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Ticketmaster is "chosen" because most venues are owned and operated by Live Nation, who in turn owns Ticketmaster.

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.

I don't understand - why can't a venue run its own tickets?

It's the same people. The venue is not independent. It's not that they can't, they don't want to.

I mean what's wrong with the same company owning the venues and the ticketing site for the venues?

Oh, nothing really I guess? Before TM, they were the same since it was the venues selling their own tickets? The problem is really having a monopoly on venues and also owning the acts playing in them.

Nothing, in theory.

However, in practice, lots of things. The problem is that since Live Nation is a huge company, they have investments in a lot of record labels and can use that as leverage to force artists to tour exclusively in their venues. Think of it almost as a modern-day payola system:

Artist needs to tour. Label needs to pay for that tour, in some cases a lot of capital is required up front, and a certain amount of profit needs to be made from that tour as well. Live Nation steps in and says "hey, since we own a portion of your label, we can front you a lot of that money (or waive our venue fees entirely) if you only play shows in our venues". Label says "well, shit, my hands are tied" and that's how it works.

Ah, okay. Perhaps it's more that the venues (part-)own the labels than that they own the ticketing systems?

I guess this is the same problem that any location/property-based situation has: incumbents have a huge advantage.

An artist on a national tour won’t go there. They will only go to Ticketmaster events.

I just checked Live Nation's interactive map and I don't see them having any sort of monopoly. Two venues in Manhattan, two in Miami, etc. Surely those locations have way more venues than that...

> I just checked Live Nation's interactive map and I don't see them having any sort of monopoly. Two venues in Manhattan, two in Miami, etc. Surely those locations have way more venues than that...

I've commented elsewhere in this thread, but no, that's not a complete list. Live Nation owns many more venues than that, and there are even more that it has exclusive contracts with. It has also illegally[0] used its market power to retaliate against independent venues that work with other ticketing systems, forcing them to use Ticketmaster.

It is virtually impossible to be a performing artist with a decent following and go on tour without being subject to Live Nation and Ticketmaster, and everything that follows from that.

[0] as determined by the DoJ

Note the size of those venues. The bigger the artist, the higher probability it is that they can only play at venues larger than a certain size, most of which are owned by Live Nation.

> The bigger the artist, the higher probability it is that they can only play at venues larger than a certain size, most of which are owned by Live Nation.

Owned by, or in exclusive contracts with. The latter is a much larger set, and it includes the very Blink-182 tour that spawned this article.

>Owned by, or in exclusive contracts with.

Exactly! The exclusive contracts thing terrifies me. There are a lot of venues that Ticketmaster/LiveNation don't own outright, but have exclusivity / quasi-exclusivity deals with, and those venues include a vast majority of the largest multi-use venues in the country, such as stadiums or arenas. Live Nation can front some of the building costs or maintenance costs for a bunch of large venues and it costs them nothing in comparison with the profits they get in return. Practically every sporting event I've been to in the US has had me use Ticketmaster in some way. This includes NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, ATP (tennis), MLS, and even college sports. They are everywhere!

> bigger the artist, the higher probability it is that they can only play at venues larger than a certain size, most of which are owned by Live Nation

They don't have to play at large venues.

They kinda do....unless they want to pay the entire costs of the tour out-of-pocket and up front. Otherwise, they'll go where their label tells them to.

That's the whole point. They could play at tiny clubs that only hold 100-300 people, but even if they did so, they probably wouldn't make enough money to break even, let alone profit what the label requires they profit.

LiveNation only owns a few dozen venues, and it owns fewer than AEG.

They also don't own venues big enough for acts like Taylor Swift, most of them are small to mid sized concert halls. The major acts are selling out stadiums and arenas, none of which are owned by AEG or LiveNation.

Many years ago I was told a story by someone who ran a company that ran midsize stadium shows that traveled the company:

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 ...

Just like when baseball players started getting paid, there was a large amount of money being left on the table and it's now being taken.

It's decent in a way; I'd rather have the band, venue, and Ticketmaster make money directly than scalpers indirectly, but I can't really complain that people pay the prices asked; if they didn't eventually the prices would start dropping.

Yeah, TFA talks about TM having a monopoly and their dynamic pricing, but it never really explains why those two things are related or why either leads to higher ticket prices.

In an ideal world, TM wouldn't have a monopoly on ticketing for large venues, and artists wouldn't be forced to work with them. Artists and venues could still charge whatever "dynamic" price the market will bear, but competition in the ticket space would hopefully push down the cut that the ticket distributor takes. I'd imagine this is why artists are generally unhappy with TM's monopoly, since they don't have much leverage here once they're booking venues of a certain size.

But TM's monopoly is here regardless of how they price their tickets. And in a world with that monopoly, TM's dynamic pricing model benefits artists more than the previous model, even if it isn't the best possible arrangement for them.

I guess the main argument is that anything a monopoly does to increase its profits is bad. That's fair -- TM makes more money from this, and they'll probably turn around and use that money to strengthen their position (e.g. sign contracts with more venues), making it harder for any competition to challenge their monopoly. But that's a really broad issue. Dynamic pricing itself seems...fine

People who want to see a specific artist have no choice but to pay those crazy prices.

It's an optional activity. If it was healthcare I would be with you. But if they pay $600 ... that's the market.

If suddenly the market was more competitive, I bet the cat is out of the bag price wise. Maybe fees would be lower but "People will pay $600... so we charge that." is going to be the case for these concerts.

One could choose to believe that concerts are substitutable goods, and then instantly there are lots of other choices at non-crazy prices.

They do have a choice. They could not pay, and pretty soon said specific artist will have to lower their prices. This happens with dynamic pricing. If the market won't bear it, you won't sell tickets.

So funny story

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.

The bands don’t see a cut of the fees that ticket providers charge consumers.

Source: I’m a former talent agent.

Do bands/venues get blocks of tickets? Do they resell those?

Bands typically get a fixed number of comp tickets that are intended to be used by friends/family/media/guests, not resold.

In practice do those tickets get resold, though?

The cut mostly goes to venues who then pay the bands a larger percentage of the ticket sales.

You're absolutely correct. A big chunk of the extra fees on ticket prices goes back to the venue. Ticketmaster is just a cover, because everyone already hates Ticketmaster.

> reserve huge blocks of tickets for the band

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.

Yea they most definitely hold back seats for a variety of different reasons and release the holds as the concert date gets closer. You can probably find tickets day of as a result. (Mainly for seated events, less so for others)

In other industries, this is called "yield management".

I don't know if this is what's actually happening; it is my supposition. I probably got this from reading something along these lines somewhere but I don't recall if that was other supposition or fact, or whether I'm extrapolating.

> how did they come to be the main player?

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.

here in chile the venues must "wink wink" receive extra money from tickets sold. this is added to the total cost, also a lot of venues are being bought by you know who.