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Ask HN: Why has no one replaced Ticketmaster?

196 points by cuuupid ↗ HN
I constantly see people complaining about ticketmaster with scalping, nasty business tactics, broken interfaces, etc. and they get sued left and right after countless big events.

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

168 comments

[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] thread
stathibus
Business relationships with the venues. They are equally to blame.
teppic
Live Nation, who own Ticketmaster, also own the venues and do the promotion for the tours.

They have a vertically integrated monopoly.

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

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

latchkey
You're bringing up the past, they are talking about the present, which is absolutely accurate.
IshKebab
OP asked why nobody has beaten TM. The answer cannot be "because they have a vertically integrated monopoly" because in the past that wasn't true and nobody was able to beat them then either.
latchkey
Even if a venue isn't owned my LN, they still use TM for ticketing because otherwise their booking agents won't be able to get the Clear Channel artists to come. It has been that way for a LONG time. Before LN, it was CC.

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

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

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

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

latchkey
What are you no about? Like I said, before LN, it was CC.
cbsmith
It was formed to compete with TM, because TM had too much market power. In other words, you didn't need to use TM if you were using CC from a business/monopoly standpoint --in fact it was against their interests. However, CC/LN often went with TM anyway because it worked out better for them.
latchkey
And what happened? They joined TM and CC.
cbsmith
No, LN was spun off from CC and after years of trying & failing to compete with TM, then acquired TM.

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

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

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

tylergetsay
It's not that LN owns the venues, but that the venues have an exclusive ticket agreement with TM. So if you want to perform at this venue, you must sell via TM. When my startup was trying to compete, we found that basically every single outdoor amphitheater had exclusive ticket rights. This makes stuff like crowdfunding a concert impossible
cbsmith
Right, but now you have to ask yourself why do the venues have exclusive ticket agreements with TM rather than another ticketing vendor?
powera
Artists like using Ticketmaster because they can blame Ticketmaster for fees. And, more broadly, blame Ticketmaster for the unavoidable problems that arise because there isn't an unlimited supply of tickets, and artists want to generate (almost) as much revenue as possible from them.
zie
Most artists generate nearly all of their income from tours.
cushpush
Not to be pendantic, but could you please provide some general numbers or cite any source for this
BenoitEssiambre
Yup. I'm convinced that part of Ticketmaster's business proposition is to absorb the hate for artists who want to maximize profits but don't want to look responsible for the ruthless capitalist approach because it would taint their artistic appeal.

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

bluewalt
In France it was widely used but now we have new competitors like www.shotgun.live with a modern app, built-in resale feature, stripe payment, etc.
MichaelZuo
What would you estimate the market share to be?
ggrelet
Afaik shotgun is specialized in nightclubs and electronic music festivals so I would say it’s not that big but it’s getting bigger.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

demondemidi
Wow. What a brilliantly evil racket. The invisible hand of the market at work I guess. I’m glad I hate going to concerts.
JohnFen
I enjoy going to concerts and other shows (Ticketmaster is not just into concerts), but haven't been, except for small local ones, in a number of years because I am not willing to support Ticketmaster.
jiscariot
I tend to agree with this analysis--that a part of the TM business model is extracting additional money for venues, artists and themselves, and taking on 100% of the reputational hit for fees. It's fascinating but have a hard time thinking of similar examples of a similar model, if anyone has some.
yoyopa
Don't know why it's taking so long. I thought "master" wasn't allowed anymore.
kelseyfrog
Ticketmaster has exclusive deals with artists and venues.

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

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

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

caseysoftware
^ This.

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

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

thatswrong0
If this were the 1920s, antitrust enforcement would come down with an iron fist. The consolidation and control of the market is insane. I hope we can see some government movement about this at some point..
nulbyte
> hope we can see some government movement about this at some point.

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

[dead] okr
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SkyPuncher
It’s the exclusivity piece that’s the problem.
kylebenzle
Both venues AND artists want it this way, who's going to complain?

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

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

Consumers?

solardev
These days, Ticketmaster would probably be the ones selling the tickets to the FTC hearings to begin with.
okdood64
Perhaps if there were enough big artists to get together and "strike" against Live Nation/Ticketmaster exclusive venues something might change for the better for their fans.

But, alas, that money too good.

simonw
If a venue has signed a multi-year contract with Ticketmaster there's not much they can do as a short-term measure inspired by something like a strike.
willcipriano
Sounds anticompetitive to me, antitrust action should be taken.
kelseyfrog
Anti-trust (at least to me) has a connotation with trust-busting and splitting up companies, but I'd be interested in the ramifications of restricting Ticketmaster to creating contracts no longer than, say, 6 months.

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

TT2048
This could be a headache for venues. The financial arbitrage is too good for them, they have almost zero risk of having their venue empty.
trollied
6 months would not make sense, when people routinely buy tickets for concerts 12-18 months out.
willis936
Trust busting exists for this very case. Shorter contracts would solve nothing because the market is as far from free as it can be and the one in charge has no interest in changing that.
hfhdjdks
The busting and splitting up is a hard tool, but anti-trust has many other tools at their disposal, including maintaining status quo (i.e. refusing the merge of two companies). Disclaimer: I don't work in the US, so I'm not sure if anti-trust there is heavily biased there to this heavy duty tool, but I do know they have plenty of other tools
pockybum522
No chance of that, they're based in America
idontwantthis
I think that’s roughly how the Coachella music festival started, but yeah…money.
masklinn
> But, alas, that money too good.

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

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progbits
Can't wait for EU commission to notice this and add them to the "gatekeepers" list.
morsch
Ticketmaster isn't huge in Europe. I think CTS Eventim is the closest equivalent, with a similar share of tickets sold in a few countries, including their home turf, Germany. But I don't think it's comparable, as they're not similarly vertically integrated.

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

atoav
I think the lock-in is nowhere near what ticketmaster is doing. Bands don't have to make deals with Eventim, for venues Eventim is typically just an additional way to sell tickets.
maccard
Ticketmaster are enormous in Europe. Pretty much every major artist uses them, and every festival uses them (aside from Glastonbury apparently). If that's not your definition of huge I don't know what is.
bazmattaz
Ticketmaster is gigantic in the UK
nsteel
That's a bit confusing when gigantic.com is "one of the UK's largest independent ticket agencies".
gigatexal
So where’s Lina Kahn pressuring to break up these exclusive agreements? She made hay talking about them in 2022 but what has been done recently? https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/big-firms-lik...
input_sh
> but what has been done recently?

Specifically about Ticketmaster or what has FTC done more broadly?

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

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

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

gigatexal
Against Ticketmaster specifically.
trogdor
>FTC definitely has some teeth now, but they can't wish monopolies out of existence

Monopolies are not inherently illegal.

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

blueboo
Bigger fish to fry

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

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

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

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ttymck
Has the FTC actually managed to effect any regulatory power in the past 10 years? Why should we hope they would succeed here.
hfhdjdks
Sounds like a two-sided market, where a company gets their value from being able to connect one side (the artists) with the other one (the venues).

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

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

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

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

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

By dangling more money.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spivak
Or just don't, keep charging the the people who have the money and aren't price sensitive.
bradfa
Ticketmaster is the official ticket seller for the NFL. It would be interesting if the NFL decided to do tickets themselves, as they easily have the scale and sway over the venues and teams. But there’s probably not enough money in it to justify it for the NFL and if Ticketmaster isn’t broken from their view, why fix it?

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

Kerbonut
I would not be surprised if Ticketmaster gives the NFL some major incentives to using their services.
BeFlatXIII
Congress (or the FTC) ought to step in to ban such exclusivity contracts using anti-monopoly laws.
kayfox
Ticketmaster also owns a lot of venues through Live Nation and also owns a lot of the venues labor through Crew Nation. Fortunately for the latter they have not been wildly successful at busting the IATSE union in union venues.
wdr1
> Ticketmaster has exclusive deals with artists and venues.

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

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

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

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

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

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

blindriver
Pearl Jam tried to do something about it 25 years ago but their monopoly is too entrenched. They gave up.
canucker2016
almost 30 years ago, now

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

does ticketmaster monopolize small venues, as well?

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

JohnFen
> does ticketmaster monopolize small venues, as well?

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

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

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

JohnFen
Truly. Of all of the various big companies that are being accused of monopoly, I can't think of a clearer, more supportable case (one where the monopoly position is obviously being abused) than Ticketmaster. And yet, the feds don't seem to mind.
Terr_
I imagine one factor is whether a monopolistic company has made enemies along the federal partisanship divide, or been in a situation where a politician believed they could advance their own career by stirring something up.
oldbbsnickname
In a world free from the corruption of billionaires and corporations outright buying influence in DC, https://economicliberties.us , a nonpartisan, nonprofit think-tank and lobbies for improving and enforcing antitrust regulations would be the best place to take this.
thfuran
As much as I am in favor of breaking up anti-competitive monopolies, I don't think that really gets to the root of th issue. As long as it's legal to make the sort of exclusivity deals that Ticketmaster has, someone can take over the market.
safety1st
What's really wild is that for the last 2.5 years the FTC has been led by somebody who's super dialed in on antitrust issues and trying to take these companies to court, but the government is having a hard time winning the cases. So either the courts have been bought and paid for, or the laws are weak and out of date because Congress is bought and paid for, or both. All this despite a rough but widespread understanding among the majority of Americans that the economy is rigged.

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

IG_Semmelweiss
I posit a 3rd option:

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

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

Let that sink for a minute.

distances
I tried to let this sink a bit but I have no idea what you mean with your example. Was the Amazon-iRobot merger somehow a clear case that should and could have been forbidden? I don't know anything about that merger but to me it sounds like they are mainly in completely different fields so I don't get how it applies here.
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jjeaff
I don't think they are hated by the artists. I think they provide the artists a very useful and desirable service. Which is to extract every possible penny from fans while also taking the negative PR hit on behalf of the artist. The artist can throw their hands up as if there really is nothing they can do and blame it on Ticketmaster. Yet they are getting a healthy cut of all those fees and above retail ticket prices. Either through up front exclusivity agreements or through other hidden means.

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

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

omnivore
same with dating apps. match owns all of them but bumble
anigbrowl
Contracts and preferential attachment. Competition theory as taught in economics class assumes zero friction to enter and exit the market, complete informational transparency for buyers and sellers, and suchlike. It really doesn't apply in the Real World outside of maybe commodity markets.
bendangelo
I worked at a startup that tried to compete with them. Eventually we just sold to them. I don’t know the details sorry.
wslh
This is why it is naive to think that a startup is successful because of the product. Here product market fit is about power specifically.
cushpush
why is ticket scalping still a thing with robust ID
Apreche
Tickets for events necessarily have a limited supply. If demand exceeds supply, price goes up. The box offices keep the face value prices of the tickets lower than what the market will bear. Therefore, someone will always step in to arbitrate and collect the margin. Even if Ticketmaster were destroyed, it would not have any impact on scalping. The only way to stop this from happening is for the face value of high demand tickets to rise greatly. For example, you could sell tickets with a dutch auction.
thaumasiotes
That doesn't really respond to cushpush, who is proposing that resold tickets shouldn't be honored by the venue.
ggybdese
Are you suggesting there is no valid use case for reselling tickets other than scalping? (I am unable to make it to an event today for which I bought tickets due to an unforeseen circumstance). Do you propose that my ticket has to go to waste?
thaumasiotes
I'm suggesting that cushpush specifically indicated that venues should prevent any and all resale of tickets, and the comment I responded to purported to respond to cushpush in a way that was a total and complete non sequitur.
lozenge
Because venues have an hour and a half to let in 18,000 people.
carlosjobim
Scalping is something that the artists and ticket sellers specifically enable. If there's a name on each ticket you can't resell it.
cbsmith
Honestly, it's not what the rhetoric tells you.

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

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

> I constantly see people complaining about ticketmaster with scalping

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

massysett
What kind of “special feature”, any examples?
cbsmith
There's the infamous "Garth mode" (named after Garth Brooks), where the inventory for multiple performances in the same venue is effectively consolidated into one pseudo-event. Some of the performances are kept in reserve, and they turn the individual performances on and off in real-time to spread out demand across performances and also ensure they provide enough inventory fulfill all demand (it just murders the resellers).
cbsmith
Seriously, even TM can't replace TM. ;-) They keep buying ticketing companies in hopes of ditching all their technical debt and switching to a new ticketing platform. Every time they try to do it, they fail. So most tickets for concerts in the US are still sold with a program that runs assembly code running on a VAX emulator.
wwalexander
I’ve seen a lot of use of Dice lately, which has a nice app and a decent ticket resale process.

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

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

n4r9
Yep, the fact that events (or even specific days of an event) can have their resale queue disabled at any time is a huge downside. My wife's been bitten by that as well.
frellus
Other companies seem just as bad. I bought tickets through AXS (no choice), and the $30 "general admission" (standing) tickets to a semi-popular rocker went from $30 to $60. Fees were literally the same price as the ticket. Insanity.
thaumasiotes
> I constantly see people complaining about ticketmaster with scalping, nasty business tactics, broken interfaces, etc. and they get sued left and right after countless big events.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Basically they are a big evil bully.