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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

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 ...

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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.

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