Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

Why not just ban the transfer of tickets and allow refunds? You buy a ticket, you show your ID at the door. Early refunded tickets get resold online and late refunds are sold at the venue. All seats, including the best seats, go to actual fans instead of scalpers just hoping to make a profit while providing zero value. First choice in seats goes to the most passionate and attentive fans.

I'm always annoyed by this kind of news. The problem has existed for a long time, and finally, FINALLY, a court weighs in on some very narrow sliver of the problem, meanwhile things keep getting worse.

It always feels like the scene in Lord Of The Rings where they're waiting for the Ents to deliberate on the big war that's going on, and then after an agonizing amount of time they announce that they just said Good Morning and decided their guests weren't Orcs.

Like jeez can justice move any slower?

It should also be said that they could do anything at all to prevent these professional scalpers from scooping up all the tickets at once, including even merely closing those APIs entirely but they continue to do nothing about it.

The verified re-sale thing as you have correctly pointed out just allowed them to pretend like something was being done about scalping while it actually just let them make more money on the resale fees.

Having produced, performed in, and engineered a number of shows and festivals, this is a terrible idea for a pricing strategy.

Consider portajohns for an outdoor festival- incentivizing folks to wait until the last possible minute makes it impossible to determine what the needs are there, so how do you plan for how many shitters you need to bring and maintain for, say, a 3-day festival?

Consider that "festivals discount early sales" might be a kind of Chesterton's Fence, and you might question why they do that...

Ticketmaster actually experimented with this https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mic.20180230

AFAIK Ticketmaster doesn't decide, they are a service provider with a variety of options for their customers (the performers).

The customer picks an option (no resale, limited or not resale price, etc...) and Ticketmaster does it, taking a commission in the process. Maybe the commission changes depending on the formula, but really, they don't care about the details, they are getting the money no matter what.

The problem is not the situation about resale and all that, I would say that part is the customer fault, not Ticketmaster, they are the ones who picked a formula. The problem is that by being in a monopoly position, they can charge high fees, making the tickets more expensive. And by more expensive, I mean something like 30% more expensive, not 300% more expensive.

I don't think Ticketmaster offers a dutch auction, but I guess that if you are big enough and if that's what you want and if you can pay, they can deliver.

> A perhaps bigger issue is the vertical integration (if that's the right term) of first-party ticket sales and resale in one company.

The monopoly findings were about vertical integration, but the resale issue wasn't. I think, if you do some research, you discover that the vertical integration issues they were concerned about are actually a bigger part of the problem.

> Ticketmaster has no real incentive to try to prevent resellers from buying up all the tickets on first sale, because it gets to charge fees on all the resales through its platform.

The incentives for to prevent abuse of the primary ticket sale is that the venues, who actually decide how tickets are sold, don't like it. If Ticketmaster doesn't make them happy, they go elsewhere and lose out on the primary market. Perhaps ironically, they are often less concerned about abuse if they still have control over the ticket resale as well, which they often do when the resale happens on Ticketmaster. In practice though, most of the resale doesn't happen on Ticketmaster; this gives both the venues and Ticketmaster plenty of incentive to combat abuse.

> I'd like to see tickets sold by dutch auction.

Pretty much everyone who first enters the ticketing industry thinks auctions are a better way to sell tickets until they learn how the industry works. Interestingly, Ticketmaster offers auction-based ticket sales. You wouldn't know this, because venues don't want to use it. You might think a dutch auction for tickets would be great, but people who experience the reality often don't. Dutch auctions work when you're selling a commodity where each item is effectively the same as the other. Often people value each seat for an event differently. Dutch auctions, by their very nature, require the a fixed time window for the auction, which makes them difficult to fit the outcome you're describing... that would more be handled by some form of yield management where venues release blocks of tickets for sale at specific time windows, which is something that already happens in the live event business.

There's all kinds of dark aspects to the live event business, but it's generally completely different from the perception of the general public.

Starting in the late '70s, and by the '90s it was entrenched with economists that could affect policy that vertical integration is good for consumers. In theory, this shouldn't matter, since there were laws against it, but in reality this created a large precedent of judicial decisions saying that there's no problem with vertical integration.

I disagree whole heartedly. The organizations should absolutely have the choice to price tickets to their events however much they choose. And they should have recourse for people who choose to ignore their wishes.

Its their product. Why would you want to take that choice away from them?

An example, I spent some time working for an organization who felt strongly that retirees living on a fixed income should always be able to afford tickets to their events. They would bring in big name musicians to perform and charge a fair price specifically so those people could afford it. Why would you want to take that choice away from that organization and force them to price out the elder community members they were trying to serve?

Its the organizations event, they should always have the choice to charge whatever they want.

The reselling seems fine to me as long as other resellers can compete. It's a classic market.

> Ticketmaster has no real incentive to try to prevent resellers from buying up all the tickets on first sale

Why should it have such incentive? And even more so, why it should be a concern for the court that it should have it?

Here in Western Australia, resale prices are capped at face-value plus 10%. IIRC the reseller platforms can still charge a fee on top, but IMHO it seems to have had the desired effect on ticket sales.

Unless it's something really, really popular, you don't have to be waiting the morning they go on sale. In fact you can usually pick up tickets for events a few weeks after they go on sale, or even longer. If they run out, there's often a small amount of resale tickets available for a bit more cash but not multiples.

Having come from the UK where you'd damn well better be online in the first 30 seconds or you're out of luck, and reseller sites fill up with tickets at high multiples of face value within minutes, it's a breath of fresh air. (I understand the UK is introducing similar resale price-caps soon)

Of course it may partly be that Perth people just don't go out that much. Either way it's really nice.

This proposed economic model creates a dystopian situation: whoever has the most capital has the right of first refusal to consume art.

Current primary and secondary ticketing markets are not ideal, but this proposition disenfranchises whole market segments from consuming art as experience based on economic factors. That's bad for art, it's bad for artists, and it's bad for consumers.

> Ticketmaster has no real incentive to try to prevent resellers from buying up all the tickets on first sale

The incentive would be to jack up the prices themselves and take any profit which would have gone to scammers. Supply and demand.

> A perhaps bigger issue is the vertical integration (if that's the right term) of first-party ticket sales and resale in one company.

Similar problem with "healthcare" insurance companies in the US.

We need a global crackdown on the breadth of markets a company can be involved in - somehow.

What I'd like to see is the banning of real time dynamic pricing of any kind in all industries.

It makes you wonder why the DoJ settled so early. Or, rather, it doesn’t really make you wonder at all. It’s obvious there was a case and they should have let their lawsuit run. I wonder why they didn’t?

> If only the federal government were allowed to pursue this case, it would have ended when the administration changed.

This is more why DOJ cases should remain independent from the executive branch. Politically controlled prosecutions means justice is intrinsically unequal. Having states be independent is helpful, but not in this regard.

On the other hand, I'm not sure a European style tribunal would have been allowed to settle the case early.

Yes. It's good that the states can serve as a check on the Federal level government. But why can the federal level government give up on cases on a national level? Just because a different party was voted in?

Federalism is a red herring. For every case of "federalism is good because it let the states do this good thing" you can find a case of "federalism is bad because it let the states do this bad thing".

And live coverage with the reactions of various AGs: https://www.forth.news/stories/Ca6C8cj6TyNe7TMMKUnFX

Matt Stoller is always worth reading.

Oh, silly me, that's why a $45 ticket came out to $78 at checkout.

From AP

> The companies could also be assessed penalties. In addition, sanctions could result in court orders that they divest themselves of some entities, including venues such as amphitheaters that they own.

I cannot imagine how they came up with that number. If it were under $2 per ticket it wouldn't have been worth pursuing. This happened because they were taking tens of dollars for no other reason than that there was no alternative.

Don't forget, you also get a free ticket to go the remaining two members of Def Leppard play a Wednesday night show at a venue 40 miles away!

Sounds about right. The attorneys take $1.52 and leave the victim with $0.20. And then nothing actually happens that would restore a competitive marketplace.

Lots of festivals are owned or controlled by Live Nation.

Yes exclusivity with venues. Live Nation owns and operates or invests in many many many large venues

Reagan halted antitrust enforcement and nobody fixed it, so they were allowed to own controlling stakes in several industries and freeze out competitors. They get exclusives with bands, agencies, venues, and promotions so at each point anyone who tries to do something else runs into a package they can’t compete with: a band which doesn’t play ball won’t get the big venues, a venue which acts independently won’t get the big acts, etc. It’s clearly abusive but they managed to spread enough money around to avoid action before Biden, and then Trump overturned that because he has the same mentality.

jwz has been writing about this for years. I don’t remember if he’s playing games with the HN referrer header on dnalounge.com but you probably want to use https://tinyurl.com/yskf7ypz instead of https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2018/01/31.html.

Multi-year exclusive contracts paid for with cash advances.

My favorite is the local tax office charges extra for paying online vs going in to the office to pay in person. At first, I thought it was a way to recoup the processing fees as you're obviously paying by card online. The last time I paid in person with a card, that fee was not added on though. So they are charging you extra for not having to pay an employee to process your account.

The one that pisses me off is when the waitress tells you to pay with your phone, and it's charged a "convenience fee."

I looked at buying tickets for a local hockey game last week, and the venue goes through Ticketmaster. The service fees were exactly the same as the actual ticket cost, maybe the total 200% of the list price.

I ended up going to the physical box office, where they still charged an extra 40% of the ticket cost in service fees.

If there was no service fee how would Ticketmaster generate any revenue?

usually the service fee doesn't even get refunded, which feels additionally foul

California, Minnesota, Maryland, and New York have

That was the first part that jumped out at me.

Apparently the state AGs dropped one of the charges that would have led to a more reasonable number there to try to make the decision easier for the jury.

Because the US espouses the virtues of the free market while embracing monopolies. If they cared about dealing with the latter they would empower more regulators like Lina Khan.

Airlines need distribution. Concert venues don’t.

Mid/high profile venues know they will sell out regardless, they can shop around the venue rights to the highest bidder.

Ask yourself why airlines deliberately overbook flights while venues do their best to never overbook events, why are subject to identify verification before a flight, and why you go through the TSA before you board... and you'll start to understand why airline seats are maybe not such the perfect metaphor for concert seats.

Live Nation has 10x the revenue of those two, combined.