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
125 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 289 ms ] threadTicketmaster 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.
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.
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.
That's not entirely true, the surge demand on their site is enormous. 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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
The problem is more that they own the venues, and aggressively punish anyone who works with their competitors.
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...
https://www.amazon.com/Ticket-Masters-Concert-Industry-Scalp...
Having a DoJ that absolutely adores mergers - that might not be working out for us.
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 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?
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.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/act...
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
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?
Ian Hogarth of SongKick describes how he first fought the anti-trust.
https://twitter.com/soundboy/status/1593549611431493632
I've bought Broadway tickets at the box office to save on processing fees, and they just printed out TicketMaster tickets.
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.
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.
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.
Live nation also runs most of the major music festivals too as they bought them up.
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.
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 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).
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?
It's one of the most quietly intractable monopolies on the planet.
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.
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.