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Comment by zdean | Hacker News Reader

"It is a testament to our weak antitrust laws that Ticketmaster has been able to gouge the public for decades with no repercussions whatsoever."

Genuinely interested to know what is keeping a nimble new startup from stepping in and blowing this up.

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Dating myself by mentioning this, but when I was in college Pearl Jam (huge at the time) tried to go around Ticketmaster and got their asses handed to them. They basically had to end up cancelling and offering refunds.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/pearl-jam-taking-on-t...

It was a really noble effort on their part. They were arguably one of the biggest bands in the world at that time and sadly they failed to make any impact on this issue.

Since then Ticketmaster has only grown more powerful.

It's interesting to read this article in from that time in NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/15/arts/pearl-jam-bows-to-tic...

Somewhat more recently comedian Louis CK attempted it:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/26/louis-ck-ticketmast...

I can't find a good copy of his conclusions from that experiment in my searches right now, but I remember his emails from around that time were not always the happiest.

He is still selling direct to fans on his site and from the looks of this he has taken this a step further by actively invalidating resold tickets;

https://louisck.net/tour-dates

Ironically enough, when you click "buy tickets" it takes you to Ticketmaster.

I bought tickets to the San Diego show on the Vitalogy tour from ETM. They went out of business in 2000: http://articles.latimes.com/2000/jun/20/business/fi-42758

Louis CK was successful in 2012, although he admitted it meant playing smaller obscure theaters.

I bought tickets to his tour when he did that, it was as good a ticket buying experience as there could be, and even included a download of the show. It was disappointing to hear that he has since stopped doing his own ticket sales.

Previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11837453

Ticketmaster either owns or has deals with all the venues. I wouldn't be surprised if all those deals specified exclusivity.

No venue will switch to a new entrant unless the new entrant can guarantee the same demand, so you have the normal chicken and egg program.

Yeah, but I would think there's a corner of the market that TM doesn't have yet...maybe the really small venues. Start with those as MVP/proof of concept and then "wow" the medium venues, repeat.

There are a handful of smaller companies that have enough market share to be relevant. Ticketfly comes to mind. Parent mentioned an important point: Ticketmaster is owned by Live Nation, which also owns many of the venues (eg, the entire House of Blues chain). Independent venues are becoming more scarce, especially at the 500+ capacity size.

I've tried and failed in this space. In your MVP, you have to be relatively feature complete and be ready to handle chargebacks, CC processing, customer service, and be willing to sustain on whatever price you set as the surcharge -- the established players are often "free" to the venue.

Of course the venues use exclusive deals. It would be foolish to try and maintain multiple ticketing systems, extra overhead with no benefit.

The venues provide the demand, not the ticketing system. The venues will use the ticketing system they can get the best pricing from.

Ticketmaster is now part of LiveNation entertainment. LiveNation "owns, leases, operates, has booking rights for and/or equity interests in a large number of U.S. entertainment venues"

If a large band is going on tour they're going to have to go through LiveNation/TM at a number of stops to use the premier venues.

A small startup can take on ticketing (and many do). But taking on the the venue infrastructure is no small undertaking.

And AEG is Pepsi to LiveNation/Ticketmaster's Coke. For live entertainments its basically a duopoly.

No need for a new startup. Brown Paper Tickets is the obvious successor.

I've had to use them a couple times at a local gallery that I like, and I like their general idea but that site needs a lot of work.

We used them for a film festival I helped run almost 10 years ago now. We were a pretty shoestring operation at the time and needed to get our cut of the money from the first few days' sales to fund an event at the end of the festival (whee!) and they were quite helpful in transferring it to us in an expedited manner.

I don't know how they are now, but they were great to work with then.

There is also TicketLeap https://www.ticketleap.com/

There are plenty of start ups in this space I just don't believe any of them can get exclusive deals with the main huge venues that are part owned by Ticketmaster's parent company.

I always cheer for competitors and I used Brown Paper Tickets a couple times now without issue, but in my experience, the alternatives tend to crumble under the pressure when they try selling tickets for a truly high-demand show (usually when a high-profile act plays a venue much smaller than they usually do). For all its sins, Ticketmaster does seem to manage to handle high loads on a regular basis.

https://dice.fm/

I'm in the UK and I use Dice whenever I can and absolutely avoid TicketMaster.

They also work up the road from me.

"Genuinely interested to know what is keeping a nimble new startup from stepping in and blowing this up."

I work at a nimble startup so I can tell you exactly why we haven't been able to secure a lot of Ticketmaster's clients.

They are part of a very large umbrella corporation that also owns booking agencies for popular international artists. So when a venue decides to ditch Ticketmaster, they will be instantly unable to book any big names that are almost guaranteed to get sold out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Nation_(events_promoter)

This is one of the most important reasons most of our clients are independent event organizers that will never book mega stars.

Nimble new startups will have to take the market from the bottom up.

I would guess having exclusive agreements with almost everybody.

There are large barriers to entry in the form of existing interlocked exclusivity agreements. At this point is would be nearly impossible for a competitor to get traction in the large event market.

The venues have no reason to want to deal with a new company.

Not to mention how many venues are owned by LiveNation what owns Ticketmaster in the first place.

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