The horizontal control of venues is only one issue. A perhaps bigger issue is the vertical integration (if that's the right term) of first-party ticket sales and resale in one company. 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 more times a ticket is resold, the better.
I don't believe a court would ever mandate this, but I'd like to see tickets sold by dutch auction: All tickets start off for sale at some very high price, like $10000, and the price declines by some amount every day until it reaches a reserve price on the day of the concert. Buyers can purchase as many tickets as they want, but professional resellers would have to guess the price that would let them clear their inventory at a profit. Under a system like this the best seats would go earliest (at the highest prices) while the nosebleed seats might still be available on day of the show, or not depending on demand.
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.
Alternatively only allow transfers within a very short period of the event. Anyone with a legitimate reason (giving to a friend etc) can work it out even on the day of the event. But scalpers have to take on a big risk buying up the good seats early, because they have a short window of time within which to secure a sale (buyers won't risk pre-paying, sellers can't risk prospective buyers backing out at the last minute).
Another tactic I've seen when there isn't assigned seating - just different tiers of seating - is to hold back some small portion of tickets to release shortly before the event, devaluing the scalpers' listings.
Online streaming tickets can also help, especially if the fans have enough of an anti-scalper stance. They'd choose one of the endless live streaming tickets over buying from scalpers just to go in-person.
I can only assume that the people flippantly proposing that the solution should be to restrict consumer freedoms don't attend these types of events themselves. Why should we immediately jump to limiting freedoms when we can increase the risk of scalping enough to be beyond the tolerance of most scalpers.
How is a buyer supposed to trust that the scalper won't just run away with the money? And conversely, how is the scalper supposed to trust that buyers aren't just feigning interest and will back out at the last minute?
Even escrow systems don't necessarily bypass this because ultimately the buyer is likely spending on more than just the concert ticket. They're probably taking time off work, maybe traveling in from another city or country. So even if they might get their ticket money back if the seller backs out, by the time that happens, it's too late to get refunds on everything else.
And combined with the possibility of getting lower prices closer to the event (extra drops from the event, honest resellers who just can't make it, scalpers trying to cut their losses), even buyers wouldn't commit early to scalper prices.
Maybe limit total number of transfers among all tickets. Because it should be a small minority of legit transfers.
Scalpers should be less likely to take a chance their transfer will be denied, whereas to a legit customer and friend ticket is otherwise worthless and just a best effort anyway.
Or beyond the first X% of transfers you do more rigorous validation. Like asking for the original buyer to call in to confirm in realtime. Something not easily automated.
> Anyone with a legitimate reason (giving to a friend etc) can work it out even on the day of the event.
I've seen it happen multiple times people couldn't find someone to take the ticket off of them, even for free.
Sure, for an ultra mainstream act the likes of Rammstein? A FC Bayern soccer game? You'll always find some people outside the venue willing to pay in cash for tickets.
It’s kind of annoying in practice. For example you buy four tickets to go with your friends. But you get sick so you offer your ticket to a different friend instead. Oops that’s not allowed so now no one gets to go? Or you buy tickets as a gift for someone.
There’s a lot of legit reasons to want transfers, outside of scalping.
That's fairly common in Japan: you can't transfer tickets, as they get a name attached at purchase, and many concerts use a lottery system. You register interest in tickets, and if you're selected, you get a window to buy them. No camping out the minute presales open, and the price is the price instead of rent-extracting dynamic bullshit.
Square Enix did that for the Final Fantasy conventions in the US as well (where details of the next FFXIV expansion will be announced later this month), but they added an additional requirement. You have to have an active subscription to the game to even have a chance.
Scalping only exists because there's a difference between what the tickets cost and what the fans value them at.
For popular shows, there are more people who want to see the show than there are tickets available, so you need to pick a strategy for deciding who's going to go.. Ticket sellers have to balance lost profits from lower prices, prices being too high and the show not selling out, and fans being furious at the artist for making the tickets unaffordable for most of the true fanbase.
Dynamic pricing (airline style) and auction-based systems basically ensure that only the rich can attend. Scalping is a way to do price discrimination / progressive pricing. If you're a true fan, you know when the ticket sale will happen ahead of time, and you snatch the tickets quickly. If you're not, but are rich enough not to care, you have to buy from a scalper. Like all discounting and price discrimination strategies, it sometimes backfires; if you're a true fan attending your mother's funeral when the sale opens, you'll have to pay the rich person's price.
You can also see scalpers as being awarded by capitalism for taking risks. They make sure the show sells out and the artist is happy, even if fan interest is lower than expected. In such a case, they take on the losses, if all goes well, they take some of the profits from the sales.
And I like your ideas but I don't see why the venues and artists don't want to capture more of what people are willing to pay enabled by what the parent comment suggested.
I wonder if in your system it actually attracts fans or just people that have the time to wait for tickets.
I think it's because touring as an artist isn't free, so they need some guarantee of income to make the journey to the venue. If there's a risk the concert goers will refund the tickets, then the artist is the one left holding the proverbial bag.
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.
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...
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.
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.
In case you wondered what the point of the federal (i.e. states not totally controlled by federal government) system is, here's a good example. If only the federal government were allowed to pursue this case, it would have ended when the administration changed. 30 states chose to keep the case alive, and good on them.
> In May 1994, the grunge band Pearl Jam filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice claiming Ticketmaster had cut the group out of venue bookings in a dispute over fees.[50] The investigation was closed without action in 1995, though the Justice Department stated it would continue to monitor the developments in the ticket industry.[51][52]
> By 1994, Pearl Jam was "fighting on all fronts" as its manager described the band at the time.[43] Reporter Chuck Philips broke a series of stories showing that Ticketmaster was gouging Pearl Jam's customers.[44] Pearl Jam was outraged when, after it played a pair of charity benefit shows in Chicago, it discovered that ticket vendor Ticketmaster had added a service charge to the tickets. Pearl Jam was committed to keeping their concert ticket prices down but Fred Rosen of Ticketmaster refused to waive the service charge. Because Ticketmaster controlled most major venues, the band was forced to create from scratch its own outdoor stadiums in rural areas in order to perform. […]
> The United States Department of Justice was investigating the company's practices at the time and asked the band to create a memorandum of its experiences with the company. Band members Gossard and Ament testified at a subcommittee investigation on June 30, 1994, in Washington, D.C.[52]
In college I worked at a record store that had a Ticketmaster machine. At the time, it was a custom ticket printer with CRT terminal and modem that took up a lot of counter space. When you camped out and bought a ticket the moment they went on sale you got an actual ticket, with perforations. Lots of people saved their stubs as collector's items. The surcharge was: $2.50
That paid for the equipment, maintenance, the ticket stock, the central computer, but not the leased phone line (the store paid for that).
These days, you're using your computer, your paper (or phone), and afterwards you have nothing collectible. The surcharge can be $40 or more.
Why the huge difference? It can't all be inflation. I think it's primarily because of monopolistic power and collusion with the venue[0]. But also - when bands toured back then it was considered supplemental income to the sale of the album. These days they hardly make anything off album sales/streaming, and more of their income comes from touring (ticket and merchandise sales).
[0] You could buy tickets at the venue and not pay the surcharge. But now Ticketmaster gets their cut even if you do that.
They never should've been allowed to merge. Funnily enough Ticketmaster has the only free API I've found for concert data and it has a ton of results because it is a monopoly.
The question should be did Live Nation knowingly allow scalpers (aka ticket brokers) to corner the market on highest demand events AND create artificial scarcity by only posting a small handful of the tickets they controlled at extreme inflated prices increasing the percentage fees collected by Live Nation and Ticketmaster on every ticket sold.
What is the moat of the major ticketing companies? Is it deals with venues? It is hard to rationalize how one company can even get a stranglehold on an entire market like this.
I feel like I could ping any random HN user and build something better in a week, which means it has been done many times already... why don't alternatives gain traction?
Michael and especially Jim are good dudes, who still like guitars in a time they often gather dust. From my opinion as a former working musician who never bought a live nation ticket and knew them way before they hit big time, this was not at all their main objective. They just wanted to put on great shows. Ticketmaster was playing the drums and that was a band worth joining. It will be nice to see Live Nation evolve. I have faith in them and monopolies should be broken.
Intersting cases like this one are a good reminder that the market structure takes source directly into the pricing because when the distribution and access are concentrated then the pricing power often shows up as fees rather than headline prices ; this makes inflation harder to measure but still very real so antitrust in that sense isn’t just about competition and it’s one of the few levers that can affect price dynamics at macroeconomic level
I feel like we had a golden opportunity, years ago, to do something about Ticketmaster. In 1994 Pearl Jam, one of the biggest bands in the world at that point, boycotted and sued Ticketmaster. I wished at the time more bands had stood up and said, “Enough.” It would have worked.
But it’s easy to scare an individual artist, or make them feel like they’re locked into a contract, and fame is such a precipice. I suppose that makes it hard for them to work together for their own good.
Ironically sometimes artists complain about Ticketmaster and their stranglehold, but again, it takes some special bravery to actually do something about it.
Its interesting that the title has to specify that they 'illegally monopolized' rather than just saying they 'monopolized'. The implication being that there are legal ways to monopolize things. Which there shouldn't be. This is a major problem in our society/economy.
Great, so now they will have to repay the illegal profits and get some measures forced onto them to bring the inflated ticket prices back down, right? Right? Guys?
A monopoly with competition: "Shares of rival ticket brokers jumped on the news, with StubHub Holding Inc. climbing as much as 5% and Vivid Seats Inc. rising as much as 9.1%."
191 comments
I don't believe a court would ever mandate this, but I'd like to see tickets sold by dutch auction: All tickets start off for sale at some very high price, like $10000, and the price declines by some amount every day until it reaches a reserve price on the day of the concert. Buyers can purchase as many tickets as they want, but professional resellers would have to guess the price that would let them clear their inventory at a profit. Under a system like this the best seats would go earliest (at the highest prices) while the nosebleed seats might still be available on day of the show, or not depending on demand.
Another tactic I've seen when there isn't assigned seating - just different tiers of seating - is to hold back some small portion of tickets to release shortly before the event, devaluing the scalpers' listings.
Online streaming tickets can also help, especially if the fans have enough of an anti-scalper stance. They'd choose one of the endless live streaming tickets over buying from scalpers just to go in-person.
I can only assume that the people flippantly proposing that the solution should be to restrict consumer freedoms don't attend these types of events themselves. Why should we immediately jump to limiting freedoms when we can increase the risk of scalping enough to be beyond the tolerance of most scalpers.
Even escrow systems don't necessarily bypass this because ultimately the buyer is likely spending on more than just the concert ticket. They're probably taking time off work, maybe traveling in from another city or country. So even if they might get their ticket money back if the seller backs out, by the time that happens, it's too late to get refunds on everything else.
And combined with the possibility of getting lower prices closer to the event (extra drops from the event, honest resellers who just can't make it, scalpers trying to cut their losses), even buyers wouldn't commit early to scalper prices.
We'll get bought out by TicketMaster within 5 years.
>
How is a buyer supposed to trust that the scalper won't just run away with the money?Contract law like anything else?
Scalpers should be less likely to take a chance their transfer will be denied, whereas to a legit customer and friend ticket is otherwise worthless and just a best effort anyway.
Or beyond the first X% of transfers you do more rigorous validation. Like asking for the original buyer to call in to confirm in realtime. Something not easily automated.
> Anyone with a legitimate reason (giving to a friend etc) can work it out even on the day of the event.
I've seen it happen multiple times people couldn't find someone to take the ticket off of them, even for free.
Sure, for an ultra mainstream act the likes of Rammstein? A FC Bayern soccer game? You'll always find some people outside the venue willing to pay in cash for tickets.
But anything with a small fanbase? Whoops.
But there's definitely a balance to be found between the popularity of an event and how soon you allow trades.
There’s a lot of legit reasons to want transfers, outside of scalping.
The parent's suggestion still creates artificial scarcity, which is the real issue: people buying tickets they have no intention of using.
The problem is that the artists, venues, and ticketing companies benefit from this artificial scarcity. So we'll never see it change.
Square Enix did that for the Final Fantasy conventions in the US as well (where details of the next FFXIV expansion will be announced later this month), but they added an additional requirement. You have to have an active subscription to the game to even have a chance.
"all seats, including the best seats go to actual fans" is not something solved by your solution
For popular shows, there are more people who want to see the show than there are tickets available, so you need to pick a strategy for deciding who's going to go.. Ticket sellers have to balance lost profits from lower prices, prices being too high and the show not selling out, and fans being furious at the artist for making the tickets unaffordable for most of the true fanbase.
Dynamic pricing (airline style) and auction-based systems basically ensure that only the rich can attend. Scalping is a way to do price discrimination / progressive pricing. If you're a true fan, you know when the ticket sale will happen ahead of time, and you snatch the tickets quickly. If you're not, but are rich enough not to care, you have to buy from a scalper. Like all discounting and price discrimination strategies, it sometimes backfires; if you're a true fan attending your mother's funeral when the sale opens, you'll have to pay the rich person's price.
You can also see scalpers as being awarded by capitalism for taking risks. They make sure the show sells out and the artist is happy, even if fan interest is lower than expected. In such a case, they take on the losses, if all goes well, they take some of the profits from the sales.
And I like your ideas but I don't see why the venues and artists don't want to capture more of what people are willing to pay enabled by what the parent comment suggested.
I wonder if in your system it actually attracts fans or just people that have the time to wait for tickets.
> Why not just ban the transfer of tickets and allow refunds? You buy a ticket, you show your ID at the door.
Because everyone on the seller side - including artists - make money on this.
If parties other than fans / buyers cared, it would be a solved problem.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
* https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taki...
> In May 1994, the grunge band Pearl Jam filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice claiming Ticketmaster had cut the group out of venue bookings in a dispute over fees.[50] The investigation was closed without action in 1995, though the Justice Department stated it would continue to monitor the developments in the ticket industry.[51][52]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticketmaster#Anti-competition_...
> By 1994, Pearl Jam was "fighting on all fronts" as its manager described the band at the time.[43] Reporter Chuck Philips broke a series of stories showing that Ticketmaster was gouging Pearl Jam's customers.[44] Pearl Jam was outraged when, after it played a pair of charity benefit shows in Chicago, it discovered that ticket vendor Ticketmaster had added a service charge to the tickets. Pearl Jam was committed to keeping their concert ticket prices down but Fred Rosen of Ticketmaster refused to waive the service charge. Because Ticketmaster controlled most major venues, the band was forced to create from scratch its own outdoor stadiums in rural areas in order to perform. […]
> The United States Department of Justice was investigating the company's practices at the time and asked the band to create a memorandum of its experiences with the company. Band members Gossard and Ament testified at a subcommittee investigation on June 30, 1994, in Washington, D.C.[52]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Jam#Vs.,_Vitalogy_and_de...
- https://apnews.com/article/live-nation-ticketmaster-antitrus...
- https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/arts/music/live-nation-an... or https://archive.is/KA1wV
Background story by Matt Stoller https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-tic... (April 13, 2026)
That paid for the equipment, maintenance, the ticket stock, the central computer, but not the leased phone line (the store paid for that).
These days, you're using your computer, your paper (or phone), and afterwards you have nothing collectible. The surcharge can be $40 or more.
Why the huge difference? It can't all be inflation. I think it's primarily because of monopolistic power and collusion with the venue[0]. But also - when bands toured back then it was considered supplemental income to the sale of the album. These days they hardly make anything off album sales/streaming, and more of their income comes from touring (ticket and merchandise sales).
[0] You could buy tickets at the venue and not pay the surcharge. But now Ticketmaster gets their cut even if you do that.
> Ticketmaster sells about 10 times as many tickets as its closest rival, AEG.
Yeah, that's called a monopoly, even if it wasn't Ticketmaster's intention, which of course it was.
> The jury determined that Ticketmaster had overcharged consumers by $1.72 for each ticket.
I think the decimal point is a few digits too many to the left here... The various "fees" routinely add up to hundreds
I'm already planning what I'm going to do with the $0.20 refund I receive for each ticket I bought.
They never should've been allowed to merge. Funnily enough Ticketmaster has the only free API I've found for concert data and it has a ton of results because it is a monopoly.
Music festivals were a sort of guerilla attack on lack of venue contracts.
I feel like I could ping any random HN user and build something better in a week, which means it has been done many times already... why don't alternatives gain traction?
But it’s easy to scare an individual artist, or make them feel like they’re locked into a contract, and fame is such a precipice. I suppose that makes it hard for them to work together for their own good.
Ironically sometimes artists complain about Ticketmaster and their stranglehold, but again, it takes some special bravery to actually do something about it.
Absolute horseshit. They were screwing consumers for more than that since the '80s. Over the last 20 years? It's 10 or 20 times that.
WTF.