It's perplexing that they charge such a large premium when the industry must be saving many millions of dollars a year in printing costs, box office attendants, and sales.
I definitely came away with the impression that Hubbard may be the right guy for the job. It seems clear he understands exactly what consumers hate about Ticketmaster, and appears to be trying to address it as best he can.
At an incredibly high level, there are two historical economic forces at play:
1) The Irving Deal, which states that the goal of the band is to get 90% of all earnings of any event, including concessions, popcorn, tickets, etc. Obviously a very tough proposition in the event promotion business when some of your events make you money, but most break even and some you lose quite a bit on.
2) The Fred Deal, which is what transformed TicketMaster from being a company that cost promoters money (you pay us $.50 for every ticket we sell for you) to one that made them money (we'll charge the customer an extra $10 and give you $8 of it, but you need to sign a multiyear contract and we sell ALL your tickets).
If you're keenly interested in this, you should read the very excellent and recently published book Ticket Masters goes through all of the history and mechanics in great detail. Immediately upon finishing you should come work for me at Ticketfly in San Francisco where we're solving these sorts of problems on a daily basis. ;)
Remember that you can, for the majority of venues, bypass Ticketmaster completely by simply going to the box office and buying the tickets in person. Don't want to? Then you're getting what you pay for in the convenience fee. $8 to not travel across the town or state, but instead do your ticket buying while sitting comfy at home, starts to look like a decently reasonable deal.
And that print-at-home fee? Market segmentation writ small. Obviously, print-at-home is more convenient for most customers than waiting for mail delivery. So the successful capitalist can charge more for print-at-home, capturing the revenue from whichever customers are willing to pay it. What costs the industry might incur or save simply don't enter into that question. It's revenue maximizing as all capitalists should strive to do.
Yes, Ticketmaster can do these things because it's a monopoly for any particular event. There is no alternative able to drive down those fees by competing. But this status does not originate with Ticketmaster. Whatever artist you want to see already inherently has a monopoly. Bruce Springsteen already has a monopoly on Bruce Springsteen concerts, because he is Bruce Springsteen and nobody else is. Springsteen and his managers just choose to delegate some of that monopoly power to Ticketmaster.
So yes, everybody hates Ticketmaster, but its practices are really just capitalism and not so different than what companies and startups around here do or would like to.
If you have a monopoly, your buyers are paying extra fees, and the cost of goods actually drops, you do not drop your prices.