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

• madduci 3mo ago
  It is the same question of: "why hasn't there been a real competitor to Facebook Events and why many people post events information only there?"
  • throwaway27448 3mo ago
    Fwiw I have never heard of facebook events
    • madduci 3mo ago
      In Italy and Germany it is massively used. You can only find events there and nowhere else. Since I don't own a FB account, I don't have access to the events information as well.
  • HaloZero 3mo ago
    I’m not that old but Partiful and other sites have completely consumed Facebook events for me for personal stuff
  • julienreszka 3mo ago
    A major reason Facebook dominates is consolidated discovery, but open alternatives are definitely needed. We have been building Events Map to let users discover events from around the web using natural language search and interactive map pins that display a countdown of how many days are left. https://reloadium.com/reloadium-events-map/ https://reloadium.com/reloadium-events-map/ Video demo: https://youtube.com/shorts/aZn0mQXpKt4?is=xNDB9ksjzXG2IdW8 https://youtube.com/shorts/aZn0mQXpKt4?is=xNDB9ksjzXG2IdW8
• jotjotzzz 3mo ago
  I think the real question is, why hasn't Ticketmaster been sued for being a monopoly. It looks like they were based on this article: https://www.npr.org/2026/04/16/nx-s1-5787491/ticketmaster-live-nation-verdict-monopoly-remedies https://www.npr.org/2026/04/16/nx-s1-5787491/ticketmaster-li... But it hasn't done much yet. We need to do more to break up these monopolies!
• mdni007 3mo ago
  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.
  • Grombobulous 3mo ago
    In my opinion, the scalping problem isn't really the primary problem with Ticketmaster's monopoly. Scalping is just the result of a gap between sale price and fair market value. I also think that many of the things Ticketmaster could do to stop scalping would build further walls around their monopoly. To me, a ticket should generally be like a piece of a paper that has right of first sale. I don't want a situation where Ticketmaster has the right to hold my tickets hostage (which they're already doing quite a bit of with digital tickets). As it relates to the resale market, Ticketmaster's main sins are: - Making it impossible to engage in a safe secondhand ticket marketplace outside of their own platform. It would be technologically trivial to implement some kind of pre-purchase mechanism for buyers on third-party sites to verify the authenticity of resold tickets and ensure ownership gets transferred upon successful purchase, but the only real mechanism is transferring tickets somewhat blindly via email accounts. E.g., I go to StubHub and pinky promise that I'll transfer my tickets to the buyer via the Ticketmaster account when they pay, and the buyer pinky promises they won't fraudulently report that the ticket wasn't transferred. Ticketmaster could easily implement some kind of technological solution to having a more open escrow market that helps keep third-party transactions secure. There could be a buy/sell/trade API that they open up to providers like Venmo, Cash App, Zelle, PayPal, etc. But they keep it all within Ticketmaster to maintain that monopoly. - Double-dipping on huge transaction fees on their own second-hand market. The only truly safe place to buy second-hand tickets is Ticketmaster (see above), and they take excessive fees far outside the realm of a fair transaction fee. It's really the artists, vendors, promoters, teams who control the side that prevents scalpers from leaving seats empty. For example, I recently went to a concert where the artist/promoter simply didn't turn on ticket resale at all. I assume this was done to keep more hardcore fans in the seats rather than giving people temptations to sell. You saw $10,000+ prices for a ticket, but the Knicks game will be filled all the way. It's just overpriced for now until game time gets closer. Or, perhaps $10,000 is just the fair market value. The building only fits 19,000 people inside. New York City has 350,000 households with over $1 million net worth. Manhattan Scalpers won't leave unsold seats to a game like this, but they will try to offer prices far above fair market value until they figure out what that fair market value is. It's also a situation where we either have to accept that New York City has a lot of wealthy people bringing up the fair market value, or the team has to decide to sacrifice revenue to enhance the fan experience (e.g., do a ticket lottery + named tickets that must match your ID).
• byoung2 3mo ago
  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 3mo ago
    Vendor lock-in by any other name boils down to monopoly. The moat is their lobby.
  • sirsinsalot 3mo ago
    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 3mo ago
    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 3mo ago
  > 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.
  • jdietrich 3mo ago
    Precisely this. Ticketmaster's entire business model is based around taking the blame. Artists don't want to set a face value for their tickets that represent a realistic market-clearing price, for fear of being seen as greedy; this leaves a lot of money on the table for scalpers. TM scrape as much of that value back for artists and venues, who get a cut of all the fees and charges and "authorized secondary resale". Selling tickets is the easy part; the secret sauce is selling tickets for as much as possible, while allowing the artists to pretend that they're being sold for a "fair" price.
    • maerF0x0 3mo ago
      The problem isnt that I don't have enough money. It's that so many have so much more.
  • luizfzs 3mo ago
    Complicity assumes every venues has the same options, but they don't. Pearl Jam tried to tour without Ticketmaster in 1994 but several venues turned them down because of contracts. They ended up signing with TM a few years later. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taking-on-ticketmaster-67440/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taki... When signing with TM is survival and not signing means your venue sits empty or your band has a hard time booking large venues, that's not a free choice. That's just coercion.
• yogibear678142 3mo ago
  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 3mo ago
  Bono, Geldof, livenation, cartel.
• rrrpdx1 3mo ago
  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 https://www.google.com/finance/quote/LYV:NYSE
  • saaaaaam 3mo ago
    Because a large proportion of the money flows out the door. Most of their revenue is pass-through revenue, due to the sports teams and concert promoters (and by extension musicians) they sell tickets for. Ticketing works as a high volume low margin business. You need to deduct at least 70% (or more) from their topline to get a true picture of the company’s revenue vs revenue that walks straight out the door.
  • toast0 3mo ago
    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.
    • deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    • imtringued 3mo ago
      Considering so many people here don't care about the corporate structure of Live Nation and instead blame Ticketmaster, it seems like they are doing a good job. After all, the idea of competing with Ticketmaster is silly, since the problem isn't originating in Ticketmaster at all, that's where the problem is most visible.
      • toast0 3mo ago
        I don't understand your message. Live Nation and Ticketmaster are a single entity. It's like Comcast and Xfinity (but with different corporate history). People complaining about Ticketmaster are complaining about Live Nation too. It's just that the Ticketmaster brand gets the heat, because that's how they run the brand. It's not like Ticketmaster wasn't doing the same stuff when Live Nation was a separate company, or even when Live Nation was a separate company that was doing its own ticketing.
• ChrisArchitect 3mo ago
  Tho not exactly a direct solution, Related: Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225357
• alloysmila 3mo ago
  Distribution.
• christina97 3mo ago
  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 3mo ago
  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.
• nemoniac 3mo ago
  Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) gave a good explanation many years ago already: https://stereogum.com/58831/trent_reznor_blasts_ticketmaster_and_the_artists_w/news https://stereogum.com/58831/trent_reznor_blasts_ticketmaster...
  • reactordev 3mo ago
    Worse, they are all owned by the same company now. It’s all a multi-headed hydra of suck. Live Music has been completely monopolized.
    • dfxm12 3mo ago
      If you like specific acts, sure. Or maybe some cities take independent venues more seriously than others. Growing up, ok I missed out on getting Metallica tickets because I didn't want to support clear channel (or Live Nation, or TM, etc...), but I still was able to see plenty of amazing metal bands in indie venues. Another interesting note: Weird Al is playing three venues within driving distance from me. Only one of them is selling tickets through TM.
      • midnitewarrior 3mo ago
        Go see Weird Al. It was a really great show. My wife only knew one of his songs (Word Crimes, she's a professional editor), and she loved the show. I loved it too.
        • baggachipz 3mo ago
          I just saw him a couple weeks ago. It's such a fun show, people there are from ALL walks. He's no spring chicken but he gives it his all, and his band and backups do too. Just an all-around great dude.
          • reactordev 3mo ago
            Will confirm, all-around great dude. He's the kind of guy you WOULD find in those independent venues. He'll happily go out of his way for it.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 3mo ago
  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.
  • emodendroket 3mo ago
    Yeah, sure, if you don't care what route you fly that's true. Otherwise you may not really have options.
  • kube-system 3mo ago
    The hundreds of "travel agents" selling through GDS online have functionally no competitive pressure, they're all booking through the airline's CRS on your behalf in the end -- it's really no different than ticketmaster's reseller marketplace. Airline price competition comes from multiple airlines running the same route.
• everyone 3mo ago
  Corruption.
• massysett 3mo ago
  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/ https://www.axs.com/
• tinyhouse 3mo ago
  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.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• maerF0x0 3mo ago
  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?)
  • cogman10 3mo ago
    This sort of thing is a strong argument (IMO) that these stadiums, arenas, theaters should be owned by the municipality they reside in. Fine, we can call it a public good which is why they have nice tax incentives. But why stop there? If its truly a public good then why shouldn't the public simply own it? Why isn't the city operating these venues and using the ticket prices to offset tax burdens? It might be harder to do this with a sports arena as there's a bunch of issues around the monopolies that are the MLB/NBA/etc. But when it comes to a theater style venue, I'd think most artists would be ecstatic to deal with a city rather than ticketmaster. It truly isn't the case that ticketmaster is providing almost anything of value for their venues. And for very large events they have to coordinate with the city anyways.
    • lokar 3mo ago
      Check who owns vs manages shoreline amphitheater :(
    • maerF0x0 3mo ago
      FWIW I actually prefer we simply tell private businesses that it's their responsibility to provide the environment/setting their employees work in. By that I mean if ticket master wants a monopoly they should have to build the stadiums too. No taxpayer money, incentives, land, or other interest group perks given.
      • cogman10 3mo ago
        I'm ok with either. Though I tend to think public ownership makes more sense because a city can only support so many venues in general.
• gobdovan 3mo ago
  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 3mo ago
  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 3mo ago
    A really great book and very good chapter
• emodendroket 3mo ago
  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 3mo ago
  Why hasn't there been a real competitor to youtube yet? Similar question. Some markets really are screwed.
  • svachalek 3mo ago
    TikTok and Instagram have YouTube worried for sure.
    • wolvoleo 3mo ago
      Maybe because of a paradigm shift to short videos, but neither can replace Youtube's actual long-form video service.
  • trumpdong 3mo ago
    What would a competitor of a two-sided marketplace even look like? They'd have to have the same content, but that's illegal because of copyright law.
• wj 3mo ago
  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 3mo ago
  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.
  • iovrthoughtthis 3mo ago
    We have to let go of old artists stuck in these patterns and find new, ideally local artists.
• alexose 3mo ago
  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.
  • akudha 3mo ago
    Looking at the world cup ticket prices gives me a mini heart attack. I don't know who is responsible for such high prices (maybe a combination of FIFA and Ticketmaster?), but goddamn these prices are insane. It is going to price out most people. Either that, or people are going to get into debt, just to see a couple of matches to see their favorite teams play.
    • loloquwowndueo 3mo ago
      Stadiums are still going to be full, that’s why it will keep happening. People voting with their wallets goes both ways.
      • kevin_thibedeau 3mo ago
        The real crime is that FIFA is allowed to interfere with mass transit schedules for venues already equipped to handle large events. Non-spectators are being unfairly disenfranchised if they need to use public services they, and not FIFA, are paying for with taxes.
      • conradfr 3mo ago
        It's not clear they will be. Or maybe not with the fans that wanted to see their teams. https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/ckgpv7v4p9lo https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/ckgpv7v4p9lo
• bluehatbrit 3mo ago
  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.
• eqvinox 3mo ago
  https://pretix.eu https://pretix.eu is having some success in the EU market. But other sibling posts correctly point out this is… let's just say "overall shit situation".
  • luplex 3mo ago
    We also have Eventim and many other local ticket shops. I usually get my tickets right at the venue's online shop, or maybe from the artist. They use all kinds of systems.
    • Slartie 3mo ago
      Eventim is pretty much "Ticketmaster in Germany". They captured like 90% of the German ticket market by closely watching Ticketmaster and basically repeating their playbook. Eventim also owns some venues, has exclusive contracts with many of them it doesn't outright own, hosts an official fan resale site, offers promotional services and generally integrates a lot of the business around large events vertically. What's actually interesting is that it seems to be possible to compete with Ticketmaster only by copying their playbook on a large-enough scale, and Germany appears to be large enough. The Netherlands right next to Germany don't seem to have been large enough, as Ticketmaster basically controls them.
• singpolyma3 3mo ago
  Exclusive contracts
• jasode 3mo ago
  >With all the hate Ticketmaster has gotten [...], I'm surprised Ticketmaster still has a hold of pretty much the entire market. How are they doing this? 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drip_pricing
  • pixl97 3mo ago
    >The add-on "convenience fees". Hence the US needs 'full price up front' laws in the same manner as Australia does. This kind of law shuts this crap down fast.
• ryukoposting 3mo ago
  From the point of view of the promoters, concerts are a two-sided marketplace. Two-sided marketplaces are notoriously difficult for small players to compete in. You need to attract good acts so people will buy tickets, but to attract the top acts you need to show that you can sell lots of tickets. 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.
  • skeptrune 3mo ago
    Well put
  • swader999 3mo ago
    Fixed the last sentence for you: "This kind of situation is exactly why lobbying exists"
  • stephenhuey 3mo ago
    Just tried searching for a long-form article I read in recent years. Wish I could find it, but obviously the facts are not a secret. It explained in depth all the problems with the monopoly, but it also pointed out something very surprising to me. A few artists have spoken out angrily on behalf of their fans. However, the fact is, the artists in general do financially benefit from Ticketmaster's way of doing things. Part of Ticketmaster's business model is taking the heat from the fans who don't like paying all the extra fees so that the anger is not directed at the artists. If an artist wants to set the floor at $150 but knows fans might be upset, they can drop the price 30% and TicketMaster can help them make up the difference in fees, and Ticketmaster has nothing to lose. The artists get to keep their reputation intact instead of appearing greedy to fans.
• kaikai 3mo ago
  The burning man org has kind of famously used a non-Ticketmaster vendor every year, and it’s almost always a shitshow. 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.
• julianlam 3mo ago
  Watch the Last Week Tonight segment. Basically, Ticketmaster owns all the concert halls too.
• brudgers 3mo ago
  [this is probably not the answer you want to read] 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.
• acheron 3mo ago
  There are several? Venues around here use AXS, Seetickets/Eventim, Opendate. I buy more non-TM tickets than TM.
• tylergetsay 3mo ago
  Everyone involved benefits from Ticketmaster, and in exchange all Ticketmaster has to do is be the bad guy
• 999900000999 3mo ago
  Same issue with Match. 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.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• schwarzrules 3mo ago
  New Yorker had a good write up on this many moons ago: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/10/ticketmaster-live-nation-bruce-springsteen https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/10/ticketmaster-l... (non-paywalled: https://archive.ph/5ILdG https://archive.ph/5ILdG
• anonu 3mo ago
  Vertical integration: they own the venues
• KingMachiavelli 3mo ago
  I don’t get why Spotify didn’t inject themselves into the ticket buying pipeline. They recently announced something but it’s kind of strange. 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.
• w10-1 3mo ago
  I think a few providers, particularly with high fixed assets like venues, will always dominate in pricing power over many buyers (same for oil companies). The difference between oil and events is that they're elective (not a real need) and almost never substitutes (you don't go to one performer instead of another due to price). So providers really have the incentive to avoid competition (just as movies used to avoid coming out the same weekend). Altogether this drives towards provider coordination if not consolidation. 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).
  • tyre 3mo ago
    People would revolt if there were auctions, because it would make it impossible for many people to attend live events. Right now there is the hope that you can, even if that’s most not true. For example, I did the Amex presale for US Open tickets. There were 22k people in front of me for regular day passes during the earliest rounds. So we end up with an auction-ish situation anyway, via the resale market, but can blame scalpers. The thin illusion keeps it palatable enough, if only barely. Ticketmaster is wants to extract the most profit. Being hated is fine. Being regulated because you’re _too_ hated is not.
    • kalleboo 3mo ago
      For some artists in Japan we do lotteries. There's an application period and then the opportunity to purchase is doled out randomly among the applicants. You can often apply for multiple tickets together if you're a group, but ID is checked at the venue for the purchaser so you have to arrive together, making resale more awkward. Usually there are multiple rounds to sell the tickets when nobody paid - some times an early round for fanclub members.
• tonymet 3mo ago
  Ticketmaster's clients are the venues and/or promotors (or both), not the ticket buyer (i.e. you). The undesirable convenience fees and other fees collected go to the venue & promotor, not to Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster's actual service fees are just a few percent -- not the 20-30% you see when you check out. They are effectively a punching bag to allow the venues , promotors & artists to collect excessive fees while retaining goodwill with the fans. 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.
• arjie 3mo ago
  What exactly is the problem with Ticketmaster? Scott Wiener's California junk fees law blocked them from late-revealing charges so what you see is pretty much what you get. They have a pretty good system for transferring tickets or relisting ones for sale that you already have. They've got a janky login system but I'm sure it's because they're being anti-fraud or whatever. Overall, I don't have much of a problem with Ticketmaster.
• bendangelo 3mo ago
  Hi, I used to work at a startup in Toronto that did compete against ticketmaster called Uniiverse. In the end they go bought out by ticketmaster. I don't know the details because I left way before then but this is one example of a company trying.
  • Marciplan 3mo ago
    were they trying to compete, or just hoping to get acquired lol
    • trumpdong 3mo ago
      Doesn't matter too much. We should all just start up one of these and all get acquired, then Ticketmaster has given us all a lot of money for no benefit to them. If enough of us do it they can't afford to keep acquiring us, and there will be real competition.
      • Marciplan 3mo ago
        it definitely matters.
• anon277748931 3mo ago
  Here's a fascinating clip that's stuck with me of Louis CK talking about trying to circumvent ticketmaster: https://youtu.be/UtoyMpR-mWY?si=LHfmofSERrQZLEj9&t=3015 https://youtu.be/UtoyMpR-mWY?si=LHfmofSERrQZLEj9&t=3015 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.
  • jimbob45 3mo ago
    That was a good watch. From your comment, it seemed like this was a low-medium level issue with low-medium venues doing exclusive deals with LN/TM but Madison Square Garden is arguably the most prestigious venue in the world.
• nullbio 3mo ago
  Because monopolies have a lot of power.
• protocolture 3mo ago
  The market wont change until someone discovers a method to sell better than ticketmaster. 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.
  • rincebrain 3mo ago
    I think the problem isn't that competition needs to be an order of magnitude better, it's that if places have exclusivity agreements, it doesn't matter how much better you are. The comment in [1] also outlines a bunch of reasons it's extremely difficult to break into. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48452308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48452308
    • protocolture 3mo ago
      "Better" in this context includes having a better offer for the organisation of venues, so they will want to break that exclusivity.
  • iovrthoughtthis 3mo ago
    Nah, theres not a technical or business solution to this. Music is cultural and we'll develop new cultural technology to solve it. Vision + regulation would help things move a little faster but the pendulums swing is inevitable.
• peteforde 3mo ago
  Many of the other commenters have explained how the ownership structure of Ticketmaster gives them near monopoly control because they also own the radio stations and the venues and the promoters. (I'm using "they" and "own" very liberally in this paragraph.) 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.
  • marysol5 3mo ago
    OASIS did that one when they announced their return tour. "We have no control over the ticket prices" Yeah you do, there's no show without you...
    • lomase 3mo ago
      [dead]
    • jorisw 3mo ago
      What incentive would Oasis have to help bring down the prices for their own shows anyway?
      • Y_Y 3mo ago
        Presumably the don't want only old rich people and empty seats. Otherwise you could self-scalp all the tickets at the highest price possible, maximisung revenue for a single gig but making it so unfun/bad press that you come off worse.
        • 3mo ago
• specproc 3mo ago
  The older I get, the less interested I am in seeing big bands. I'm lucky to live in an area with a great local music scene, plenty of independent venues. 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.
  • shermantanktop 3mo ago
    Are you suggesting that others should share your musical taste in order to punish Ticketmaster?
    • iovrthoughtthis 3mo ago
      Yes
    • jorisw 3mo ago
      Regardless of taste, it's mostly up to consumers to keep prices in check, by saying No at some point
    • specproc 3mo ago
      I'm saying I don't need to give sleazy American companies money in order to enjoy great music, and that I put money back into my local economy when I go out for a gig.
• insane_dreamer 3mo ago
  I don't know much about the details work (I don't buy tickets through TM), but I've wondered why doesn't TM just ban the resale of tickets? If someone buys a ticket from TM for $100 and resells it for $300, that person is pocketing the $200 difference, not TM. So why does TM allow it?
  • dboreham 3mo ago
    To make money?
    • insane_dreamer 3mo ago
      but isn't it the resellers who are making money from the resale, not TM? or can you only resale tickets bought through TM on TM? I thought they were exchanging hands offline the old-fashioned way.
• roschdal 3mo ago
  https://www.hoopla.no/ https://www.hoopla.no/
• qwery 3mo ago
  There's a lot of good responses here, which I agree with. Namely: it works for them and anti-trust law (enforcement) is weak. Competing with a such a well-engineered, deep (vertical integration, etc.) monopoly is extremely difficult and the smart business strategy for a ~startup in the space is to sell out to Ticketmaster. Attempting to challenge them on their turf is more or less impossible at least as a relatively small entity. 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".
• jorisw 3mo ago
  FWIW the most popular and renowned venue in my town doesn't use Ticketmaster — it uses a domestic alternative, as do a lot of venues where I am.
• mininao 3mo ago
  I'm in Europe and i use DICE a lot, it's a great app. And most of the time tickets are on sale on multiple platforms at once here (eg DICE and Ticketmaster)
  • Slow_Dog 3mo ago
    Indeed. Pick any two of Ticketmaster, Dice, AXS, Skiddle and seetickets. There are so many it's not straightforward to track down where your ticket is when you're off to the gig.
• newsclues 3mo ago
  Regulatory failure
• nickforall 3mo ago
  I run a ticketing SaaS in the Netherlands. 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.
• anthk 3mo ago
  How about banning Ticketmaster for the good.
• vova_hn2 3mo ago
  A question only tangentially related to the original post, but I always wonder about it when I read such discussions. 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?
  • washadjeffmad 3mo ago
    First come first serve, and multiple show dates if you're optimizing for sales. There are lots of platforms for ticket sales and venue management. That's how they run high school and college events, local theaters, etc. Ticketmaster is doing something completely different.
    • pezgrande 3mo ago
      Guess who wins that, bots. Now you need a whole new system to verify the identity of the buyer (which HN would prob love). Also is First Come First Serve really fair? Some people have more time at hand to keep refreshing the page until the tickets are available.
      • flemhans 3mo ago
        Supply md5 hash of first name + last name + seed when buying, computed manually by yourself. Upon arrival at the venue you show photo id and a sheet of DIN A4 paper containing the hash and seed, and the Ticket Man will verify. Side joke: One of the German ticket sites, maybe eventim, stated on the PDF that it must be printed on DIN A4 paper.
    • carlosjobim 3mo ago
      Not all artists want to do as many shows as the market demands. Not all artists can do as many shows as the market demands. People should instead consider the vanity of thinking they absolutely need to see a certain artist perform live on stage.
• FinnLobsien 3mo ago
  I think centralization (e.g. one player having almost all of the primary supply in the marketplace) is a big issue. The issue of venues/arenas etc. as mentioned, is another. I think an underrated issue most don't bring up here is that the demand is extremely concentrated too. 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.
• maxdug 3mo ago
  Ticketmaster's parent company, Live Nation, owns and operates numerous venues worldwide. This includes controlling booking for many major concert locations, which contributes to its dominant position.
  • tclancy 3mo ago
    And they will ban artists who avoid them, so that’s nice.
• monster_truck 3mo ago
  They're fuckin hounds that's how. Know someone who was the CTO for a competitor in sports tickets which was later acquired by them. They had hundreds of people on payroll who would stand in line at box offices to buy up anything they could, along with an internal tool that would let them enter seat details to get a price range to determine if the scalpers selling theirs were worth the asking price. Was maybe 7 years before it became easy enough for basically anyone to buy a product/service to bot checkouts. Was a very 'boots on the ground', logistically intensive business that the CEO had done solo for years before scaling up. 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.
  • FunHearing3443 3mo ago
    Yeah tbf as someone who works in the industry, that sounds more like a ticket brokerage than what Ticketmaster / StubHub etc do (directly). I’ve learned from personal experience that ticket brokers will do some WILD stuff.
• Finix94 3mo ago
  [dead]
• annagio_ 3mo ago
  When you bride and lobby with people of your interests in a broken political system, what you expect to happen? Monopoly. Worst part, people keep buy tickets from Ticketmaster, pay crazy amounts of money to see Taylor Swift, and it never ends! If people had a voice, if people stopped buying tickets from Ticketmaster, now we would have a different outcome. 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.
• aaarrm 3mo ago
  I use Dice for some venues
• vogelke 3mo ago
  Matt Stoller has written some excellent articles about Ticketmaster's monopoly crap.
• imtringued 3mo ago
  If you're Microsoft and you release another Xbox, would you ask Nintendo or Sony to provide the OS for you, or would you use just modify Windows to run on your latest Xbox? 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.
• lapalapa 3mo ago
  This is a really good question. If possible, I use other providers because Ticketmaster is a disaster. Since I'm not in one of the "big" countries, registration was already a nightmare. For me personally, their technological solution is a disaster. I've already wondered if this is done on purpose.
• cyberrock 3mo ago
  Japan has multiple ticket vendors (Lawson is dominant but not close to TM), dozens of venues of all sizes, concert tours lasting years (I have tickets for a show in November 2027), ID checks, ticket lotteries, presales for fan clubs, anti-scalping laws, you name it, but the prices can still be astronomical for local price levels. I think the problem is that there isn't five clones of every popular act.
  • caycep 3mo ago
    the konbini company also handles tickets?
• adrianwaj 3mo ago
  I have a bunch of ideas where artists and performers should crowdfund their own shows. Once they have the funds, the performer hires out a venue and issues their own tickets. Backers of the initial hiring can get preference or free tickets for getting a venue booked in the first place - maybe even a slice of the final door total. I started thinking about this when analyzing the new crowdfunding site, http://trypieces.com 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."
  • soared 3mo ago
    Artists want to make art, not sit on the phone coordinating with venues, vendors, promoters, insurance, marketing, etc.
    • adrianwaj 3mo ago
      The venues have their calendars and capacities listed in the system. Marketing is direct to an established fan/follower base with known locations. Imagine if Kickstarter had the final destination of the funds, and customers of the products already locked into place before a fund-raise ever took place and thus known during configuration. Would make the entire lifecycle more deterministic. I was thinking.. how can I raise money for 10 loaves of bread to distribute to the homeless? Well can't the bakeries at least be listed in the system too and shown during configuration? But back to tickets - people can carry an inexpensive smartcard and use that to get in with readers. They could also print a qr code, or there could be a manual door list with id-checking as well. Blah, should I go on?
• helioshulk 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• Suppafly 3mo ago
  There was, Ticketmaster bought them out. Also, they are pretty entrenched, and their actual customer's the venues, whom they also sometimes manage, like them. They don't really care that use peons don't like them.
• Jgoauh 3mo ago
  Why would a someone make a company where the business plan is "we have less margins" ? why would the rest of the industry, including artists choose the "make the same event for less profits" company where Ticketmaster gets all the blame ? The Ticketmaster situation sucks for customers but its a blessing for the rest of the industry, why would anyone want it to change ?
• shakeelhussain5 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• dbehera 3mo ago
  We have stubhub, tickpic and I have been getting tickets from there. Better pricing than ticketmaster
• keane 3mo ago
  Adam Conover has a well-watched explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayrVYwoe-DY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayrVYwoe-DY
• bitbasher 3mo ago
  Ticket Master can never be replaced because Terry Davis himself worked on it.
• julienreszka 3mo ago
  You can use this app to search for any kind of events globally using natural language https://reloadium.com/reloadium-events-map/ https://reloadium.com/reloadium-events-map/ https://youtube.com/shorts/aZn0mQXpKt4?is=xNDB9ksjzXG2IdW8 https://youtube.com/shorts/aZn0mQXpKt4?is=xNDB9ksjzXG2IdW8
• JessieJanie 3mo ago
  Does Ticketmaster own all the major platforms?