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Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?

265 points by mdni007 ↗ HN
It feels like every event/venue is selling tickets exclusively through Ticketmaster. Every other ticketing platform seems to only hold resale tickets in their inventory which just transfers the tickets to your Ticketmaster account when bought. With all the hate Ticketmaster has gotten and all the other ticketing platforms out there, I'm surprised Ticketmaster still has a hold of pretty much the entire market. How are they doing this? Why haven't the other platforms been able to compete?

105 comments

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mdni007
Rant: Trying to buy tickets for the Knicks game at MSG. Is it really impossible to have a ticketing platform that prevents scalpers from marking up prices to an insane amount?

$10000+ for a ticket that originally costs around 2k should be illegal. Most of these tickets will go unsold I'm sure.

secabeen
> $10000+ for a ticket that originally costs around 2k should be illegal. Most of these tickets will go unsold I'm sure.

I'm not so sure. See this article in the Washington Post where multiple season pass holders they talked to sold their seats for $5k+ quite quickly: "His tickets fetched more than $8,000 each within the first few hours of going up."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2026/06/08/knicks-seas...

solumos
Without regulation, yes. Brokers (i.e. scalpers) will buy up tickets to events and take all of the risk off of TM’s plate, and reprice however they’d like. ~80% of tickets in the U.S. are sold this way. Stubhub has done a great job of lobbying for this since their existence depends on ticket brokers.
drdec
> Most of these tickets will go unsold I'm sure.

The tickets have already been sold. These postings are for resales.

emodendroket
No, they will not go unsold. People aren't buying up $2,000 tickets and then trying to resell them at prices where they will lose their investment.
DANmode
> Most of these tickets will go unsold I'm sure.

They go to the cousin for $3k two hours before game time, worst case.

SoftTalker
If there is demand for tickets at $10,000, then people will find a way to sell them for $10,000. Any regulation that would somehow prevent that would only make it even more impossible to buy ticktets due to shortages.

Games and concerts are luxury goods. If you can't afford to go, don't go.

byoung2
They merged with LiveNation and they own half of the venues. The other half of the venues have exclusive deals with TicketMaster, who provides them with software to run venue logistics (TicketMaster for business), creating vendor lock-in.
testbjjl
Vendor lock-in by any other name boils down to monopoly. The moat is their lobby.
sirsinsalot
They also own a lot of the venue infrastructure across the industry such as catering, tour buses, security,...

They have leverage with venues they dont own and a monopoly across industry verticals.

Sickening situation for music.

lokar
And they manage tours for bands. So it’s very hard for them to play independent venues and still have access to the big livenation venues
mschuster91
> With all the hate Ticketmaster has gotten and all the other ticketing platforms out there, I'm surprised Ticketmaster still has a hold of pretty much the entire market.

That's the thing. Everyone hates Ticketmaster... but forgets that the venues and even many high profile artists could easily cancel their contracts with Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster takes the blame, rakes in the cash and distributes the cash to venues and artists. Everyone in the industry is complicit.

On top of that, I 'member the times here in Germany before the big gun Eventim took over, getting tickets used to be a clusterfuck before as your average 1000 seats venue just can't be expected to build a system that doesn't collapse under (often literally) hundreds of thousands to millions of fans.

The fix would be legislation, but given the amount of money in live events... it just won't happen.

yogibear678142
Oh yea ticket master owns the venues. The artists can't revolt if they want to put on a big show. Software companies can't compete without dipping their toes into big money real estate property.

Software start ups are all about that 0 cost replication of software. One webserver spawns millions of threads for free. Start ups crack under the pressure of real world costs. Like sure anyone can make a website where users send tweets to each other. But if you have to spend billions of dollars constructing stadiums so Swifties can have an ex-ticket master experience... That's a hard sell to the software guys.

yrcyrc
Bono, Geldof, livenation, cartel.
rrrpdx1
I always wonder why ticketmaster/live nation isn't making more money? Given they are a monopoly, I'd expect them to be making a ton of profit. But it doesn't really seem to look that way: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/LYV:NYSE
toast0
Ticketmaster's job is to take the heat for ticketing (high prices, BS fees, sketchy reselling, etc), but funnel enough money back to the producing parties (artist/event, venue, promoter) that nobody is going to go through the effort to try to compete.

Better to set their margins at 2-3% and keep a monopoly than be forced down in a competitive marketplace.

datsci_est_2015
“They” (shareholders, etc.) also own the venues and promoters, so much of the pass-through revenue is captured by the same interests that own TM.
christina97
As others pointed out, it only sucks for the buying side. The actual customers instead get price gouging and taking-the-blame as a service.
dfxm12
Ticketmaster has more vertical integration. They own the ticketing, ticket resale, the clubs, concert production, promotion and talent management. When you own the venue, you can lock out other ticket sellers. Artists are probably looking for a one stop shop for putting a tour together.

As an example, stubhub can sell/resell tickets, but that's about it.

2OEH8eoCRo0
They're a monopoly.

We already have a thriving marketplace of seating- it's called the airline industry. You can buy a seat on a plane from dozens if not hundreds of sellers online.

massysett
I frequent a small venue that sells all its tickets through this vendor. They have other venues as well, also using this vendor.

https://www.axs.com/

tinyhouse
I try to always buy tickets on TickPick when I can (no affiliation). No fees and total prices are often much better than Ticketmaster. But my usecase is almost always buying from resellers. I never up-to-date to buy official tickets.
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maerF0x0
One component of the total picture also is that many of these stadiums/arenas are being funded by the public / tax payer often by tax breaks etc. and the politicians / lobbies are using their relationship to monopolize that public good.

IMO every event at an area should go through a public auction / RFP of who is the ticketer for that event (maybe artist gets right of first refusal to pony up the difference for their preferred ticketer?)

gobdovan
I heard they had a real good employee that was the smartest programmer to ever live and built his own OS by divine command.
ngcazz
Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow's Chokepoint Capitalism dedicates a chapter to the mechanisms through which TM enforces a virtual monopoly over live music.
mrsssnake
A really great book and very good chapter
emodendroket
It seems like it would be very easy to blacklist any artist/venue that works with the competition and make it practically crazy to do.
wolvoleo
Why hasn't there been a real competitor to youtube yet? Similar question.

Some markets really are screwed.

wj
I felt that Amazon had the best chance to step into the ticketing game as they have the platform that can handle the volume spikes (Cyber Monday). But tech infrastructure is only a part of the puzzle.
hurrell
One detail I haven’t seen in other comments.

In the uk at least, live nation / Ticketmaster will sign exclusive deals with artists - limiting them to a summer run of (for eg) five live nation festivals and no performances at any non live nation events.

So even if alternative venues / festivals exist, live nation squeezes them out by being able to sign bigger multi venue/event deals.

alexose
Ticketmaster obviously sucks, and their monopolistic business practices deserve a close look by regulators.

But the core of it is that an unregulated ticket market actually supports these prices. Fans keep showing that they're willing to dig deep and outbid each other to attend these events in person. Ticketmaster realizes this, and have set up a business model that extracts accordingly.

I think this is where us Americans get turned around. We tend to believe that it’s fair to charge the full market value for a thing, but we also have a sense that cultural experiences are "meant" to be shared equitably. But until we actually put a value on the latter, we're only ever going to have the former.

bluehatbrit
I spent several years working for a competitor of Ticketmaster. The industry is really difficult to break into.

First, there's the chicken and egg problem of content (events) and consumers. One big part of the sales process is a venue or promoter understanding how your platform will support their sales and marketing processes. If you already have consumers with an app and push notifications, it's an easy sell.

Another issue is cash flow. Deals often depends on what advance you're willing to pay, and it's not uncommon for very large venues to get signed at a loss just for the content. You need the cash to compete, and the big boys will happily take a hit on the big venues to hold onto them. The actual take per ticket is quite a low margin, and if a venue performs worse than you'd hoped you can easily end up making a lot less than planned.

Then you've got all the usual RFP noise around feature offerings. Plus regulation in different countries (looking at you, Italy).

You need investors to fund your sales process, and your development all at very low margins. You also need all the industry connections to build an enterprise sales pipeline and secure business. All of that is to say it's a difficult industry to get any sort of a foot hold in, let alone grow enough to be a serious contender.

The company I worked at ended up doing several rounds of layoffs followed by a very poor sale with no consideration to staff options. It's limping on as it slowly gets absorbed into the company who bought them who are also in the ticketing and event space.