[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?
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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
Author : jnac
Score : 62 points
Date : 2022-11-17 15:07 UTC (7 hours ago)
| datapolitical wrote:
| The answer is that Ticketmaster gives 50% of their revenue to the
| venue, which is a pretty good deal for the venue, so they have
| every incentive to keep that relationship going
| sf4lifer wrote:
| Venues also sign multi-year contracts and ticketmaster also has
| multi-year contracts with all the talent agencies as well.
| robrenaud wrote:
| They run a not that complicated website. As someone who loves
| live music, they take way too much in ticket fees for the value
| and difficulty of the service they provide. Legitimately, it
| feels like expertsexchange.
|
| 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?
| oblio wrote:
| It's not about the tech. It's rarely about the tech.
|
| The sooner techies understand this, the better.
|
| Read this: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-bill-gates-line/
|
| Ticketmaster is a large aggregator.
| ars wrote:
| > They run a not that complicated website.
|
| That's not entirely true, the surge demand on their site is
| enormous. They pay for enormous capacity that is used only
| sporadically.
| coder543 wrote:
| > They pay for enormous capacity that is used only
| sporadically.
|
| 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.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| anuvrat1 wrote:
| The vertical integration, from venues to ticket reselling.
| riteshpatel wrote:
| We are very much alive :)
|
| https://www.ticketfairy.com/event-ticketing
| colesantiago wrote:
| Do we need to disrupt Ticketmaster?
| eschneider wrote:
| I spent a fair bit of time researching this space as it seemed
| like an obviously good startup idea. It turns out that almost
| everyone who you think would benefit from a better system have
| already been coopted by the current players. It's definitely an
| uphill battle.
| zwkrt wrote:
| To put it into perspective I work for two years at Amazon to
| try to create a competitor to Ticketmaster. Our ticket sales
| infrastructure wasn't quite as polished as Ticketmaster is but
| it was passable. What killed the product though is that we
| couldn't get any reasonably sized contracts in the United
| States. So even a company with the motivation to burn capital
| the size of Amazon couldn't swing competing with Ticketmaster.
| eschneider wrote:
| You have to look at it this way: Ticketmaster's job isn't so
| much "selling tickets", as being the "designated bad guys" so
| artists and venues don't have to be. Everyone gets their cut.
| nunez wrote:
| Now that you mention it, Apple has the best shot at this
| given their relationships
| tfang17 wrote:
| Read the book Ticket Masters. Explains how they've basically
| formed a monopoly via their merger with LiveNation - Ticket
| Master controls all major venues and thus all ticketing systems.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Ticket-Masters-Concert-Industry-Scalp...
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| >they've basically formed a monopoly via their merger with
| LiveNation
|
| Having a DoJ that absolutely _adores_ mergers - that might not
| be working out for us.
| carlosdp wrote:
| They own most of the largest music venues in the world, after
| their acquisition of Live Nation in 2012. So, if Katy Perry goes
| on tour and needs to choose a ticketing provider, she pretty much
| has no choice because several of those venues will only use
| Ticketmaster, period.
|
| It's one of the most quietly intractable monopolies on the
| planet.
| yuy910616 wrote:
| Yeah like other comments have said - agreements with venues. In
| the real world, it is still relatively easy to control the
| supply, especially given there are so few big venues and only a
| number of big artists that can fill those venues.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Ticketmaster's a very vertical monopoly, if you go with anyone
| else then a _ton_ of venues simply _will not work with you_. If
| you open a venue that works with anyone besides Ticketmaster then
| you won 't be able to book any acts that _do_ work with TM, which
| is "pretty much fucking everyone". There's a lot more to this,
| Doctorow and Giblin's recent book "Chokepoint Capitalism" has a
| couple of chapters that examine this whole setup in great detail.
|
| https://craphound.com/chokepoint/2022/09/27/twitch-does-a-ch...
| AlanYx wrote:
| What I don't understand is how this doesn't fall afoul of US
| antitrust legislation, especially the rules on tied selling?
| wolpoli wrote:
| This is where free market fails, and to fix this, government
| would needs to outlaw these types of exclusive agreements.
| ISL wrote:
| If they do it in an egregiously anticompetitive way, it is
| already outlawed.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| I can't believe they went after Microsoft for IE, but all of
| this is fair game. It regulatory capture and it's rampant in
| every industry.
| aj7 wrote:
| We've had 50% Republican administrations. Regulatory
| capture is their technology as they can't pass anti-
| competitive legislation, no matter how much they are
| bribed.
| francisofascii wrote:
| But the acts don't have exclusive rights with TM, do they?
| zwkrt wrote:
| It's complicated. Live Nation is a promoter. For those of you
| not in the industry a promoter is basically like a mini VC
| that funds a tour or a live event. The promoter invests the
| capital necessary to put on the show and in turn gets to
| dictate what the ticket prices will be where the show will be
| what acts will be performing together and who will sell the
| tickets.
|
| 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.
| aj7 wrote:
| Because it actually works.
| nervousvarun wrote:
| This has been discussed a few times before (see link below).
|
| 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).
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18025209
| floor2 wrote:
| This is why it's frustrating that America has no right-wing
| political party.
|
| 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.
| vintermann wrote:
| Right-wing? When did a right wing party, anywhere in the
| world, go through with a strong smash-the-monopolies policy?
| skyyler wrote:
| Could you give an example of a true right-wing political
| party, in your eyes? Anywhere in the world.
| comprev wrote:
| In the same way it's so hard to disrupt Google.
|
| They are such a powerful monopoly the average Joe rarely thinks
| there is an alternative.
| noodle wrote:
| I briefly worked on starting a small competitor to TM as a
| contractor (which is incidentally still around and doing fine).
| The reason TM is hard to disrupt boils down to this:
|
| 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.
| pier25 wrote:
| Ticket Fairy is not DOA they're doing fine. I don't work there
| but know people that do.
| hedora wrote:
| Even before the live nation acquisition, they were a monopoly. At
| the height of their careers, Pearl Jam tried to tour without
| using them to sell tickets. They failed. I doubt any current
| bands have as much market leverage as Pearl Jam did back then.
| rchaud wrote:
| Vertical integration.
|
| 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.
| twiddling wrote:
| Luxottica is another example of vertical integration that needs
| to be broken up.
| not1ofU wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| Andrew Schulz's Beef with Ticketmaster | Joe Rogan
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS8a1rnPGGo
| [deleted]
| chpatrick wrote:
| It's a monopoly, the same group owns the venues.
| srfvtgb wrote:
| I think big artists need to start doing what some large sporting
| events do and sell a significant proportion of tickets on a
| ballot system. Instead of being first come first served, anyone
| who registered to buy a ticket (possibly paying a deposit to
| disincentivize duplicate entries) would go in the draw for the
| opportunity to buy a ticket, preventing things turning into an
| auction benefiting those who have the fastest bots.
| aj7 wrote:
| The Grateful Dead had a system where you just bought the
| tickets. If you didn't make it in the lottery, your envelope
| was returned unopened. Don't remember what the method of
| payment was.
| angryasian wrote:
| Thats what these presales were. They were limited to Taylor
| Swift fans that essentially were entered in a lottery
| aaron695 wrote:
| koolba wrote:
| TicketMaster has exclusive contracts with the vast majority of
| venues and just about every large one. These contracts include
| kickbacks where TicketMaster will add $X of fees to each ticket
| it sells and pass back Y$ (Y < X) to the venue.
|
| 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?
| wilsonnnn wrote:
| Is Y <<<< X?
| bsimpson wrote:
| I've been buying my tickets at The Greek in Berkeley since
| Ticketmaster started requiring 2FA and rejecting my Google
| Voice number.
|
| They charge a $5 fee for physical tickets now. It's less than
| their online bullshit, but it's still bullshit.
| Justsignedup wrote:
| So much this. And just to add, any startup that even attempts
| this, EVEN WITH 100% ARTIST SUPPORT, cannot work out because
| venues have the exclusivity contracts.
|
| 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.
| pedalpete wrote:
| It isn't just that the venues have exclusive contracts, its
| also that if they break the exclusivity contract with
| TicketMaster, they can't use a competing service for 2 years
| (though I can't find proof of this, when I worked in venues 20
| years ago, this was the case).
|
| 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.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| > It isn't just that the venues have exclusive contracts, its
| also that if they break the exclusivity contract with
| TicketMaster, they can't use a competing service for 2 years
| (though I can't find proof of this, when I worked in venues
| 20 years ago, this was the case).
|
| How is that legal under Sherman Act?
| georgeplusplus wrote:
| It's probably not along with many other industries that
| sorely need the Sherman act, but the DOJ would have to
| bring charges and sometimes it's not politically popular
| especially during periods of bad economy to do so
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| > _If you are attending any event and you can actually buy the
| tickets directly at the box office then go that route._
|
| 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.
| valarauko wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I've bought Broadway tickets at the box office to save on
| processing fees, and they just printed out TicketMaster
| tickets.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| The artists _can_ do better too, if they have the power to make
| TM share the upside (most don 't) because TM controls much of
| the resale market and is also moving towards surge pricing.
| This is why they're pushing into virtual ticketing so hard
| (Ticket-less Master?)
|
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Sounds very anti trusty.
|
| https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-
| news/act...
|
| https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-
| guidance/gui...
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Unfortunately, monopoly laws are enforced like the rules in
| monopoly: entirely arbitrarily
| anm89 wrote:
| No body goes to those shows anymore, they are too crowded
| idunno246 wrote:
| You still get hit with fees at the door in my experience.
| Considering most venues bigger than a bar are owned by
| livenation which is the same company as Ticketmaster...
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I think it's not so straightforward what your competitive
| advantage is. Charging customers lower fees isn't so simple
| because Ticketmaster splits the fees with the venue. So I guess
| you need to take an even smaller cut than 50%. But can you afford
| to run a profitable business off of smaller margins than that?
|
| 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.
| angryasian wrote:
| thats the reality, Taylor Swift tickets would probably be
| priced at $1k a ticket and would still sell out
| shmatt wrote:
| In short: the anger over what happened yesterday is overblown. If
| a commodity is sellable, people will sell it. The ONLY option
| here is to make tickets non-transferable, full ID check to verify
| the name on ID is the name on the ticket
|
| 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
| chrishare wrote:
| ID verification + limited transfers + pre-election via lottery?
| jnac wrote:
| My thought too- charging higher prices in the first place &
| passing the same % on to the venue would allow you to offer
| the venues a better deal while still allowing fans to pay
| less than they would to resellers.
|
| 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.
| zwkrt wrote:
| I worked in the industry for a while and I agree with your
| points. I would add though that Ticketmaster is incredibly
| entrenched because Live Nation (parent company) is also a
| promoter and also owns many venues or has exclusive contracts
| with venues and they also have contracts with artists
| specifying that they will tour to venues affiliated with LN.
| Vertical integration.
| aj7 wrote:
| Not true on StubHub. No information on original purchaser. Also
| effectively not transferable as you can't print the ticket.
| Must use mobile device, not optionally use.
|
| 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.
| angryasian wrote:
| I think its so naive for anyone to think that this problem won't
| exist within the same rules that are currently set for any
| company.
|
| 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.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Because they work with venues, promoters, and artists behind the
| scenes by sharing the profits and playing the bad guy to the
| public.
| Xcelerate wrote:
| Why is there a secondary market anyway? I don't understand why
| ticket prices don't just rise to the optimal balance of supply
| and demand. Same question I have for the allocated bourbon market
| actually...
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Some artists and performers have goals separate from "extract
| the maximum revenue possible on every sale", they may want to
| price their tickets so that young fans or other people not in
| the 1% of income distribution can attend their shows.
| Apreche wrote:
| Because it's not Ticketmaster you have to overturn, it's the
| venues. They have exclusive deals locked in for several years.
|
| 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.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| But mah free market ideology says competition will produce the
| best outcome for everyone, we just need more deregulation to fix
| things.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Ticketmaster exists because they kickback to artists and
| venues. This is is the best outcome for them. Supply of tickets
| is so limited that fan perspective is completely ignored, the
| tickets sell out anyway.
| vintermann wrote:
| Kickback? I wouldn't exactly call it that, since it's the
| venue's seats, and the artist's acts it's selling.
|
| The problem is more that they own the venues, and
| aggressively punish anyone who works with their competitors.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Half of the fees go to the artist and venue. Ticketmaster
| takes the position of the "bad guy" to take all the blame
| for high prices while artists can say "the tickets only
| cost $40" even though the real price is easily double that.
| thedangler wrote:
| I am so pissed at my 2004 self. I was in 2nd year university and
| won a bid to create the website and ecommerce platform for a
| local event. The website was for: Event information, Team
| Schedules, Buying merhcandise, and event tickets.
|
| 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.
| jmkr wrote:
| related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kShIppJtHiY
|
| 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.
| standardly wrote:
| Such a travesty, everyone should be given an equal opportunity
| to see Phish. There's an idea that floated around that the band
| should either start their own venue or festival grounds. I am
| not sure how logistically viable that is, but it would totally
| solve the issue of ticket distribution if they could just do it
| organically.
| pjlegato wrote:
| Ticketmaster works "well enough" that venues have no compelling
| reason to switch.
|
| 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.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?
|
| Because speculation is at the core of capitalism.
| bombcar wrote:
| Let's see. LYV is the parent company (including venues, etc).
|
| 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.
| jnac wrote:
| That's a good data point, the market is surprisingly small
| which could account for lack of competition. But the last
| annual report has the ticketing org alone at 37% EBITDA margin
| [1] (they call it AOI). No expert on benchmarking this # but
| wouldn't say they're not milking it.
|
| [1]
| https://d1io3yog0oux5.cloudfront.net/_6fc34851c72a6087b32b93...
| p47
| bombcar wrote:
| 37% EBITDA is in line with APPL (31%) and relatively _low_
| when you consider that APPL produces a ton of actual physical
| goods.
|
| 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).
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Livenation has a zero percent profit margin for 10+ years.
|
| 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?
| ID1452319 wrote:
| The reason resellers exist is because people are prepared to pay
| many multiples of the face value for tickets. If people stopped
| buying tickets on the secondary market, the resellers would be
| left with worthless paper they paid thousands of dollars for and
| the secondary market would disappear.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> The reason resellers exist is because people are prepared to
| pay many multiples of the face value for tickets._
|
| 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.
| mikewebkist wrote:
| If artists and venues used market clearing prices there would
| also be much less demand for a secondary market. The "problem"
| Ticketmaster solves is that for someone like Taylor Swift the
| supply of tickets is VASTLY lower than the demand for tickets.
| But Taylor, reasonably, doesn't want to be seen selling tickets
| for thousands of dollars each. Instead you get presales and
| lotteries and "ticketmaster fees" and a secondary market.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| TM is actively dismantling the secondary ticket market by (a)
| being a secondary market themselves, (b) pushing paperless
| tickets so they are very hard to transfer, (c) surge pricing to
| capture the margin the secondary market needs.
|
| 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.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| You are correct but you are missing that TM is doing this in
| collaboration with the promoters and artists, which of course
| means sharing the profits with them too.Example, The Black
| Keyes told TM to invalidate secondary market tickets to one
| of its.shows.
|
| https://variety.com/2019/music/news/black-keys-hundreds-
| turn...
| CabSauce wrote:
| I heard that ticketmaster has exclusive agreements with basically
| every large venue. So if performers want to play venues of over a
| medium size (large theaters, arenas), they're forced to use
| ticketmaster.
| treepunch wrote:
| That's because most of the major venues are owned by
| LiveNation... which is the same company. When they merged in
| 2010 everyone saw this coming.
| fuzzylightbulb wrote:
| Tickemaster was terrible even before the Live Nation merger.
| The issue is that everyone is making money hand over fist at
| the expense of the consumer, while Ticketmaster is absorbing
| all the negative attention. Artists love selling out shows at
| a particular ticket price; it doesn't matter to them if the
| venue is full of true believers or if the true believers paid
| extra to be there so long as the "extra" is still within the
| price people are begrudgingly willing to pay. The venues love
| it because they get a portion of the ticket sales and the
| fees, and they don't need to manage the sale of tickets or
| employ folks to do so. No one in the chain is going to stick
| their neck out to kill the golden goose for the sake of the
| consumer. It's a mess.
| bena wrote:
| Ticketmaster was just as bad and just as monopolistic in the
| 80s and 90s.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Now they have a moat too
| rchaud wrote:
| How did they do algorithmic pricing then? Send updated
| price lists every morning to all ticket vendors via fax?
|
| 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.
| bena wrote:
| They just charged a shitton and tacked on bullshit fees.
|
| 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.
| chitowneats wrote:
| Yes and they used the insane amounts of money they made in
| those days to close a potential vector of attack by
| purchasing LiveNation. Feds still should have prevented
| that merger.
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