There's Bipartisan Agreement on One Thing: Ticketmaster Sucks (newrepublic.com) 86
The partisan divisions we've become used to on Capitol Hill are if anything even more stark in the new 118th Congress. But so far, there is one thing Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate seem to agree on: Ticketmaster is a problem. From a report: "In terms of their monopoly power, I'm concerned about it," Senator Josh Hawley told The New Republic in December. "I think we should look into it." Finally, the Senate is going to. Senators Amy Klobuchar and Mike Lee, the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the Judiciary Committee's subcommittee that oversees antitrust issues, jointly announced a hearing for Tuesday that will be assisted by committee Chair Dick Durbin and ranking member Lindsey Graham. "I look forward to hearing more about how we got here, and identifying solutions," said Graham in a statement.
Ticketmaster has a dark history of confronting political rivals within the music industry. Pearl Jam was the last major live act to challenge the company in Congress in 1994. Pearl Jam filed a complaint with the Justice Department accusing Ticketmaster of being a monopoly. In an obscure House subcommittee, the complaint became an open airing of grievances on MTV by the band and its music industry allies against Ticketmaster CEO Fred Rosen, who, in turn, wrecked the Seattle grunge band's subsequent tours with last-minute ticketing shenanigans. The government all this time has done nothing to rein in the company. In fact, quite the opposite: In 2010, the Justice Department approved Ticketmaster's merger with Live Nation Entertainment, the company that owns the venues (and therein the concessions) where live music acts Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny perform for millions of adoring fans. For the world's biggest acts, Live Nation offers an all-in-one vendor that can pack stadiums for the artist who, in turn, doesn't have to deal with a galaxy of local players in the live events space, like venue owners, concert promoters, food and beverage vendors, public officials, and other hometown luminaries looking to dictate terms for the show.
Ticketmaster has a dark history of confronting political rivals within the music industry. Pearl Jam was the last major live act to challenge the company in Congress in 1994. Pearl Jam filed a complaint with the Justice Department accusing Ticketmaster of being a monopoly. In an obscure House subcommittee, the complaint became an open airing of grievances on MTV by the band and its music industry allies against Ticketmaster CEO Fred Rosen, who, in turn, wrecked the Seattle grunge band's subsequent tours with last-minute ticketing shenanigans. The government all this time has done nothing to rein in the company. In fact, quite the opposite: In 2010, the Justice Department approved Ticketmaster's merger with Live Nation Entertainment, the company that owns the venues (and therein the concessions) where live music acts Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny perform for millions of adoring fans. For the world's biggest acts, Live Nation offers an all-in-one vendor that can pack stadiums for the artist who, in turn, doesn't have to deal with a galaxy of local players in the live events space, like venue owners, concert promoters, food and beverage vendors, public officials, and other hometown luminaries looking to dictate terms for the show.
The free market (Score:2)
An unregulated market that has a dominate player quickly moves away the ideals of modern capitalism and regresses to earlier economic systems. I'd draw parallels between Ticketmaster and the manorial system before I'd use it as an example of healthy capitalism.
Re:Capitalism deprecates competition (Score:5, Insightful)
Capitalism is an economic system based on surplus and the competition as a consequence of that surplus. Ticketmaster is about artificial scarcity and anticompetitive practices. Even Karl Marx is more pro-capitalism than these guys.
Re:Capitalism deprecates competition (Score:5, Insightful)
Read Smith's "The Wealth of Nations", PLEASE.
In order for Capitalism to work as an economic system, it is necessary for government to regulate markets and the players in the market to promote market health. A 'market' with only one seller is not actually a market at all.
The cornerstone of capitalism is vigorous competition forcing efficiency and keeping prices near the marginal cost of production.
What you're describing is market failure due to lax government and extreme rent seeking.
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That's not Capitalism, that's economic thuggery.
Re: Capitalism (Score:3)
Who would play at those venues? Ticketmaster locks people into only playing at their venues. A band won't risk it going against them. They learned from Pearl Jam.
Re:Capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
No, and I say that as a capitalist.
See Porter's Five Forces. Part of what you look for in a successful opportunity, or build in a successful business, is ways to LIMIT competition. Make it harder for competitors to enter the market. Reduce the power of consumers. Don't want to buy from us? Then you're not going to the show. Reduce the power of suppliers. Want to sell tickets at $venue? We have an exclusive agreement with them. Reduce competition. Sorry, guys. We bought our biggest competitor.
Much as we want to pretend pure capitalism is a panacea, it exists within a legal framework that can be, and often is, used to stack the deck.
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And by "build your own venues" you are really suggesting that some would-be competitor should go and build hundred-million dollar stadiums and concert venues in 30 or 40 cities in North America alone, in order to compete with LiveNation?
That's a barrier to entry that even Apple and Google envy. And also a reason why there isn't any competition - LiveNation is a de facto monopoly due to buying up / strongarming practically everyone else out of the market through unfair practices. Gee, don't you think that
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Agree
Exclusitivity with Tax-funded entities (Score:4, Informative)
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They're a business, they aren't alive and don't have a heart, and shouldn't have any individual rights.
But seriously, the way Ticketmaster operates they are extracting as much money from the market as they can without much care on what might happen as a result. They have no long term view and I wouldn't recommend investing seriously in a company that probably won't be around in 20 years.
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Why wouldn't it be? Govt owned facilities of all kinds have exclusive contracts with concessionaires.
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Face Value Please! (Score:5, Interesting)
There's really only a couple of things I want from the likes of Ticketmaster:
1. Face value ticket price plus applicable government taxes
2. Physical ticket option
3. Ability to purchase tickets at the venue at least the day of show if ticket are available
4. No mobile app or account required to purchase tickets
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There's really only a couple of things I want from the likes of Ticketmaster:
I can shorten that list a lot:
1. Quit being absolute bastards, all the damn time.
If you need/want to be more specific I'd add a few more: Break up Ticketmaster and Livenation, build a giant wall between the primary and re-sale markets, deal with the bots, and up-front pricing (not sure if that's what you meant by #1 or not).
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Did they finally get rid of the physical ticket option? The last time I bought a ticket (a LONG time ago), they offered physical tickets for "free" but charged a premium for digital tickets, citing convenience. I couldn't believe that they wanted an extra $14 for NOT sending me tickets through the mail.
I won't get into the rest of the buying experience, but I will say that Ticketmaster is the biggest reason I haven't visited any event in more than a decade.
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It varies by venue (and sometimes even by artist), but for the most part yes -- most TM venues and artists exclusively use mobile ticketing with an animated barcode that can't be screenshotted. I've had only a handful of TM shows in the last few years that still allowed print-at-home PDFs or paper tickets by mail or will call. They still charge you a BS $14 "convenience" fee in every case.
If you don't have a mobile phone or if your phone dies or whatever, you can supposedly still pick up the ticket at the
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You don't know what you're taking about.
Bands make most of their money from touring and selling merchandise.
https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
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Bands can still sell merchandise. Also, as I mentioned, they could have live shows online and charge a fee. Imagine how more can they make by cutting out the middle man. Offer a few different platforms to pay or allow people to register on the band's web site.
The idea is to hurt TicketMaster and the only way for that happen is for people to stop giving them money.
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you're missing the point of live music, for performers and the audience.
How long do you think bands can hold out (i.e. burn cash) until their new revenue streams are successful enough to sustain a boycott against Ticketmaster et. al.?
Ticketmaster needs to get smacked down.
pop tarts (Score:1)
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Right, so you're expecting Adele, for example, to tell Ceasers Entertainment to fuck off with their millions of dollars for performing two shows a week in Vegas and instead do some YouTube live streams for pennies instead?
Seriously?
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Also, as I mentioned, they could have live shows online and charge a fee.
That is quite frankly one of the dumbest ideas I've heard in a long time. That's effectively watching a recording. Sure its "LIVE" but the point of it being live has been negated.
People go out to see music played because live sounds are different from your earbuds. They want to be around other people, buy drinks, and have fun.
I get it, many people are introverts. Hell I'm among them, but you can't be so blind as to assume that everyone else will just readily go that route.
There's a good chunk of the pop
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No. They can't. Part of the record deal usually includes handing over all branding rights. They get nothing from their albums (special record industry accounting) and nothing from branding. That leaves concert tours as their only source of income.
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Bands should tour YouTube live streams as guest bands. I feel like that's a more 21st century way of doing things.
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See how well that has worked for educating kids.
"Modern" isn't always better.
I'd rather listen to a shitty cover band in person than watch the original artist on a "livestream".
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I have heard that touring is typically the only way for small or mid size bands (50-200 seat fillers) to make any money. (I've also heard "touring isn't profitable anymore" the last couple years, but I get the feeling that's whining or Covid.)
Touring is also probably how these bands make physical record sales, at the merch table. That gets you $10 a pop, streaming is fractions of a penny.
Stadium-fillers like Taylor Swift or Drake are the only ones who'd earn a living off streams, album sales, and radio play
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To add: Pearl Jam stopped touring due to Ticketmaster. People just spent their money to see Elton, Drake, or Paul McCartney instead. You need very, very few acts to sustain the Ticketmaster ecosystem. 90% of acts could stop doing live shows, and they'd go on filling stadium seats for $500 a pop with the ones they've still got.
Re: Simple solution (Score:2)
When did they stop touring I've seen the 6 times in the last 20 years.
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In the mid-90s, they tried boycotting Ticketmaster venues and apparently were not able to organize a tour without them in the US for several years. Presumably they gave up the boycott after a while.
Re: Simple solution (Score:2)
They still toured it was just a clusterfuck.
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As others have pointed out, bands make most of their money from touring. "Album sales" stopped being a thing with the demise of CDs, and no, vinyl's resurgence won't make up for that. Even then, bands make more money from CDs sold at the merch table than from CDs sold on Amazon or at Best Buy.
IMO, the worst part of Ticketmaster/Live Nation's monopoly is the euphemistically named "verified reseller" market, where they make it super easy for the scalpers for a cut of the secondary profits. They claim to be in
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If artists would price their tickets at what the market will bear, there would be no profit left for scalpers.
Sorry, but if you're charging $200 for something people are willing to buy for $1000, it's your own damned fault when third parties will step in to profit off that situation.
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great, you can sell 1/10th of the venue for 1000 a seat and now your fans hate you.
Re: Simple solution (Score:3)
Just fucking auction shit off!
If you have, say, a 10,000 seat venue for an event at 8pm on Sept first, do an auction.
Highest bidder gets x number of tickets at his price. Next highest bidder gets the same. So on down the line. Seat placement is based on ticket issue order. First ticket sold is the best seat, last ticket sold is the worst seat.
If some fool wants all tickets at $1M each, awesome!
If not, every ticket gets sold at the maximum price a buyer is willing to pay for it.
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The auctions will be run by Auctionmaster, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ticketmaster.
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What difference does it make who conducts the auctions?
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That's presuming that the goal is to make as much money as the market will bear, regardless of anything else.
What if I, as an arena-filling artist, determine that for a particular average price per seat, I can still turn a satisfactory profit after paying the crew, the venue, etc., generously, so that's what I want to charge, even if some people would be willing to pay many times that? I want my fans to see a good show for a reasonable price, and I don't want anyone else ruining that by making tickets unaff
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You'll need to bust up the RIAA first. Bands make next to nothing on album sales. There have even been cases where an album goes double platinum and the band has yet to receive even a single penny for it due to crazy accounting and dirty tricks.
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I'm not sure "album sales" are much of a thing anymore. Nobody seems to play CD's anymore, and even on the digital side most people are doing some sort of streaming plan from Spotify, Youtube Music, etc.
Albums sales as a metric have basically been replaced by play counts.
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So basically you want the performing artists starving and destitute, or have no idea how the music business actually works.
The artists get exposure from recorded albums and media play (radio, inclusion in TV / movies / etc). Record labels and talent management gets money from album sales and streaming revenue. The talent gets money from touring.
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Fans should stop going to Ticketmaster shows. That's how you fix it. I mean they won't because on a whole Americans are selfish bastards. But boycotting Ticketmaster shows would send the biggest message and cause the fastest change.
But it will never happen.
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I wish it were that easy. If Ticketmaster has a monopoly on all my favorite bands, and Live Nation has a monopoly on all my favorite venues, that's a lot of doing without.
Now to be fair, I'm an Old Fart (oldest of genX). A lot of the shows I'm going to these days are either explicit farewell tours, or likely ones as musicians from the boomer generation are dying of old age. The clock is ticking. They and I can't necessarily wait for either legislation, court action, or a boycott to have a meaningful effect.
Pearl Jam (Score:1)
Pearl Jam is but one of three well-known rock bands named after semen. Can you name the other two, without doing a web search or consulting ChatGPT?
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10cc and Lovin' Spoonful come to mind. I think there are more, but I can't think them up right now.
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No question what’s on your mind.
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Cream
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I was thinking of the two that Black Parrot mentioned, but I suppose Cream might qualify, though I'd always heard that they were thusly named because they considered themselves the "cream" of the crop of musicians of that time.
And who moderated this as offtopic? Pearl Jam was mentioned in TFS, FFS.
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Yeah, the gist of this story for me is that US politicians are looking for a bigger "campaign contribution" from Ticketmaster if they want them to maintain the status quo.
Protected Monopoly (Score:5, Informative)
Nah, fluffypony (of Monero fame) aimed to replace Ticketmaster [yahoo.com] with blockchain assets on a Monero sidechain way before NFT's became popular and They rapidly found a decades-old minor business dispute on which to arrest and jail him.
Ticketmaster is protected for some reason. One presumes they share data with somebody powerful who finds it valuable.
I don't see the angle but there must be something there. Heaven forbid we have autonomous and permissionless decentralized ticketing - why a band could sell its own tickets!
I had great seats at a concert once. (Score:2)
And I paid face value for the tickets. Pink Floyd (learning to fly tour)
This was 1988. LA Coliseum. I got in line at a Ticketron that had window booth outside a Sears about 35 hours before tickets went on sale. I was first in line. About 5 mins before tickets went on sale the employee started to try to push through my order (4 tickets) like a lab rat trying to get his food pellet. He was awesome.
Result: 9th row floor. At the LA Coliseum. For Pink Floyd. I think it was something like $80 or $100 to
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It's also because Ticketmaster pre-sells/reserves giant blocks of tickets before even the 'presale' for the reseller market.
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That's not a bad analogy other than it's not taking advantage of information not available to the public.
It's certainly collusion. Both sides work together to raise the cost of tickets to the general public -- but the paper trail shows that ticketmaster paid face value. It doesn't account for the fact that they paid a premium contract fee for access to that purchase.
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Yup. And they (ticketmaster) get access to those tickets for a contract fee. Venue gets more more money than face value when that contract fee is included. A significant amount more.
Which is why ticketron is now a fond memory.
Another Bipartisan Agreement (Score:2)
Both sides of the Party agree that the best thing to do is ask Ticketmaster to increase their "campaign contributions".
It's not as if Congress is going to actually DO anything about it, right?
Ain't nothing going to happen (Score:2, Offtopic)
The next two years is going to be nothing but show trials and a Non-Stop cavalcade of crazy designed to get your attention so that they can fundraise off it. The space laser lady has more money in her War chest than anyone
Lots of things suck (Score:2)
Lots of things suck. Congress doesn't need to investigate all of them.
This is not a matter of national security or anything else actually important.
If venues are unhappy with TM, if artists are unhappy with TM, then they can convince someone else to go into the business and sell their tickets.
If end-users are unhappy with TM, they can protest by no longer buying tickets at TM-based venues.
But what isn't reasonable is for everyone to go whining to Congress. It has WAY more important shit that it should be
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Even Republicans font like market distortion as much as you.
Do you realize that you are never going to be the one on the top of the pile?
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I don't expect to be at the top of the pile. I have stage four cancer and expect to be dead in under 3 years.
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Genuinely sorry to hear that.
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Artistic culture is worth as much, if not more than, "national security" and "more important shit". It sounds good to "vote with your wallet", but then you realize Ticketmaster got into the real estate business and locked most of it down. Their business model is to remove your choices until only Ticketmaster is an option.
1. They consolidated the online and national ticket selling market as best they could (the realm of government oversight and regulation applies)
2. Then they signed exclusive deals with mo
Sounds familiar (Score:2)
Ticketmaster stories always make me think of this bit [youtube.com] in the Rick and Morty episode Raising Gazorpazorp (s1e7):
Rick: Well obviously Summer it appears the lower tier of this society is being manipulated through sex and advanced technology by a hidden ruling class. Sound familiar?
Summer: Ticketmaster.
I usually... (Score:2)
...go to the venue ticket office, sometimes weeks or months before the show, and avoid TicketBastard and their absolutely cockamamie markups and "convenience fee" for printing your own damn ticket.
It is, in my opinion, which admittedly isn't worth a hill of beans to it, one of the worst businesses in America.
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True story, once I approached a box office at a venue asking to purchase tickets... and they handed me a laminated card with a QR code and told me to scan the code to open the website and purchase online because they don't do in-person sales.
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I rarely go to convention centers or stadiums for concerts, so it's not a issue for me. Where I live, or even when I travel, events I go to are in places that have a ticket office. No act is worth seeing if the the only option for tickets is to use TicketBastard.
There has been a steady downhill progression (Score:1)
I'm sure there will have been a steady downhill progression ever since Terry left.
It's a damned shame (Score:2)
It's a damned shame that it took some Congresscritter's kid being screwed out of Taylor Swift tickets for them to look at this blatant violation of anti-trust law.
Pearl Jam tried to do something about this 25 years ago, and got screwed over by TM.
Bread and circuses (Score:1)
How Ticketmaster Operates: Lobby Correctly (Score:1)
As much as it amuses me to hear armchair theories about how the ticketing industry operates, it eventually gives me a headache. As someone who has worked in the venues, most people have it all wrong. If you want a closer picture to the truth. You can go watch John Oliver's Videos on it where he has some decent inside sources that I agree with. Here are some points
1. Ticketmaster gets less than 4% of the fees or any cut from primary tickets
People don't understand that when your artist is selling your ticket
Politicians must have researched... (Score:2)
...to find professions rated less trustworthy than "Member of Congress."
https://news.gallup.com/poll/3... [gallup.com]