Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster? It seems there are a variety of solutions to prevent value from being transferred from artists/fans/venues to resellers. Why does it seem like there have been no significant attempts to implement an alternative? The only YC company[1] I can find in this space seems to be DOA. [1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/the-ticket-fairy |
Also AEG/AXS owns or has deals with some 30 venues in the US (not to mention London's O2) and also owns some sports teams.
The problem is more that they own the venues, and aggressively punish anyone who works with their competitors.
They are such a powerful monopoly the average Joe rarely thinks there is an alternative.
It's difficult to do a TLDR for such a complex issue, but from what I remember the biggest problem seems to be that Ticketmaster is extremely vertical to the degree it either owns or has exclusive contracts with venues.
Seems like a pretty strong argument that they have a monopoly (so gov. regulation might be the only way to change anything).
Every freshman-level economics 101 course when discussing the basic mechanisms required to have a functioning free market has "no monopolies, no cartels, no anti-competitive agreements between market participants" as necessary conditions.
But functionally, in America today, the Republicans are happy to have money-printing monopolies because their donors are profiting. And the Democrats are happy to have money-printing monopolies because their donors are profiting and large stable incumbents are easier to control with regulation than many small, changing entities.
In a better world, we'd break up the monopolies, and have thousands middle-class-owned small-businesses operating competitively, rather than one corporation.
If your band builds enough profile and sticks around long enough, you can always approach bars yourself that you have no history with, and we did actually do shows without the agency at a couple of places that we had never booked through them, it was fine, but involved a lot of hustle on the drummer's part as well. TANSTAAFL.
Now, I'm not actually comparing the above to Ticketmaster's shenanigans. For starters, there is a good argument for the role of the agency, in that every single gig we ever played, we got paid in full, on time, with zero hassle, and I boil that down to the implicit threat of losing access to the agency's bands. A similar dynamic guarantees to the venues that the bands they book will show up on time, play for the required amount of minutes, not be on bad drugs, etc.
Would I prefer that we had split up that extra two hun rather than hand it to those sharks? Sure, but I'm also a wimp and would not be able to do anything about it if some scumbag club owner told me, flanked by his bouncers, that it was a bad night and we can't get paid. It's far from perfect, but they're our sharks too.
But I bring up this very typical contract for a working band to say that it goes way way back through the centuries that the music business (not the industry - the business, as in the promoters, club owners, circus operators, Vaudeville stages, village Inns, etc) has spent literally centuries figuring out how to keep the talent from controlling anything. Opinions about this are fine, but it also means there's always been some reliable work for talented people who just want to provide a service for folks who want to do something involving music, rather than Be An Artist or whatever.
But Ticketmaster, and later the streaming platforms, really amped up that process of predatory contracts to levels previously unseen. I have always been a bit cynical when "artist" type musicians, people who exclusively play their own compositions I mean, complain about their lack of ability to make a living at that; I have a lot more concern about the ability of music teachers and wedding/event/bar bands to make a living with their craft, because they are the ones I consider to be "working" musicians, but even stipulating that, things have clearly turned into a free for all at this point.
We do actually need artists, as annoying as they can get.
Because speculation is at the core of capitalism.
It's essentially the venues and artists outsourcing the job of "being the asshole" to TicketMaster as a large chunk of the money eventually flow back. They get to publicly blame TicketMaster, claim they have no involvement, and still get their slice of the "processing fees".
If you are attending any event and you can actually buy the tickets directly at the box office then go that route. You'll likely save anywhere from 25-60% off the price of the tickets. Plus you'll get actual physical tickets.
Sure this doesn't work for some crazy in demand show, but nobody goes to those anyway right?
And worse, you can't split a venue up to 2 different sellers. They don't have a communication protocol for which seats are sold, so you end up in a position of double-booking. Also bad.
Basically the only way for this to work is:
a) a system exists where venues publish an event and seating
b) the system does nothing but keep track of sales and seats. They don't care who sold, just tracking that it was sold. Also allow full API access so any service can reserve and claim the seat, the service is now on the hook for that seat.
c) allow venues to indicate which services can sell their tickets
This will commodotize ticketmaster, but at the same time, there will very little value add, so who would compete. It'll be a race to the bottom with barely any money. And the service you build could take a small fee at best otherwise nobody would use you. AND you'd be competing against ticketmaster with almost no money.
And don't forget, the double booking problem... Your service will have to basically integrate with ticketmaster, who will never willingly do this given that you'll commodotize them, and they will not simply sacrifice themselves just to make some sort of positive outcome, and then also be completely beholden to another company.
Its a perfect monopoly field.
SongKick took a stab at breaking TicketMaster, as did PearlJam, and a few others. Everyone has failed so far.
This is clearly monopolistic and harmful to concert goers, and StubHub (also a Ticketmaster/LiveNation company) was fined a few years ago for selling tickets at a premium which were never made available to the public.
The whole industry is so shady, it's pathetic that this is allowed to continue.
How is that legal under Sherman Act?
I've bought Broadway tickets at the box office to save on processing fees, and they just printed out TicketMaster tickets.
TM also has huge vertical integration. If you want to perform a live show at almost any mid/large venue your tour is likely to be managed by Live Nation, and they are integrated down to artist representation.
I used to try that - in order to avoid ticketmaster fees. For most venues, even if you buy tickets at the venue, it is a ticketmaster terminal/printer that prints the tickets out. And you still pay the ticketmaster fees.
Live nation also runs most of the major music festivals too as they bought them up.
They charge a $5 fee for physical tickets now. It's less than their online bullshit, but it's still bullshit.
Last time I tried that the venue processed the sale through TicketMaster and I got a TicketMaster ticket.
My partner and I created, to our knowldge, the first ticketting system with live purchasing for seats at a stadium where you could choose your seats. Ticket master was not doing this at the time.
We drew the stadium with squares. It showed reserved, and purchased seats while selecting. It even picked the best possible seating so it wouldn't leave one spot vacant if you choose the "get me the best availble seats for N people option".
It was a huge success for a stadium that seated 8k people.
After the event was over, the main attraction host team asked us if we could do the ticketing system for their games. Their games were at the ACC. After a couple weeks they came back and told us it wasn't possible because Ticket Master had the rights to the stadium.
So what did we do? University was stating up soon so we went back to school. My business mind didn't even think to turning it into a service back then because we assumed ticket master controlled everything.
Forever facepalm.
- Selling tickets is hard. I mean really hard. By coincidence, I just hit my 14 year mark at Google. I also spent 5 years at Yahoo! in the early 2000s. I'd like to think I've seen hard technical problems over my career. And again, ticketing is hard.
- There's not that much money it. Especially relative to the technical challenge.
- Most of the thoughts here are how to build a ticketing system that fans want. Ticketmater could already do that.
There's a few things about ticketing people don't realize:
(1) Ticketmaster doesn't own tickets. They don't see the prices. They don't set the fees. These are typically by the promoter or the artist.
(2) Ticketmaster doesn't keep much of the fees. Read LiveNation's financials. Last time I checked, I think Ticketmaster was keeping about $3 per ticket on average (i.e. revenues / tickets sold). Almost all the fees go to other parties in the value chain -- venues, promoters, artists.
You have complex business rules. How venues are laid out change. How tickets are marketed is very dynamic.
Bad actors have a strong incentive for fraud.
You have an insane delta between median traffic & traffic spikes. You need to be able to sell out the staple center in under 4 minutes to an audience of millions.
What are the reasons they don't?
https://www.amazon.com/Ticket-Masters-Concert-Industry-Scalp...
Having a DoJ that absolutely adores mergers - that might not be working out for us.
And below that, artists sell their tickets at wholesale prices to ensure that they are sold, providing some guarantees about how much money will be made for a given performance. They have better things to do than waste their time trying to eke out every last possible penny, along with the risks associated with that. It's best to let someone else put in that work, and that's where resellers enter the picture. The same reason why you find a wholesale/retail divide in pretty much every industry.
There's both pros and cons to this outcome, but I don't believe havig TM as the single owner of the entire live event industry is on the whole, a good one.
https://variety.com/2019/music/news/black-keys-hundreds-turn...
Economically, it doesn't seem to make sense for artists and venues to be giving so much money to a partner who is delivering so little value. Even if the venue is getting half of the ticket master fee, the tickets selling with the fee included is proof that the customer is willing to pay that much, why share more than a small fraction of the ticket price with a website?
The sooner techies understand this, the better.
Read this: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-bill-gates-line/
Ticketmaster is a large aggregator.
That's not entirely true, the surge demand on their site is enormous. They pay for enormous capacity that is used only sporadically.
Artists and venues receive a part of the fees that TicketMaster charges. TicketMaster's essentially being paid by artists and venues to be the bad guy.
As long as there is an arbitrage opportunity and its incredibly profitable this will always exist. Tickets are priced too low, and there are very sophisticated companies who's only purpose is to buy and resell. This was SeatGeek's original premise to optimize when to sell and buy.
I'm not really even sure what the complaints are... yes theres limited quantity and incredible demand. The only real solution is you limit who can buy by price or exclusivity.
In a sense this situation came about because people want ticket prices to be ‘fair’. They don’t want to pay $500 for some concert even if that should be the market price. So it gets priced at $100 instead and Ticketmaster allows venues to recoup part of that with fees.
A startup may offer a "10% better" set of features, but that's not enough for the venue to justify the large switching costs and large risk that would be involved in trying out a competing product.
For such a switch to be justified, the alternative product's feature set would have to be 100x better -- a "gamechanger" that fundamentally alters the way the venue does business, not merely offers minor improvements.
The problem is just that they have a monopoly. They suck because of the ridiculous fees. They suck because they enable a secondary resale market. Etc etc. With no competitors, they have a captive market.
Point 1: Let her sell it on a different website.
Yesterday, Ticketmaster said millions, but it was probably more than 10 million people, logged in to try to buy hundreds of thousands of products. Each product has inventory=1, and you're not allowed to double sell a product. Try pushing this to any other website and it would crash for days.
This used to happen when sneaker reselling was at its peak. People would get angry at the terrible way Adidas or Nike would sell a sneaker, but when the same shoe was sold on a small website owned by some small store in Paris, the website would completely shut down until the owners could convince people via social media that the shoe will not be sold online, ever. Everyone loses. This problem was later solved by all stores either moving to Shopify, who has its own ticketmaster-like system, or just not selling popular sneakers online. Another thing that can happen is a seat could be sold to 100 people, then 99 get cancellations later. Would that make people happier?
Point 2: Bot protection. It's hard. I've worked on reseller/bot protection, you either go too light, and let bots in, or go too strong, and block non-bots. Especially when millions are hitting the website at once, and every seat can be sold once.
Point 3: It's not all professional resellers.
Someone can be a huge Swift fan, but if they see people spending thousands, or tens of thousands on StubHub, and it can pay for rent or half a new car, they'll sell it, even though they're not professional resellers. As long as Swift didn't block transferring tickets, and some rich people are willing to spend thousands, this will happen 100% of the time.
Ticketmaster, to try to fix this, has also attempted to sell the tickets themselves for resell prices, cutting out the middle man. But then people get mad at them. As long as the rich people are willing to pay, either Ticketmaster or resellers will charge them the high price
When you buy a ticket on stub hub, you see the buyers original name. Some times itll be some LLC, but most times its just some regular shmoe looking to make a buck
Are you looking to disrupt fees on a concert that never sold out? Sure, someone could do that, thats mostly politics internal to the entertainment world. Are you trying to sell out 20 stadiums at the same minute? It's either raffle, or queue, and not allowing anyone not on the paying credit card to enter concert
They are worth $16 billion (or about 1/4th an Elontwitter).
They had revenue of $6 billion and made a EBITDA of $573m.
So disruption of the Ticketmaster monopoly is going to result in $500 million? Perhaps?
They don't seem to be printing money as much as everything thinks they are. Someone could buy LYV and show people how you really milk a market to death.
[1] https://d1io3yog0oux5.cloudfront.net/_6fc34851c72a6087b32b93... p47
It seems that companies that go much above 35% start "investing" in stupid shit (FB hit 50% EBITDA margin in 2018 and then went nuts with Meta, dragging themselves back down to the 30s).
I'd say that these are rookie numbers and they could get that stuff to 50% or more (though some of it they wash into the venue and book on another part of the ledger).
Everyone makes more revenue when they go with TM - artists, venues, etc - everyone except for the ticket buyers, who pay out the nose. And TM plays the "bad guy" role in the equation to cover for all of those other people. Yes, TM holds a lot of contracts with venues, even owns some venues outright. But those contracts wouldn't exist if they weren't very juicy for the venue.
Every Phish tour starts the same way. Enter the lottery and hope to win tickets in some random spot.
Don't win lottery and join the Ticketmaster queue. Watch the site fall apart for an hour. Crashes at checkout and you're back to the end of the queue.
Go on Stubhub and pay 2x or more for the "big" shows (Halloween, NYE, etc).
But hey, also crashed chess.com.
They acquired the independent ticket sellers, then went on to acquire the physical venues themselves. Now if the artist wants to play at those venues, they deal with Ticketmaster from start to finish.
That means that even if artists wanted to buy a block of tickets to sell to their fans, their allotment would be whatever Ticketmaster themselves deem appropriate.
Andrew Schulz's Beef with Ticketmaster | Joe Rogan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS8a1rnPGGo
It's one of the most quietly intractable monopolies on the planet.
https://craphound.com/chokepoint/2022/09/27/twitch-does-a-ch...
Unregulated capitalism has flaws - this is one of them. Vertical monopolies are a huge issue period.
So if Taylor Swift promoter for her to her is Live Nation than the answer is no she does not get to choose the venues.
Can you convince a small venue to use your new system? Maybe? But since the big venues use Ticketmaster, it's advantageous for the smaller venues to use the same thing.
Can you convince a big venue to use your new system? Absolutely not. You're some unproven little company.
Example: Broadway theaters. There are three organizations that collectively own the vast majority of the Broadway theaters, Shubert, Nederlander, and Jujamcyn. These are very wealthy and very old fashioned organizations. Even when it's time for them to renew their contracts, do you think you can convince any of them to leave Ticketmaster/Telecharge? Not a chance in hell.
Lastly, Ticketmaster already covers all of the use cases that these venues have. It doesn't do the best job, but it does the job. Even if you do a great job of covering 90% of the use cases, they won't switch to you if there's even one thing they need that your alternative can't handle. Even these small and rare edge cases are absolutely essential to their business. To even come close you will need to hire several experts in the ticketing industry to learn that business to even know what these cases are.
Ok, so let's say you hire ticketing experts and you build a system better than Ticketmaster that does indeed cover 100% of the use cases the venues have. And you have perfect timing, the venue's exclusive deal with Ticketmaster is coming to a close and you have the opportunity to sell to them. Can you do it? Can you convince them to take a huge risk to use your platform? What's the upside other than the fact that its nicer for ticket buyers? Sticking with Ticketmaster is a safe bet for them. If you fail to convince them in that one window, you won't be able to try to sell to that venue again for several years.
TL;DR: Ticketmaster's customers aren't the ticket buyers, it's the venue.
Source: I have worked in ticketing in the past.
Granted, it was challenging to build and operate tech to sell exactly 300 tickets for a venue like Webster Hall at a scheduled time to all of greater New York City area and the half of USA fans willing to travel for such an intimate concert.
But it's possible. Pearl Jam did the same back in the day.
Stubhub prices appear to be significantly lower, but I had to call them to figure out how to retrieve my tickets, the UI is so confusing. Selling was a breeze though.
Much of the anger is about Ticketmaster’s terrible website, which made it impossible for fans to reliably buy tickets even when they spent the whole day hitting refresh. There can be no excuse for that.
People clicking refresh the whole day to get tickets? Let’s be real here unless you were in queue before the tickets even went on sale, the chances of getting a ticket were nearly zero.
Limited/no transfers - returns offered instead - offer flexibility to customers.
However as others have said I think the real obstacle is the venue relationships that came from the purchase of LiveNation. These are difficult to replace although maybe it would be possible to start with smaller venues and acts....or using public places a la music festivals.
In this day and age? I am highly skeptical.
Any large, upcoming surge of traffic is planned in advance, as in the case of the Taylor Swift Era Tour ticket sales, so they can easily preemptively scale up infrastructure ahead of that. There is zero reason to hold onto that infrastructure all year long, and dynamic scaling works fine for this type of service the rest of the year.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/LYV/live-nation-en...
Why are investors buying its stock? Do they want to capture more of the market before they start ratcheting up prices?
Ticketmaster today is significantly worse than even the entity I remember in the 2000s. The worst they'd do is charge 20% out of thin air for a "processing fee", and in any case, there were alternatives available, like buying paper tickets from record stores or directly at the venue.
The fact that they're now algorithmically predatory does not mean they are any less predatory than before. They have always used every tool available to them to extract as much money as they could from people.
Those paper tickets from record stores and those directly at the venue were purchased through Ticketmaster. For anything of note. It's why Pearl Jam tried to fight them in 1994.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taki...
Their next concert is at Innings Festival in Tempe, AZ. You can buy your tickets at Ticketmaster. So that's how well that went.
Ian Hogarth of SongKick describes how he first fought the anti-trust.