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Comment by lawnchair_larry | Hacker News Reader

I wonder when we are going to see a startup do to ticketmaster what Uber did to cabs. They are asking for it with their escalating shitty rent seeking behavior. Unfortunately, due to their stranglehold on most venues in the country, they seem to enjoy more power over their industry than even the taxi lobby did.

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The difference is that people disliking Ticketmaster is actually a feature of their brand. The vast majority goes to the artist, but Ticketmaster takes a lot of blame for high prices, and everyone wins.

I would say less on the artist side and more on the sports side. Artists at minimum pay lip service to prevent scalping and some appear to at least try and avoid scalping (by requiring cardholder to be present for example)

Edit: also want to add that no one thinks Lebron James is having a hand in setting ticketing policies whereas Taylor Swift probably has someone asking for her input

Eh, I don't know how much of a say artists have either. Back in the '90s, Pearl Jam tried to get the price on their tickets down and ended up canceling the tour and pursuing antitrust charges against Ticketmaster.

Considering how frequently this idea is trotted out(I count 4 times in this hn post), are the artists really fooling anyone?

It's more of an open secret, like the way certain terms are obscured by EULAs. The information is there for anyone who wants to look into it, but most people don't care or don't have the incentive to investigate. The important thing is to have a buffer to make certain details less obvious to the majority of customers without appearing dishonest.

Financially, scalpers could take a hit too if they buy a ton of tickets and then have to sell them for a loss.

You will not.

Ticketmaster has exclusivity contracts with venues. You cannot bypass them unless the venue and ticketmaster want you to. The very nature of the exclusivity contract prevents your startup idea. Unless they are also scalpers in good graces with ticketmaster, there's no tickets for them in the first place.

In the UK TicketMaster own many venues. They even own the companies that run the concerts too.

For example in Scotland the main company that runs all the 'big' events is DF Concerts & Events who are owned by LiveNation who themselves are partially owned by TicketMaster. They also host festivals like 'T(ennents) in The Park' and 'TRNSMT' and own their own venues like 'King Tuts Wah Wah Hut'.

LiveNation also own many venues around the country.

Basically you're stuck with them.

I find it's relatively easy to get tickets though. Presales (through Spotify, DF concerts themselves ('gigsinscotland.com' and Spanish/Telefonica owned telecom company O2) or just being fast on the website is normally good enough.

There are other companies in the UK that run ticketing sales too. SeeTickets is quite big and the Ticketmaster owned TicketWeb. Both give better chances of getting tickets.

Cities had exclusivity contracts (medallions) with cab companies.

Ticketmaster has exclusivity on the infrastructure (venues) -- a rival service would need to create their own network of venues.

That's part of the issue but the bigger than venues, was the merger between LiveNation and Ticketmaster, that congress decided to approve.

LiveNation is the promoter of every major artist and tour. When that merger happened Ticketmaster gained the ability to basically block any Arena Size artist of going on tour if they weren't using Ticketmaster.

The thing is, that the concertgoer isn't Ticketmaster's customer really as they see it. The venue is who they see as the customer as they are the ones who pick which ticketing agency will be used. And venues actually tend to like Ticketmaster overall.

EDIT: Also, I'm going to throw out there that I've heard rumors in the industry where if a venue doesn't get the percentages they're looking for from the artist, they'll scalp the tickets themselves obfuscated slightly.

> doesn't get the percentages they're looking for

What does that mean? Not selling out the venue?

They weren't able to negotiate the percentage of the proceeds of the ticket sale that they wanted.

Artist negotiating too high a cut of each ticket.

Never.

Competitors show up once in awhile. If they see anyone with improved technology, they buy them. Otherwise, they have the market power to box competitors in.

The only way they will ever lose is if some sort of regulatory action made it impossible to get exclusivity agreements.

Taxis are the most overrated cartels. In most geographies taxis were just conduits for Medicare/Medicaid money who also gave rides to drunks and to the airport. Ticketmaster has more control of the market, and has it on a national scale.

I hope it happens, but there's been more than one startup out to take on the ticket resales issue that ends up drowning in their own obscurity. Some Stanford 20-something who's been robbed on a markup or some exorbitant fee inevitably shouts "BLOCKCHAIN!" in the same sentence as "ticketing" and nothing comes of it.

Seatgeek is moving into the primary market and they're crushing it. Hope they drive TM out of business.

ticketswap is a start. Most ethical ticket platform I've ever experienced and for multiple transactions. Granted it's for reselling but to me it's the same because approx 4 out of 5 times, I have waited to buy tickets expecting to be able to buy them reasonably priced there and succeeded. I like to think of it as other fans selling them there but I could be wrong. Just seems like people trying to recoup the face value +/- 20%. Never seen more of a markup than that.

It's more likely to cause government and society pushback if a startup can't compete against the disliked behaviour, shooting themselves in the foot in the long-term for short-term gain.

How do you prevent scalpers? Better KYC?

I think you need to use basic supply/demand economics; the original sales price needs to be near the limit people are willing to pay scalpers. There's no secondary market if the scalper needs to pay near the maximum value of the seat. The entire legit reseller market is just TicketMaster trying to get a piece of the pie that the promoter left on the table.

There's a misalignment of incentives for most events. The performer gets paid for the show regardless if there's one attendee or it's a sell-out (some acts do share in gate and/or merch). They want the lowest ticket prices. The promoter is on the hook for a lot of fixed costs so they need to sell enough tickets to break-even; everything beyond that is profit from selling more tickets or higher prices. The venue gets rented but then TM "offers" them a per-seat fee in exchange for exclusivity. Then TM gets big processing and assorted fees for every act. Then resellers, legit or not, buy blocks of tickets that they resell in a dynamic market, prices floating based on demand and timing. Now we have TM coming back and saying "we'll offer you a marketplace and make it easier for you to secure supply (via bots and other shady processes)".

Tickets are associated to a name at purchase; you are then required to provide corresponding ID upon admission at the event. Very similar to non-refundable airline tickets (which was designed to kill the secondary market for airline tickets [1]). If you cannot attend, your ticket expires worthless.

Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame has been doing this as part of his fan club for over a decade, and is a vocal opponent of scalpers [2].

[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-cant-I-resell-my-air-ticket-to-som...

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=trent+reznor+ticket+scalping

They did say that they were doing that. However.. they're still selling tickets through Livenation. That was only happening via the Presales.

Source: I have a ticket for NIN that I bought on Stubhub.

Pre-Auctioning tickets. That'll increase their risk and exposure. Also, do the same as Kamakazie did... don't preannounce shows.

Add a marketplace for resells to same place face value tickets are sold. Would be same site, but could be different pages or w/e. Cap resells at face value, removing incentive to flip.

Then to prevent resells, would need an app with ticket barcode that changes over time, like most 2 factor auth apps. This should help prevent resells via printing and screen shots. I expect that's not foolproof, but could prevent the easiest alternative market. This would work offline too which is a plus since service at big events is generally bad. Could also make transfers as easy as venmo through the app.

The whole idea is to remove incentives from resells and make it easy as possible for people to transfer legitimately.

Print the name of concert-goer on the ticket. Require photo ID at the entrance to the venue.

No resales, get a refund from the ticket seller if you can't go.

Do what our glorious province did, make a cap on reseller pricing.

Then they'll sell them through unofficial channels.

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