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Comment by function_seven | Hacker News Reader

No artist is going to price their tickets at $50 face value, then shrug when TM sells them for $500 and keeps the additional $450 for themselves.

Of course Ticketmaster isn't just keeping all the extra money. They're probably splitting that with the performer as well.

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You do understand that Ticketmaster has an effective monopoly and has a past history of sketchy business practices. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if they pocketed it themselves or a large majority of it. It would be completely congruent with their business practices.

Yeah I know TM is sketchy and monopolistic. That doesn't mean they have the leverage to take 90% of the money for themselves. The artists would raise the face value of their tickets to recapture it if it were as simple as that.

We don't know what the details are on how the money is divvied up, but I do know that artists must be getting upside on this dynamic pricing.

> That doesn't mean they have the leverage to take 90% of the money for themselves

Listen, that's exactly what they have. The music business mostly exists to screw artists out of money made from their work, probably more now than ever.

The artist signs a contract to pay for X dollars, that's what they get and they have no leverage whatsoever to go after that upside. Ticketmaster would have to share the data about the dynamic pricing in the first place and they are NOT doing that.

Actually thats exactly whats this means. Monopolistic/monopoly allows them to capture what they want without risk.

Depends how it works, just as an example (not what they are doing) if ticket master guarantees X seats for Y price. Then the band might be fine with ticket master doing what every they wish -- there's no risk to the band.

Granted the band probably negotiated minimums and a cut. Remember, you also have the venue, security, traffic, marketing, etc. There's a lot involved with these kind of events.

there is risk to the band. die hard poor fans cannot attend.

If an artist wants to play a big venue and make money by volume, then they need to grin and bear it.

Because TicketMaster/LiveNation own most of the large music venues in the country. And if you don't use them in a "vertical stack" you don't get to play those venues.

And even at $50/ticket, you make money a lot faster in a 25,000 seat arena than you do trying to play 15 nights at an "intimate" theater (hey, guess what, TM/LN own a huge swathe of those too).

We complain on HN about tech "monopolies" (or debate their existence, at least). TM/LN is a much larger effective monopoly that, to my knowledge, has not had any real investigation.

> If an artist wants to play a big venue and make money by volume, then they need to grin and bear it

Blink-182 is not in this category.

Why? Because they're "too big"?

Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen will tell you a similar story.

> Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen will tell you a similar story

Springsteen's team is defending dynamic pricing [1], with Ticketmaster claiming "promoters and artist representatives set pricing strategy and price range parameters on all tickets, including dynamic and fixed price points."

[1] https://www.ticketnews.com/2022/07/springsteen-manager-fires...

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