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

The simple fact that there's an ownership link between Ticketmaster and the scalper I mean totally legit resale sites is so wildly corrupt that, well, it's textbook stuff.

What I haven't really seen discussed in the comments is that the role and objective of Ticketmaster is poorly understood. They seem like the people who sell tickets, but in reality they are "blast shield for consumer rage" as a service. Their role is to industrialize the conversion of anger into waste heat while leaving the musicians looking like neutral parties.

They also do a lot of catch-and-kill; once competitors get too big, they use bully tactics to starve them until they can acquire them cheaply.

There's an app called DICE. I like it a lot. I'm rooting for them.

Ticketmaster avoided the two-sided market problem until they reached scale. They were just a website where you buy tickets, an IT appliance for promoters.

But then Ticketmaster started buying out promoters, and that short circuited the entire system. Fans can't buy tickets from a different storefront because their favorite artists are only booking performances with ticketmaster-controlled venues. Top talent can't book high-grossing venues that aren't owned by ticketmaster, because Ticketmaster owns the promoters.

Scalpers are a symptom, the disease is consolidation of competitive markets by corporations. This kind of situation is precisely why antitrust law exists.

Specifically the part where he'd play at a non LiveNation/Ticketmaster venue, and right after, TM would find out and would make a deal with the venue to be their exclusive promoter. Insanity.

https://stereogum.com/58831/trent_reznor_blasts_ticketmaster...

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.

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?)

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.

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.

Most people want to see a tiny number of musicians/entertainers/shows (i.e. there's only one Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Kevin Hart), and there are extremely few venues that can accommodate those huge shows. That supply is further constrained by the artist's time and need for physical presence, meaning it's impossible to expand supply.

This makes it extremely hard to break into the market because you need to get one of extremely few, extremely demanding customers on board.

The dynamic almost approaches that of defense contractors, where your only potential customers are a few governments in the world.

As others have pointed out, high prices and additional fees are just extracting higher prices, which is good for the providers financially.

The more interesting question is: since ticketmaster has a monopoly, why have price tickets at all?

The most efficient way to maximize price is the auction (assuming you can eliminate re-selling), particularly the dutch auction which reduces signaling.

With auctions, the performer takes no reputational hit for the outrageous price. Losing fans would have to blame the winning fans.

Also, you get a lot more information about the market, and could see softening demand or specific preferences (to, e.g., increase or decrease the luxury boxes).

That also tracks the winners/loser zeitgeist in the US, where people want to signal that they're in the 1%/10%.

My few concerts were real milestones in my life, but they were always the first shows of a great performer, relatively intimate and cheap (and always pure luck). I wish others could have that experience instead of the overpackaged hyper-produced events of today (required to support the high venue investments).

This question is a common mystery because you're using the perspective of the fans. E.g. "I hate Tickemaster ridiculous fees because it's price gouging, etc"

But the mystery of Ticketmaster being dominant is solved once you understand it from the perspective of the venues, promoters, and the artists. They are the true customers of Ticketaster. Ticketmaster's various "convenience fees, surcharges, etc" are just creative financial tricks to funnel more money back to venues+promoters+artists but still keep the ticket's face price artificially lower.

The alternative arrangement would be the ticket's face price being much higher to reflect the "true market price" but that means the artists would be the ones perceived as price gouging. Instead, just charge the higher price via convenience fees and let Ticketmaster take the public relations hit. The psychological manipulation of fans is working exactly as designed.

When the fans wish that there was another true competitor to Ticketmaster, what they're saying is they want "a service that charges less money". But that idea conflicts with the venues/promoters/artists that want to charge more money.

Therefore, if you really want to disrupt Ticketmaster, you need to charge even higher fees and more expensive ticket prices so that the greedy venues & artists will get more money from you and thus choose your service over Ticketmaster. I don't think that's the type of competitive disruption fans have in mind.

And the common cited reasons of vertical integration of LiveNation and owning the venues doesn't explain Ticketmaster's advantage. They were already dominant in the 1980s and 1990s before LiveNation acquired venues. Taylor Swift's tour promotor was AEG (not LiveNation) and she played at many stadiums owned by the cities (not owned by LiveNation) and she still chose Ticketmaster to be the selling agent for those locations. One of the reasons is she negotiated 110% of ticket's face price from Ticketmaster. How is extracting that type of money even mathematically even possible?!? The add-on "convenience fees".

Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drip_pricing

I can't think of a single band I'd pay these extortionate prices for, I'd much rather support a local band and local venue.

I started thinking about this when analyzing the new crowdfunding site, http://trypieces.com that may reimburse backers if something doesn't fund, just for trying.

So the idea is to "empower performers to play anywhere and everywhere that suits them best."

But I'm interested in the framing of the question. You say "yet", "still" ... when there was. There was a healthy (at least healthier) market that was cynically, systematically corrupted over years/decades to get to the state its in today. During that period, there were warning signs. There was a lack of an effective counter to the behaviour. It's easy to say that "nobody cared" which isn't quite true, of course. Nobody in a position of power cared. The venues were in a precarious position by default -- easy to squeeze. The acts aren't your friend, they're businesses. Regular people that speak up about this sort of thing get silenced because "businesses exist to make money".

To all the people, who complain about "price gouging" or "scalpers" and "lack of regulations": if there are no fair market price, how exactly are you planning to judge who is "worthy" of getting a ticket and who isn't.

Let's say, you somehow forced them to sell tickets at low prices and somehow magically got rid of all the resellers. Now you have a 1000 people venue and 10_000 people willing to buy a ticket for the stated price. What do you do? How do you decide who are the lucky ones?

The biggest promotor here, Mojo, a subsidiary of Live Nation, occassionally requires venues to use Ticketmaster (Live Nation-owned) for events featuring the artists they manage.

The artist is why people buy tickets, and they control that part of the market.

In the US they also own a bunch of venues. They can pressure other independent venues into using Ticketmaster, they own 80% of big venues in the US, so the venue needs the artist, not the other way around.

No independent venue wants to use Ticketmaster, but they have to to book the big names.

I often find I learn about a festival or concert too late to buy tickets or they are prohibitively expensive. Spotify knows who I listen too and where I live, I don’t get why it can’t remind my to buy tickets X months before the event. I can even manually see an artists concert schedule.

It then be trivial to monetize this. If 50% of people buying tickets on Ticketmaster, actually are going through Spotify first, that gives Spotify a lot of power in an otherwise asymmetrical position.

Secretparty.io is another ticket vendor that has a great user experience. Easy transfers, handles large spikes in traffic, etc.

Ticketmaster just has a really solid moat, it’s not that alternatives don’t exist.

In Toronto for example, many events I went to used eventbrite. There was also ticketweb, part of Ticketmaster, which I tried to avoid as much as possible.

https://www.axs.com/

Competition emerges and Match/Ticketmaster just buys them out.

Just the other day I went to a non Ticketmaster show and I’ll go to another next week.

I go to a lot of hyper small shows, shows where the artist sells their own merch. So many opening acts it feels closer to an open mic.

I’d rather that, the 30 to 100 person shows than KENDRICK LAMAR in a mega venue.

I really hope to find small shows the next time I travel. I’ve no interest in BTS, but I’d love to see an underground Korean rap concert.

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.

Any tactic you could imagine was employed to deter this. They'd hire PIs to collect names and inconvenience them with BS regulatory complaints and lawsuits, rearrange street sweeping/sidewalk steaming schedules to have their cars towed, etc. When things came to a head they had just worked out a deal with cash courier chain to supply their employees with cash to buy the tickets because the card processing would somehow always be down.

If you've tried to buy a ticket to a sporting event in person recently you might have noticed that they don't even let you use cash anymore.

Yes ticketmaster sucks, but when competition pops up, it isnt like an order of magnitude better than ticketmaster.

Its like Cabcharge. The first real thing that ever challenged it was uber.

I change here needs to be similar. Maybe a presale marketplace to attract events? Tours could change to follow the money to an extent? Then the money is there on the table and the venue can make the decision whether to change its Ticketmaster only policy or not.

Some markets really are screwed.

Basically, Ticketmaster owns all the concert halls too.

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.

Because Ticketmaster has been a force in the market for decades (at least since the 1980’s), the simplest market based explanation is that using Ticketmaster is often obviously the economically rational choice.

For example, many people who dislike Ticketmaster choose to buy tickets through Ticketmaster rather than exercise their alternatives. The same is true for performers and venues.

Because that is how markets work.

Any potential competitor has to do some, many. or all the things Ticketmaster does…not the least of which is staying in business…and that’s non-trivial.

Or at least that is what ordinary market economic theory strongly suggests.

The venue is owned by a company that also owns a ticketing system. Of course they're going to use it.

Ticketmaster gives promoters very liberal API access and has a complex resale and dynamic pricing system that the promoters and artists can utilize. This is where the sketchy things can happen.

The dynamic pricing system (which is optional and enabled by the artist/promoter) is obviously going to perform like an auction system, so the price is going to shoot up for popular artists.

The shadiest part by far is that promoters can enable the secondary market if the artist allows it, then purchase and resell the tickets themselves. This will obviously make them look like scalpers, but there is a difference, the artist usually has a profit share agreement, let's say 80% of the profits after expenses go to the artist and 20% to the promoter. This profit share agreement usually doesn't cover the profit generated by the resale of tickets, so the promoter has a strong incentive to make his money using by "scalping".

If you look at the consumer facing entity "Ticketmaster", you're looking in the wrong place.

The more you hate Ticketmaster, the better they are doing their job, really (assuming reliable service is being provided, which they do well).

Moreover, pricing , tiering, selling, lobbying , on-sales, marketing, customer support, check in / validation (often without stable internet) are really hard problems.

The lesson here : the consumer experience of a business is usually just the tip of the iceberg, and extremely biased , often missing the crux of the business.

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.

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

Related:

Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225357

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