Blink-182 tickets are so expensive because Ticketmaster is a monopoly

Original situation: tickets are priced too low, and sell out almost immediately, with scrapers buying much of the tickets, then reselling them. Fans are furious! Plus: the band+seller is leaving money on the table, scrapers are making a killing.

Current situation: tickets are priced at market value thanks to dynamic pricing, so they no longer sell out instantly, and scrapers are discouraged from buying them. Fans are furious! Plus: the band+seller make more money than before, scrapers make close to none.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like TM, I don't like monopolies and I don't like high prices, but... price = equilibrium between offer and demand, it's the basics of our capitalist society, and all this look like to me is that TM is doing a good job at figuring out the equilibrium price for their tickets?

That's essentially what scalpers are taking advantage of. They're betting that the ticket will sell for more than the cost to someone, they just have to find that person.

If tickets were $5 or whatever is deemed reasonable, that doesn't mean more people can go, it means a slightly different group of people will go.

The other option is to prevent ticket resales (except through the original ticketing website at face value). This arguably leads to a more equitable distribution of tickets as your ability to buy tickets isn't dependent on how wealthy you are.

> Even if there were 5 different companies selling concert tickets, wouldn't they inevitably move to dynamic pricing for the same reason?

Not necessarily. It would presumably depend on the preference of the artists (who would choose which ticketing company they use). I see two models being popular: one with dynamic pricing where the extra money in paid to the artists. One with fixes pricing. I can't see any artists freely choosing a model with dynamic pricing where the ticketing company pockets the difference.

I think a big part of the problem is: it's challenging to estimate the demand for events. It's just less risky to consistently underestimate than over estimate. A sold out venue is annoying to fans who can't attend or who have to play a lot. But an under-attended event can be financially bad for the performer (depending on how deals are structured).

Combine that with the limited number of venues that can accommodate large audiences, and I think it's generally not surprising that this is a persistent problem.

I think there is a good solution; it just takes more work on the part of the performer: ticket pre-pre-sales. If the performer can "sell" all/most of their tickets before they even start talking to Ticketmaster, that should give better control over pricing since they can "rightsize" the number of performances they do in each place.

If artists took home the extra profits, there would be more incentive for the market to provide more quality artists, more concerts, and cheaper prices, supply would meet demand.

But since the profits go to ticketmaster, ticketmaster might not even have higher total earnings if it increased supply, as prices might decrease faster. Higher supply of concerts would also give opportunities for competitors to ticketmaster to emerge, as it would have to control a bigger market.

Lets say the same band plays the same venue, but no ticket monopoly.

Everyone knows folks will pay $600, so they're going to charge it, fees or not.

For instance, at time of sale (or signing up for a lottery ticket) they could ask for your name and then check everyone's ID at the door to make sure it's a match — just like airlines do. But this would introduce long delays.

Another option would be an app that used FaceID at time of lottery signup and then again to pull up a barcode to display at the gate, to make sure it's the same face.

It's a little more complicated when you realize that Ticketmaster is owned by Live Nation, a conglomerate which has bought out most of the major performance venues over the years. Many bands (including Blink 182, I believe) get contracted to Live Nation for the entirety of a tour, which means that they will only be performing in venues that Live Nation owns and operates, using Live Nation's ticketing system (Ticketmaster) and accepting all of the terms and issues that come along with that.

As a condition of the 2010 merger, Live Nation promised the US Justice Department not to retaliate against venues that partnered with other ticketing providers until 2020. Because they violated that agreement, it was extended until 2025. You can look at that as "Live Nation is legally prohibited from retaliating against other venues", or you can look at it as "Live Nation has already demonstrated that they will leverage monopoly power in flagrant violation of the law, and in 2 years they will be permitted to with no recourse". Both are true.

You can refuse to use Ticketmaster, but that means likely getting locked out of most of the venues you'd want to perform at - both the ones owned by Ticketmaster/Live Nation and the ones that have an exclusive contract with them (ie, de facto owned by Ticketmaster/Live Nation).

Look at how things went for Pearl Jam, and realize that Ticketmaster/Live Nation has even more of a vertically integrated monopoly now than they did 30 years ago.

Fixed fair prices for such a thing and just first-come first-serve is imo the right thing. E.g. my soccer club has much more demand than places, you can sell your ticket, but selling for higher prices is forbidden. That's good, because it is for the people and not the riches.

Please just not shrug every problem off with "what's bad here, only riches now can have that"..

The problem with setting your ticket prices too high is it stops young people joining your concert-attending fanbase, leading to your fanbase ageing. This is what happens to opera houses and similar institutions - they 'market price' the tickets to $150 then find all their customers are in their 60s.

Of course, for a band it might be less of a problem than for an institution - the band ages at the same rate the fans do, after all. And merely offering $50 tickets that get brought by scalpers and resold for $150 doesn't solve the problem.

The specific implementation of it is also not great. TM has you wait in a queue to select seats; the position in which is randomly assigned. This is to protect the servers from the thundering herd. (Lousy but fair.) When you finally make it in, you need to choose your seats and book as fast as possible, because dynamic pricing can cause the seats you selected to move up in price while you are selecting them, and the implementation doesn't let you OK it and move on, you have to essentially hope you choose and confirm before the price you locked in goes up. If you don't, it says, "sorry, the prices have gone up since you started, please choose new seats." This is both a super crappy UX and it ensures that they milk every last cent from people, as you can't lock in a price by moving quickly.

The thing is, I'm not sure if the dynamic pricing floor ever gets dropped. Are they fine with not selling out venues because the people get priced out? Or do we wait on the secondary market to try to push prices back as demand recedes?

The previous system sucked quite a bit with scalpers. However, the new system seems like it brings a whole new set of problems with it and it has made me question whether I even like going to concerts at all. Maybe I just don't care much anymore and this is a bridge too far. I don't know.

So, it's not a matter of scarcity, but a matter of one company hyper-maximizing profits based on an illusion of scarcity that they create. And the only intention is to con middle and low-income families into spending exorbitant sums to see their favorite performers, while the labels and marketing agencies spend millions to convince them the shows shouldn't be missed. It's all by design.

Seeing a concert should not be a once in a decade event, and for many families, it currently is. And the only people preventing them from seeing those shows are a handful of executives at a couple of companies, for the sake of absolutely absurd profit margins.

I am not old enough to have attended, but I am told that Woodstock (1) tickets were about $15.

But when I arrived at the venue to sell the tickets, the buyer put $200 in front of my face assuming I had meant $100 EACH. My greed got to me and I took the money.

My conclusion was, ticket buying is not rational, and the ticket market is extremely liquid, so without tying tickets to an identity like airline tickets there isn't a good solution.

I don't understand why it wouldn't be. If a city has sufficient demand to sell out two or more concerts, aren't the later concerts still profitable? And it's less travel expense per concert. If there isn't enough demand to sell tickets for at least two concerts, then doesn't that mean most of the fans in that city have been satisfied by a single concert?

It makes sense to me that you'd schedule as many consecutive concerts in one city as you can as long as demand is high enough to make each additional concert profitable. That might be 9 concerts, or 2, or even a thousand concerts if you're talking about a city like Los Vegas.

Electronic events, especially the more independent ones, release tickets in ever more expensive batches, eventually hitting them market rate.

Also systems that lock you to buying a fixed amount of tickets and then being only able to sell them for what you paid such as with RA Guide and STEP (for a burner event, Nowhere).

Allowing those with financial privilege access at the expense of those without us fundamentally antithetical to music and art.

Artists, venues get to blame them while keeping the base cost of their tickets lower (for perception purposes), while still making money on the TM fees.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ticketmaster-resellers-las-...

Whether this is better or not is up for debate. Personally I think it's good to give everyone equal opportunity to participate in culture, regardless of their financial status.

Is this a monopoly, and a massive conflict of interest? Yes, and yes.

Most acts don't really have the ability to set their own pricing. Those that do either are huge acts, who kind of have to go to Live Nation venues (because an act like Taylor Swift can't really go to tiny venues when she could sell out a stadium) or are tiny, local bands or artists in niche genres that don't really play venues larger than clubs or bars.

Source: I’m a former talent agent.

Basically in the 70s and 80s there were so few venues that the folks who ran the venues called the shots in terms of costs, dates, etc. They paid venues to run a show there. What choice did they have, there was maybe one venue for hundreds of miles in some cases.

Sometime later new mid sized venues started popping up all over the place. Venues run by cities and etc (who had built these places) were operating at just about break even, there were lots to choose from. Venues sometimes paid up front for a show and then would take a small cut of some other activity on the day of the show. The tables had turned, for a while.

Now venues are run by the folks running the whole thing, the venues, the tickets, all sold by the same people.

What never seems to get mentioned (often enough) is people will pay these crazy prices ...

Wait are you saying this is what happens or this is the theory? Any shows I've been given a friends/family ticket they just put your name on the guest list and you show your ID at the door. Unless this happens at massive venues (like stadiums) I don't think this is normally true.

Ticketmaster is chosen for 2 reasons

1. It actually does have the most robust tech - although much of it is dated

2. Most shockingly because it takes the brunt of the brand punishment

The ticketing, events, music, etc industry is built on many many middlemen. Lawyers arrange contracts between bands and venues. Promoters sit in between and set everything up but take their cut from TM.

TM is chosen because it can make a promoter fee look like a ticketmaster fee. Which makes all the accounting work when the band/venue agreement say profits are split 50/50.

While TM and live nation are joined at the hip, the above was all true before they merged. Which is also ridiculous. Don't get me started on clear channel who owned livenation and all the radio stations... Or the fact the it spun out of CBS.

In the 60s, venues had to pay someone to run ticketing for them. Ticketmaster came along and said "Hey, we'll do it all for you, and you don't need to pay us a cent. All we ask is you let us add a $0.25 fee to the ticket."

From the venue perspective, it was a no brainer.

Later, in the 90s/00s, Ticketmaster was lightyears ahead in building a scalable infrastructure that could handle peak onsale demand for major artists. Want to sell out the Staples center for 5 nights in 4 minutes? Most LAMP stacks of the era would just melt. Most ecommerce platforms weren't built with non-fungible inventory in mind. Meanwhile Ticketmaster, through VAX assembly & sharding, was able to handle the load.

The platform Garth Brooks uses to sell tickets the way he does: Ticketmaster. So it's available to other artists/promoters, if they want to do it. The nickname for that approach is "Garth mode".

Also Pearl Jam uses Ticketmaster now: https://www.barrons.com/articles/ticketmaster-pearl-jam-good...

This is backward. Albums were where the record company made their money. Only mega-stars made their money on albums. Modern musicians have always made their money from live performances, and especially from merchandise. Albums were essentially marketing to bring fans in to concerts. This is why so many artists live on the road.

Artists, and record labels, are certainly making less on albums now though, and I wouldn't be surprised if the labels are now nosing in more on concert profits to make up for it.

Merch, on the other hand, is definitely much more expensive than it used to be, and I imagine that probably is reflecting the dynamic you're hypothesizing, at least to some extent.

Why should those with the highest ability to pay be the ones who get to see the band? Doesn't seem very Punk Rock...

How do you even track that?

lol really? snagged a bunch of decent seats for <$100.

I paid $300 in festival tickets this summer to see Metallica, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Kiss, and 60 other bands.

Now, festivals can either suck or be fun as far as sound, weather, etc. goes - but anything over 100 bucks to see a headliner + warmup gig better be top shelf stuff.

It just requires you to stay in their system instead of selling (taking a screenshot of the code) elsewhere.

If they locked the ticket to your name, that would actually block the scalpers but they don’t.

Ever got down to a venue and had shitty mobile service? Ever had your phone die or crash at an inconvenient time? Ever lost data?

Even worse, turns out if you don't have Chrome set as the default browser app on your mobile device then the app is completely worthless and loads no pages (tested on Surface Duo 2). The same problem exists with their website when viewed from Edge on Android: you can't load your account page or tickets at all. Chrome only. Don't worry, there's zero mention of this anywhere on the app store so if you're trying to figure this out while in line at a venue, well fuck you.

So now we have to deal with all this bullshit simply because we can no longer print my tickets.

Really the place where this happens, much to the hatred of everyone is things like VIP tables at Clubs/Music festivals. The ppl leaving a 50k tab for 1000$ worth of stuff eg.

I find this whole kerfuffle especially ironic given that the band in question is Blink 182.

Blink 182, a band absolutely known for treating their fans shittily and putting on shitty concerts, are being berated by fans because they treated the fans shittily. I can't wait for the complaints about the shitty concerts to start.

Jeeze people. Take the hint and vote with your wallet.

People have a love/hate relationship with the frenzy I guess.