one of the UK's largest independent ticket agencies".


Perhaps if there were enough big artists to get together and "strike" against Live Nation/Ticketmaster exclusive venues something might change for the better for their fans.

But, alas, that money too good.


> But, alas, that money too good.

This one. Not only does ticketmaster have contracts with most venues unless they own them outright, they're also a very convenient foil as they serve as ire-magnets.


If a venue has signed a multi-year contract with Ticketmaster there's not much they can do as a short-term measure inspired by something like a strike.


Sounds anticompetitive to me, antitrust action should be taken.


Anti-trust (at least to me) has a connotation with trust-busting and splitting up companies, but I'd be interested in the ramifications of restricting Ticketmaster to creating contracts no longer than, say, 6 months.

On one hand, free markets involve sellers and buyers coming together freely which exclusivity contracts prohibit, but on the other hand exclusivity contracts are nominally voluntary agreements which is a free exchange. Perhaps free-exchange simply isn't a useful framing here.


Trust busting exists for this very case. Shorter contracts would solve nothing because the market is as far from free as it can be and the one in charge has no interest in changing that.


This could be a headache for venues. The financial arbitrage is too good for them, they have almost zero risk of having their venue empty.


The busting and splitting up is a hard tool, but anti-trust has many other tools at their disposal, including maintaining status quo (i.e. refusing the merge of two companies). Disclaimer: I don't work in the US, so I'm not sure if anti-trust there is heavily biased there to this heavy duty tool, but I do know they have plenty of other tools


6 months would not make sense, when people routinely buy tickets for concerts 12-18 months out.


No chance of that, they're based in America


I think that’s roughly how the Coachella music festival started, but yeah…money.


Sounds like a two-sided market, where a company gets their value from being able to connect one side (the artists) with the other one (the venues).

What I find strange is that people aren't usually reluctant to sign exclusivity agreements because it's very limiting. How did ticketmaster get so big to begin with to force / convince people of signing exclusivity clauses?


>How did ticketmaster get so big to begin with to force / convince people of signing exclusivity clauses?

By dangling more money.

In the 1980s, Ticketmaster beat the competitors (e.g. Ticketron) by offering the venues a better financial deal.

Ticketron charged the venues a service fee. Venues pay Ticketron.

Ticketmaster flipped that around and made a clever proposal: instead of charging the venue, we'll charge the concertgoing fans extra service fee(s) and we'll give the venue a percentage of the fees collected. To sweeten the deal, we'll even pay the venue _upfront_ money as part of signing an exclusive deal.

https://thehustle.co/the-sneaky-economics-of-ticketmaster/

That's why most ideas about creating a new ticketing startup to "disrupt Ticketmaster" are naive about how the underlying business deals actually work. E.g. if the well-meaning programmers have idealistic motivations to create a new "fair ticketing" system that doesn't charge outrageous fees, the venues will not sign up with you which means you have no tickets to sell at the "cheaper & fair price".

Why would the venues use your new "fair ticketing" system if it means they get less money?!? That's the financial puzzle a viable Ticketmaster competitor has to solve.


Or just don't, keep charging the the people who have the money and aren't price sensitive.


Probably burned a lot of cash to build its dominant position and are now milking it back.

One way would be to sign deals reserving venue space in advance for a good chunk of the year. Artists wanting to perform there on dates reserved to Ticketmaster would need to sign exclusivity deals.

This has a network effect. The more they do, the more effective is the strategy and the easier it gets to keep doing it.


Gets value ? Or extracts value?


Congress (or the FTC) ought to step in to ban such exclusivity contracts using anti-monopoly laws.


Ticketmaster is the official ticket seller for the NFL. It would be interesting if the NFL decided to do tickets themselves, as they easily have the scale and sway over the venues and teams. But there’s probably not enough money in it to justify it for the NFL and if Ticketmaster isn’t broken from their view, why fix it?

I think we would need some entity on the scale of the NFL to fix this. Ticketmaster is too big to take on any other way.


I would not be surprised if Ticketmaster gives the NFL some major incentives to using their services.


Ticketmaster also owns a lot of venues through Live Nation and also owns a lot of the venues labor through Crew Nation. Fortunately for the latter they have not been wildly successful at busting the IATSE union in union venues.


> Ticketmaster has exclusive deals with artists and venues.

While it's true Ticketmaster does have these exclusive deals, it's demonstrably false that this is the reason why TM still hasn't been replaced.

If you've been around the industry for a while, you'll remember that LiveNation & Ticketmaster were distinct companies. In fact, LN tried to leave Ticketmaster. LN was the one with the exclusive deals with artists. LN was the one who owned the venues.

Yet LN failed. They dumped hundreds of millions into building a ticketing platform unsuccessfully. And eventually just bought Ticketmaster.

It a good data point that even if you have the right contracts, you'll fail if you don't have the right tech.


Yes but the REASON they do this is so they ALL make a lot more money.

Artists can play small venues, venues can book small artists, but that's not where the money is.


The question should really be why the FTC tolerates this, letting them after all this time enjoy the blatantly monopolistic anti-consumer stance they've enjoyed since the 80's (at least). It isn't difficult to see how nasty of a business this is by how hated they are by artists and consumers alike, and if nothing else they should be broken up the same way Ma Bell as a telecom monopoly.

At least it might come with some renewed interest in competition getting in on game with a better playing field before the monopoly starts forming again in new ways.


Truly. Of all of the various big companies that are being accused of monopoly, I can't think of a clearer, more supportable case (one where the monopoly position is obviously being abused) than Ticketmaster. And yet, the feds don't seem to mind.


In a world free from the corruption of billionaires and corporations outright buying influence in DC, https://economicliberties.us , a nonpartisan, nonprofit think-tank and lobbies for improving and enforcing antitrust regulations would be the best place to take this.


I imagine one factor is whether a monopolistic company has made enemies along the federal partisanship divide, or been in a situation where a politician believed they could advance their own career by stirring something up.


I don't think they are hated by the artists. I think they provide the artists a very useful and desirable service. Which is to extract every possible penny from fans while also taking the negative PR hit on behalf of the artist. The artist can throw their hands up as if there really is nothing they can do and blame it on Ticketmaster. Yet they are getting a healthy cut of all those fees and above retail ticket prices. Either through up front exclusivity agreements or through other hidden means.

Ticketmaster then tries to offload some of the blame to unknown "scalpers" but I think it's very likely that most of the scalpers are either Ticketmaster itself or entities contracted with them.

it's the only logical explanation since if they really wanted to solve the scalping problem, it would be the easiest thing in the world to solve. just make the tickets non-transferable.


What's really wild is that for the last 2.5 years the FTC has been led by somebody who's super dialed in on antitrust issues and trying to take these companies to court, but the government is having a hard time winning the cases. So either the courts have been bought and paid for, or the laws are weak and out of date because Congress is bought and paid for, or both. All this despite a rough but widespread understanding among the majority of Americans that the economy is rigged.

Biden is probably the first President since Carter to have even acknowledged the issue, we have 40 years of both Democrats and Republicans at every level of government slopping at the trough at this point.


I posit a 3rd option:

antitrust enforcers starting with Lina K are so incompetent that they cant win open and shut cases

Exhibit A: action against a merger between Amazon and a robo-vaccum company, iRobot.

Let that sink for a minute.


I tried to let this sink a bit but I have no idea what you mean with your example. Was the Amazon-iRobot merger somehow a clear case that should and could have been forbidden? I don't know anything about that merger but to me it sounds like they are mainly in completely different fields so I don't get how it applies here.


They are maybe working on it according to this vague article: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/28/feds-home-in-on-tic...


As much as I am in favor of breaking up anti-competitive monopolies, I don't think that really gets to the root of th issue. As long as it's legal to make the sort of exclusivity deals that Ticketmaster has, someone can take over the market.


same with dating apps. match owns all of them but bumble


We replaced Ticketmaster for fan club tix to Prince's Musicology tour.

Ticketmaster wasn't set up to handle the unique setup Prince wanted, popular tour in both arena and intimate venues with scheduled sales. When all Prince's music club fans were trying to buy the tickets to a 300 seat venue at 12 noon on a Friday, Ticketmaster had trouble.

Prince being Prince ditched the studio for his music, and bypassed Ticketmaster for his tickets, for what he wanted to do. Over the course of a few weeks, working for his incredibly talented and creative webmaster Sam Jennings, we built and hosted a system that could handle the flash traffic and sell the correct number of NPGMusicClub tickets for these small venues in the milliseconds the event started.

Musicology Live 2004ever went on to do $87.4 million from 77 shows in 52 cities across the United States, selling more than 1.4 million tickets.

It didn't occur to us we should make a business out of having been able to do that. But being 6 feet from his guitar playing in Webster Hall NYC is quite the memory, so no regrets.


Erm except AEG promoted that whole tour (and the too few beyond it – RIP Prince) and is a replica of, and/or, the only direct competitor of Live Nation.

That's a weird example to pick out, as if Prince was 'fighting the system', and yet I'm sure you know he exclusively signed & got paid up-front from the 2nd positioned monopoly in the game.

Cool story that you got to sit side stage and wrote code behind his fan club ticketing (which I'm sure you and AMEX shared for <= 7% total tickets sold, and AEG _definitely_ didn't finance as part of the exclusivity deal on the whole run) but come on... I know you know all you've done is present an alternative story that's supposed to garner upvotes but anyone who knows, knows you were the next one in line to fuck this entire industry and rake it off top.

Edit: Google says fans also know. https://prince.org/msg/7/247733


It’s weird to complain about supporting AEG claiming they’re somehow the 2nd “monopoly” after LiveNation. You can only have one “monopoly” in a given industry, otherwise they’re both just close competitors.

Having a close second competitor is still a step in the right direction, even if you disagree with their business practices.


Fine. I used the wrong term. You can't argue anything else I wrote outside of the word "monopoly" though, sooooo...


That’s not true. You can have two or more companies share a market via market splitting and the result is still effectively a monopoly.


That would be a duopoly not a monopoly.


Perhaps. It still sucks for the same reasons.


> I know you know all you've done is present an alternative story that's supposed to garner upvotes

Please don’t don’t do this. Ugly and Boring.

See bottom https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Fair enough. Message received.


There ought to be (separately):

- A talent-owned, co-op live music ticket and venue platform

- A talent-owned, co-op music streaming service on all the devices (Spotify as the benchmark, Tidal is better quality but less convenient)

- A talent-owned, co-op label

Pick any or all 3. The only way to get money back to the creators is for them to own it because the megacorps never will give more than pennies without a fight. The major are only have the perception of a lock on distribution by the inertia of popularity that celebrity influencers can readily overcome.


Nice story. Prince really did things his own way, sad we lost him


Live Nation, who own Ticketmaster, also own the venues and do the promotion for the tours.

They have a vertically integrated monopoly.


Ticketmaster was still seen as a monopoly long before LN bought them.

In fact, Pearl Jam sued TM for being a monopoly in 1994, about 15 years before LN bought TM.

https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/1994-when-pearl-jam-took-ti....


Succinct. Precise. Accurate. Correct.


Not accurate. TM already had a lock the market before LN acquired them. In fact, LN created their own ticketing platform to compete with TM... and failed miserably.

Take a look at the largest venues in the country. Most of them aren't owned by LN, but they still use TM for ticketing. If anything, TM has helped LN to acquire more venues than the other way around. In general, TM has a much more dominant share of the ticketing business than LN has of the venue or promotion business.


You're bringing up the past, they are talking about the present, which is absolutely accurate.


OP asked why nobody has beaten TM. The answer cannot be "because they have a vertically integrated monopoly" because in the past that wasn't true and nobody was able to beat them then either.


Even if a venue isn't owned my LN, they still use TM for ticketing because otherwise their booking agents won't be able to get the Clear Channel artists to come. It has been that way for a LONG time. Before LN, it was CC.

Source: I used to own a night club in San Francisco.


Yeah, no: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Nation_(events_promoter)

"Founded in 1996 by Robert F. X. Sillerman as SFX Entertainment, the company's business was built around consolidating concert promoters into a national entity to counter the oversized influence of ticket behemoth Ticketmaster."

It's kind of amazing how the present distorts our perspective of the past.


What are you no about? Like I said, before LN, it was CC.


It was formed to compete with TM, because TM had too much market power. In other words, you didn't need to use TM if you were using CC from a business/monopoly standpoint --in fact it was against their interests. However, CC/LN often went with TM anyway because it worked out better for them.


And what happened? They joined TM and CC.


No, LN was spun off from CC and after years of trying & failing to compete with TM, then acquired TM.

The point being: TM already had the market power before LN was on the scene, and all of LN's market power wasn't enough to get people to use their ticketing platform instead of TM. Saying LN is the reason everyone uses TM is very much getting it backwards.


So LN's market share in venues and acts is smaller than TM's market share for ticketing, and LN tried to use their venue/promotion business to launch their own ticketing platform and couldn't compete with TM... but right now the only reason people use TM is because of LN?

Surely, if LN's dominance is what is needed to lock up the ticketing market, LN's ticketing platform should have been able to compete with TM quite well, and TM should have been struggling to succeed in the ticketing market prior to being acquired by LN.


It's not that LN owns the venues, but that the venues have an exclusive ticket agreement with TM. So if you want to perform at this venue, you must sell via TM. When my startup was trying to compete, we found that basically every single outdoor amphitheater had exclusive ticket rights. This makes stuff like crowdfunding a concert impossible


Right, but now you have to ask yourself why do the venues have exclusive ticket agreements with TM rather than another ticketing vendor?


So someone did beat TM by buying them


Ticketmaster is a company which is so hated, people ascribe their success to malice and illegal activity rather than any compelling economic arguments. It's unfortunate because their business model is, imo, quite interesting.

The first thing to point out is that the question itself is flawed. Ticketmaster has a number of competitors (StubHub, Eventbrite, AXS, Seatgeek). Nevertheless, artists do seem to always gravitate to companies like Ticketmaster, even when neither they nor their venue have any affiliation.

What we should ask is what problems a naive artist would face selling their tickets like any other commodity:

- They overprice it: No one shows up, people are angry at the artist, the artist is in debt to the venue for overbooking.

- They underprice it: The tickets are hoovered up by scalpers who capture most of the ticket's true value, fans are disappointed they can't attend because finding a ticket is much harder.

Ticketmaster's (et al) primary service is to capture as much of the value of each ticket as possible (through phased ticket rollouts, faux-sellouts, variable pricing, attendance modelling, etc.) and package the event wholesale for the venue and artist. Both parties are can be guaranteed of some portion of the event before tickets even go on sale and the risk for them both is diminished.

Obviously I'm not trying to say Ticketmaster is all sunshine and lollipops, but if you want to make an argument about Ticketmaster's success, saying that they've cornered the ticketed events market globally is ludicrous.


Obviously not true. Pearl Jam tried to ditch Ticketmaster in the 90s and ended up cancelling their tour because they could only get shitty locations. The top comment here is correct: Ticketmaster has exclusive deals with venues and you can't get around it as a performer.


But that doesn't answer the question as to why Ticketmaster had exclusive deals with the venues. Why would every decent venue go with Ticketmaster?


> Nevertheless, artists do seem to always gravitate to companies like Ticketmaster, even when neither they nor their venue have any affiliation.

Artists will want play at more than one venue, surely, and I should imagine that TM's stance is "If you want to play at any of our venues, you sign with us". Might be possible for a small indie band to completely avoid any TM venues but for any moderately popular band, it's probably not possible.


You forgot Ticketbastard's scalping business. They are (were?) directly involved with scalpers operating a "platform" for them:

https://www.npr.org/2018/09/20/649666928/ticketmaster-has-it...


> Ticketmaster has a number of competitors (StubHub, Eventbrite, AXS, Seatgeek).

Those are reseller platforms (StubHub, Seatgeek) and independent entities (Eventbrite & AXS) that aren't associated with the venues/rooms they're playing in.

So your examples either:

1) Resell tickets from Ticketmaster + the list you mentioned + all other providers, or

2) They don't have the ability to flex on people because they don't own & operate the rooms across the entire planet, and in turn can't hit them with exclusivity clauses in their contracts the second they step foot into one of XXXXX rooms they'd like to play.

> Nevertheless, artists do seem to always gravitate to companies like Ticketmaster, even when neither they nor their venue have any affiliation.

Are you sure those non-affiliated venues don't have 10+ year exclusive ticketing contract that came with a fat lump sum when the ink dried in order to modernize & sustain their business?

I'd also question which rooms are slanging TM tickets without being owned by the overarching entity? I don't think I've ever seen that and I'd appreciate you presenting some examples of this.

> What we should ask is what problems a naive artist would face selling their tickets like any other commodity:

So anyone outside the TM system is naive? Wow... 0k... proceed...

> - They overprice it: No one shows up, people are angry at the artist, the artist is in debt to the venue for overbooking.

Please explain to me how the artist is in debt to the venue? There isn't a promoter in between the two? The artist is signing loan agreements and going into debt to the venue? Tell me you have zero clue what you're talking about without telling me you don't know a single thing about this industry...

> - They underprice it: The tickets are hoovered up by scalpers who capture most of the ticket's true value, fans are disappointed they can't attend because finding a ticket is much harder.

Again, no idea what you're talking about.

1) TM is GASSED UP when scalpers hoover up. They have multiple reselling platforms for exactly this scenario, including one that's TM branded. They _love_ this.

2) In reality, the promoter/venue is totally fine with this. They build offers against the proposed ticket price & sellable capacity, and a sell out is a sell out. Sure, hindsight is 20/20 and they'll reference historicals and adjust accordingly when the agent hits them up for the next play, but nobody is mad at a sell out.

> and package the event wholesale for the venue and artist. Both parties are can be guaranteed of some portion of the event before tickets even go on sale and the risk for them both is diminished.

They own & operate the venues. The artists are paid cash up front to sign the exclusive tour contract. They're not working for _anyone_ other than Ticketmaster... you're tripping my guy...

> Obviously I'm not trying to say Ticketmaster is all sunshine and lollipops

Ayyyyy no worries anyone with any exposure to this industry and half of a brain has already determined you have no idea what you're talking about, you're wrong & confused & way out of pocket, and we already know TM isn't sunshine & lollipops... back into your text editor you go (please)...


I can tell you are very emotionally charged about this subject matter so thank you for taking the time to respond.


To follow on with your comment, I think Ticketmaster also offers hate-absorption as a service. Weird fees and opaque pricing can help venues and artists like you describe, but alienate fans. Ticketmaster is comfortable with being the bad guy.


Thanks for the balanced perspective!


Except this isn’t a balanced perspective. That Ticketmaster can help cover the increased costs of touring is not really relevant to the discussion of “why isn’t there a replacement for Ticketmaster?”.

Why?

Livenation and Ticketmaster controls like 70+% of the market for shows (https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/did-ticketmasters-mar...). They own fuck tons of venues and literally can’t be competed with in a lot of instances. Theres not a competitor because it turns out that acquiring vast numbers of venues is expensive and is only something that a market leader like Livenation could do.


Wrote my own Ticketmaster replacement for the Handmade conferences, as it's one of our core principles [0]:

> Anything essential to our conferences is processed in-house. E.g. When you register for an event we personally handle the process to generate your ticket—removing spying middlemen like Ticketmaster.

It saves thousands in Ticketmaster fees which is life-changing when you're indie. We don't have to overcharge ticket holders.

I'd be interested in turning this into a polished webapp other organizers can install and use. Sadly, building your own replacement doesn't address the monopoly TM has with the biggest venues.

[0] https://handmadecities.com/about


I’ve seen a lot of use of Dice lately, which has a nice app and a decent ticket resale process.

I was initially quite a big fan until I purchased “sold out” tickets to a music festival a year in advance with the assurance that I could resell them if I changed my mind, only to see the resale queue disabled many months before the festival due to “lack of demand”. This didn’t seem to align with the festival being sold out, and apparently the tickets were released in batches which allowed them to claim it was “sold out” despite there being plenty of tickets still available. I’m not sure if this was the fault of Dice or the festival itself but soured my impression significantly.

Dice is still leagues better than Ticketmaster both in terms of UX and fees, but to me Resident Advisor is still the gold standard; unfortunately it seems a lot of the sort of shows that would be listed on RA are now on Dice instead.


Yep, the fact that events (or even specific days of an event) can have their resale queue disabled at any time is a huge downside. My wife's been bitten by that as well.


I worked for Ticketmaster as an Engineering Director for a few years. Reading through the comments, most of them are wrong. Here are the real reasons, imho.

(1) The ticketing system you want as a consumer is not the ticketing system that artists/venues/promoters want. As a consumer, you hate those Ticketmaster fees. The others? They love those fees. That's how they get paid. There are almost no standard fees for Ticketmaster. Every fee is contract specific and split between the parties. From the convenience fee to the print-at-home-free -- cuts of those got to everyone.

You could build the consumer-friendly platform, but it's not going to be used anyone, and certainly not by top artists. Top artists expect to get get 95% to 105% of the ticket price (yes, more than 100%). That leaves everyone else (including the promoter & venues reliant on other revenue streams like fees.

(2) The business requirements make it a technical beast to solve. Nevermind your LAMP-based ecomm site. Tickets aren't fungible. That creates a lot of problems. Thing selling airline tickets, not widgets on Amazon. Venues can be configured in countless ways. Pricing strategies are complex, often unique per show & dynamic. Most shows don't sell out. The promoter is the one who took the financial risk and needs to figure out how to maximize the revenue per show. Once the show is over, those unsold tickets are worthless.

(3) Scaling is hard. Massive spikes during onsale, but very low QPS at other times. The hardware cost profile is challenging than most non-FAANG services.

(4) Creating a ticket system for a small theatre with fixed seating, or purely GA events isn't that hard. What's hard is a top tier artist going on tour across the country. (And that's where most of the profit is.)

(5) Ticketing isn't that profitable. You'd have to invest a lot of resource for not much gain. The last serious attempt was LiveNation. They dumped hundreds of millions trying to build their own platform. Then gave up & bought Ticketmaster.


Artists like using Ticketmaster because they can blame Ticketmaster for fees. And, more broadly, blame Ticketmaster for the unavoidable problems that arise because there isn't an unlimited supply of tickets, and artists want to generate (almost) as much revenue as possible from them.


Yup. I'm convinced that part of Ticketmaster's business proposition is to absorb the hate for artists who want to maximize profits but don't want to look responsible for the ruthless capitalist approach because it would taint their artistic appeal.

Ticketmaster's service is to provide something to point a finger at. People hating them instead of their clients is just their product working as intended.


Most artists generate nearly all of their income from tours.


Not to be pendantic, but could you please provide some general numbers or cite any source for this


https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/07/17/artists-touring-...

Literally a web search will give you plenty. The NYT even did an article about it.


Okay, am hung up on the distinction between "most" and "top" artists.


As far as I know the economics don't really change, just the $$ amounts.

Streaming services pay peanuts and nobody outright buys albums anymore.


This article explains why: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/23569504/ticketmaster-monopoly...


Their moat is a combination of vertical integration(their parent company owns a bunch of venues) and contract lockup with other venues they don't own.

Also, since artists make almost all of their money from tours, they know trouble will arise with the mess that is ticket/venue sales. If they go full capitalist and someone like Taylor Swift starts charging what the market will bear(maybe $10k/ticket ?), many people will revolt, since there is zero chance they can afford that.

Instead, they can lay 100% of the blame on Ticketmaster, and nobody hates the artists for the mess.

So artists are not incentivized to try and fix the mess, and venues are not really incentivized either, since they also get to lay the blame on Ticketmaster.

Ticketmaster in the meantime takes all the blame, does nothing and keeps depositing fat stacks of cash in their bank account.

Some incentive will have to change, for this to get fixed. Perhaps govt will slap some regulations on Ticketmaster? Perhaps people will stop blaming Ticketmaster and make venues and/or artists accountable for their continued contracting with Ticketmaster? I don't know, but until something changes, don't expect Ticketmaster to behave or a competitor to show up.


I tend to agree with this analysis--that a part of the TM business model is extracting additional money for venues, artists and themselves, and taking on 100% of the reputational hit for fees. It's fascinating but have a hard time thinking of similar examples of a similar model, if anyone has some.


Wow. What a brilliantly evil racket. The invisible hand of the market at work I guess. I’m glad I hate going to concerts.


I enjoy going to concerts and other shows (Ticketmaster is not just into concerts), but haven't been, except for small local ones, in a number of years because I am not willing to support Ticketmaster.


I worked at a startup that tried to compete with them. Eventually we just sold to them. I don’t know the details sorry.


This is why it is naive to think that a startup is successful because of the product. Here product market fit is about power specifically.


In France it was widely used but now we have new competitors like www.shotgun.live with a modern app, built-in resale feature, stripe payment, etc.


What would you estimate the market share to be?


Afaik shotgun is specialized in nightclubs and electronic music festivals so I would say it’s not that big but it’s getting bigger.

Also, Ticketmaster influence wasn’t that big in France to begin with because many concert halls and arenas have their own ticketing website. Music events were also not that pricey compared to other neighboring countries, probably because the state pumps a lot of money in the music system.

Of course now we also have huge expensive festivals owned by Live Nation and the likes and the model is changing: festival are going from 30€ a day to almost 80€+


Pearl Jam tried to do something about it 25 years ago but their monopoly is too entrenched. They gave up.


almost 30 years ago, now

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/pearl-jam-war-with-ticketmaster...

does ticketmaster monopolize small venues, as well?

maybe those venues could also sell streaming access as well as in-person viewing, to attack ticketmaster from 'below'. Other than Pearl Jam (and Prince, RIP), the big concert attractions seem to be happy with the current ticketmaster situation.


> does ticketmaster monopolize small venues, as well?

I don't know, but I do know that about half of the small venues in my town use Ticketmaster. I notice because it means that I have to remember which small venues I'm willing to see shows at.


Contracts and preferential attachment. Competition theory as taught in economics class assumes zero friction to enter and exit the market, complete informational transparency for buyers and sellers, and suchlike. It really doesn't apply in the Real World outside of maybe commodity markets.


> I constantly see people complaining about ticketmaster with scalping, nasty business tactics, broken interfaces, etc. and they get sued left and right after countless big events.

> Yet even with all that, it seems no competitor has been able to reasonably get off the ground and poise a viable alternative. What gives?

To the extent that you're complaining about scalping, that's not something ticketmaster does. Scalping is a choice made by whoever originates the tickets. If the facial price is $20 and the market value is $700, scalping is going to occur regardless of whatever platform(s) may be involved. And if the facial price is $20 and the market price is $5, scalping won't occur regardless of whatever platform(s) may be involved.


Previous similar discussion, different thread, but a lot of the same general comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33831027


Must people have already highlighted the issues.

But the other side of the coin, is people don't really care that much about who the ticket vendor is for a big show, they just want to go to a big show.

The artists want as much as possible. Ticketmasters practices allow as much profit for themselves as possible and for the artist. A lot of the 'fees' that people hate, ticketmaster take the blame, but it's just a stealth way of increasing the ticket price and making the band not look like they are ripping off there fans.

Tickets are only $60, but then there are $30 worth of fees. Oh and dynamic pricing which means the ticket actually costs you $180 + fees, but the band can get away with it, rather than just outright putting them at $200, ticketmaster are the ones that look like they are ripping off the fans, not the acts, when they are in it together.

Here in the UK, the problem is, all the major venues are owned by Live nation who own ticketmaster, band wants to play there? have to use ticketmaster. They also bought up a lot of the festivals here, so the issue is they control everything.


In addition to what everybody else has said, I will add one more thing:

They don't go down when there's a big ticket sale. If you've ever used these alternative ticket sites, they will struggle under the load.

The reason it is hard is because there is a flood of people all hammering your site at once, all doing credit card transactions. There's bots. There's people hitting refresh constantly.

They are lame for a lot of reasons, but they don't suck in this department. And I imagine that is important for a lot of people.


Taylor Swift might disagree with you: https://www.vulture.com/2022/11/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-sa...

Of course she might be an extreme end of the market :)


I've sat in that TM queue during a big sale a bunch of times, sometimes you get in, sometimes you just sit there until you realise it's not actually doing anything. I don't think sticking a broken queuing system on the front is any better than going down. It's maybe actually more frustrating because you think it's all working.


Business relationships with the venues. They are equally to blame.


Exclusive, and frequently draconian, arrangements with venues (and sometimes artists).

Kind of like back in the day when Intel & Microsoft imposed drastic licenses on Dell and HP that you couldn't get Windows license if you shipped ANY linux or non-windows laptops, Ticketmaster has the tremendous power of blacklisting non-conforming venues.

And then there's the REALLY SHADY stuff they do like hiring competitor executives who bring over their passwords, excels and accounts (https://www.directitcorp.com/blog/ticketmaster-caught-access... and other ridiculously wrong stuff like this https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ticketmaster-resellers-las-... . Just start google search with "TicketMaster Caught..." and you'll find fascinating stuff that should be made up but isn't.

Basically they are a big evil bully.


Lots of great answers here, the other thing I'd say is consumers are not Ticketmaster's customer the promoters are. 75% of the time that prompter is livenation which is now merged with them, who they themselves went on a promoter acquisition spree. The rest of the time people pay Ticketmaster to be the bad guy.


Being “the bad guy” is a service TM provides


Dice will be making a bigger splash in the US soon. https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/23/dice-books-65m-for-its-eve...


Dice is so much better from a user standpoint. Ticketmaster still mails me physical tickets or asks me to print them. Dice's app just works.


Haven't they? I see a lot more from eventbrite, ra.co, fever etc than before. I have not booked anything with ticketmaster in years. I'm in Spain though, maybe it's region dependent.

Ticketmaster seems to just still have a hold on the AAA shows (which I never visit) but they seem to have lost everything else.


Ticket master is owned by Live Nation. Live Nation is the biggest concert promoter in the world. Live Nation also owns or holds stakes in a significant number of music festivals. It owns or holds stakes in agencies representing artists for live shows, and it owns or holds stakes in a significant number of artist management companies.

This means it has pretty much “full stack” control over live music events at from the top end of the market down - it’s got relationships with artists, venues and promoters who want to book artists and put shows on sale.

If you’re in the live music business you will almost certainly be doing business with part of Live Nation.

That’s why no one can really challenge Ticketmaster.


Spotify is trying to get a foot hold [1].

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/10/spotify-starts-selling-liv...


Other companies seem just as bad. I bought tickets through AXS (no choice), and the $30 "general admission" (standing) tickets to a semi-popular rocker went from $30 to $60. Fees were literally the same price as the ticket. Insanity.


I was blown away when I found out LiveNation owns their venues. That's how they lock the artists in. I think Ticketmaster and live nation both are monopolies, maybe even racketeering.


Have a look at https://www.get-protocol.io/ They are selling tickets on the blockchain and challenging Ticketmaster since 2016. More than 4 million tickets already sold. More statistics can be found here: https://dashboard.get-community.com


Ticketmasters is an excellent book about their history, some of which has been touched on in the comments here. https://www.audible.com/pd/B00B2S9K46


I personally decided not to buy tickets for any event that costs more than $100. There are so many local artists, small music events, and community theatre that are delightful that I ve come to the conclusion that Ticketmaster can go screw itself.


One lesser known moat that Ticketmaster has is they have the best tech stack.

From what I've heard from folks in the industry, literally no one else is capable of handling the biggest artists like Taylor Swift.


Didn't they spectacularly fail to handle Taylor Swift's tour last year?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/ticketmaster-taylor-sw...


You should check out https://wail.fm Full disclosure, I have an internship there.


Exclusive deals and market capture.

Essentially they’ve captured the market.

Venues and artists are no longer in the free market.

It needs a big powerful player with deep pockets, startups don’t stand a chance.


I'm going to give a controversial counter-example. Ticketmaster itself is actually a really good product. It is just so overpriced and is an example of a "true monopoly", a far stronger example of a monopoly than the current Google anti-trust lawsuit.

I live in a mid-size metropolitan city. We are kind of a perfect size because we are a large enough city that most A-list celebs will actually stop here on tours (albeit near the end their tours or for 1-2 shows only). We also have some awesome minor league sports teams with enthusiastic fanbases, and we get lots of visits from large sports teams like NHL, NBA, etc in pre-season travel games. Anyway, the point being that forever, our stadium had some non-ticketmaster product to manage ticket buying. It was usually terrible. Tickets would get bought out from under you mid-purchase, reservations would get double-booked, finding available seats was clunky on a computer and almost impossible on a phone. The site was slow and burdensome and the tickets got emailed to you and needed to be printed out. On the flip side, our events were really cheap. We already paid lower-than average for these events and then our ticket fees were like a tier-based price of either $2 (tickets under $30), $4 (tickets under $80), or $6 (tickets over $80) depending on the pricing tier of the ticket.

That all changed last year. Ticketmaster came in and became the exclusive provider for our stadium. The change was dramatic. First of all, there was an awesome mobile app that works really well. It was modern and fast and made is very easy to find and reserve a seat. No more glitches with people buying the same tickets as you or failing during checkout. It was easy to find upcoming games or events and pre-buying was fast and efficient. Plus now we could sell unused season ticket games on the aftermarket (which wasn't possible before). A lot of boring ticket management features that used to require phone calls between 10am - 3pm (Mon-Thur) could now be done anytime on the app, day or night, even on weekends, and even hours before a game or event. You can also now buy last-minute tickets even after a game has started now because of Ticketmaster, which wasn't possible before. We had an NHL team come into town for a pre-season game and we could buy pre-order tickets super easy, and the previous year the website actually crashed when they opened up these tickets. Oh and my favorite feature now is being able to use contactless tickets through my Apple Wallet. Lines are shorter when we get to the stadium as a result and just an incredible improvement of quality of life for me and my family. So there are a ton of big benefits to Ticketmaster.

The downside is the fees. A lot of the tickets we buy are only $30-40. I routinely pay close to 50% in fees with ticketmaster when I previously was paying 5-10% in fees. And worse, I don't actually know or understand the fee structure at all. I've even asked employees and no one seems to know. As far as I can tell, they basically handed over the keys to the stadium, giving full responsibility of ticket management to TicketMaster and so everything from the website, the pre-orders, the season tickets, the aftermarket, mobile checkin, last minute auctions, are all just part of the package deal that Ticketmaster offers.

As a result, I used to pay $34 for a hockey or basketball game, and I now pay ~$65 for the exact same seat that I bought last year. The team doesn't get anymore money, the stadium doesn't seem to be either. My ticket prices are still the same until you get to the fees. Two years ago I could go to an event for under $100 all-in for my family of 3. Now it costs me about $200.

So I wanted to provide perspective on what Ticketmaster offers. They do offer a lot for stadiums, who truly aren't equipped to manage a distributed and scalable ticket management product. So there is value in what ticketmaster offers. But do they deserve to make as much as the artists or athletes that I am paying to see? Hell no, and that seems to be the current pricing model. So I want to see Ticketmaster competed with. The problem is that no one else seems to offer a product that comes close.

For anyone out there that wants to start a competitor, you just need to offer a package deal for stadiums. Ticketmaster offers an all-in-one deal for stadiums so they don't have to worry about any app or web development, maintenance, ticket sales, or anything else.

Remember stadiums are owned by corporate real estate. They just want to collect their rent and keep values high on property. They outsource all labor, food, and management of the events to different people. So for ticket sales they don't really care what Ticketmaster charges, they just like to hand over the keys and know that the job gets done and to them that means that butts are in seats. That's all they care about, because if the stadium stays filled, then rent stays high, good artists and sports want to play there, and they keep getting paid. If Ticketmaster can do that while charging 50% fees to customers, and the company that only charges 10% can't. Then Ticketmaster is getting the contract. That's how it works.

Ticketmaster has a good product, people need to acknowledge that. That is why the upstarts and startups fail. But we need to see competition here, because the fees are getting out of hand and that is a direct result to ticketmaster being a monopoly.


They have. Ticketmaster eventually buys them up.


Honestly, it's not what the rhetoric tells you.

The entertainment business is not very technical. TM serves as their IT department. By the nature of the business, everyone wants to differentiate themselves from everyone else. So literally every client wants some special feature that no one has seen before. TM is the only place that can afford to say, "sure, we'll do it" to all of them, and since most of the clients (sports teams being the major exception) aren't that technically sophisticated, so they're not in a position to do the differentiation on their own.

Startups usually don't succeed by having more features than entrenched competitors. They succeed, but delivering a small bundle of features that create a huge value difference. If one were to do that, it'd be great for the first few clients that used them, and then it'd be "old hat" and everyone else would want tons of new, differentiated features, which would cause the startup to lose focus. The industry doesn't want a handful of outstanding features. They all want to be snowflakes.

> I constantly see people complaining about ticketmaster with scalping

Ironically, the reseller market is the one part of the ticketing market that TM hasn't dominated. It's kind of ironic that people talk about TM when they complain about scalping.


What kind of “special feature”, any examples?


There's the infamous "Garth mode" (named after Garth Brooks), where the inventory for multiple performances in the same venue is effectively consolidated into one pseudo-event. Some of the performances are kept in reserve, and they turn the individual performances on and off in real-time to spread out demand across performances and also ensure they provide enough inventory fulfill all demand (it just murders the resellers).


Seriously, even TM can't replace TM. ;-) They keep buying ticketing companies in hopes of ditching all their technical debt and switching to a new ticketing platform. Every time they try to do it, they fail. So most tickets for concerts in the US are still sold with a program that runs assembly code running on a VAX emulator.


John Oliver did a good 20min segment on that last year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_Y7uqqEFnY


check out their public SEC 10-k filing, just a few pages in will give you a plain-English explanation of their size.


(activates voice changer) my side hustle is working for LiveNation at a local venue. Now they pay me to go to shows.


They have a monopoly on venues.


why is ticket scalping still a thing with robust ID


Tickets for events necessarily have a limited supply. If demand exceeds supply, price goes up. The box offices keep the face value prices of the tickets lower than what the market will bear. Therefore, someone will always step in to arbitrate and collect the margin. Even if Ticketmaster were destroyed, it would not have any impact on scalping. The only way to stop this from happening is for the face value of high demand tickets to rise greatly. For example, you could sell tickets with a dutch auction.


That doesn't really respond to cushpush, who is proposing that resold tickets shouldn't be honored by the venue.


Are you suggesting there is no valid use case for reselling tickets other than scalping? (I am unable to make it to an event today for which I bought tickets due to an unforeseen circumstance). Do you propose that my ticket has to go to waste?


I'm suggesting that cushpush specifically indicated that venues should prevent any and all resale of tickets, and the comment I responded to purported to respond to cushpush in a way that was a total and complete non sequitur.


Scalping is something that the artists and ticket sellers specifically enable. If there's a name on each ticket you can't resell it.


Because venues have an hour and a half to let in 18,000 people.


In my area I use

Eventbrite

Dice

Ticketfairy

ResidentAdvisor

Partiful

so I dont know, it seems pretty fragmented to me


StubHub?


Don't know why it's taking so long. I thought "master" wasn't allowed anymore.




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