A few thoughts on Ticketmaster and Taylor Swift
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For an American age 15 to 25 today, much more of their spending power, time, and opportunity is lost to Ticketmaster than FB/IG/Tiktok/Twitter monopolistic behavior combined.
Hopefully the Taylor Swift ticket sale breaks into the Overton window and results in actual enforcement. Ticketmaster should have to divest Livenation and every other ticketing company it's acquired since 2010.
I say this as the PM of the first attempt to sell tickets within Facebook Events in 2015. Even for Facebook, it was virtually impossible to get share because all the major venues and artists have exclusive lockups with Ticketmaster or a subsidiary of theirs.
As separate companies they’d seek the best deals and wouldn’t collude to exclude new entrants in each others’ markets.
For a consumer who just wants reasonably priced tickets for a particular venue, there would be no change from today under that arrangement.
But if you split the company vertically, the venue business needs to look after its own profits rather than maximizing the vertically integrated profits.
Today you can’t start a ticketing business because Ticketmaster owns so many venues and they won’t use you. You can’t compete in ticket resale because Ticketmaster’s resale gets inventory even before retail tickets are sold.
If these were separate companies there would be no reason, and it would likely be illegal per the breakup ruling, for every venue to use a single ticketing service, or for a ticketing service to use (give a huge advantage to) a single resale service.
The problem isn’t dominance in one segment; that is normal and fine and self-correcting. The problem is leveraging dominance in multiple segments to exclude competition in any of them.
(The reason I disagree with this is because I think that corporations, like countries, are a social contract that should only be allowed if they serve the people. I think a free market serves the people, but a market needs heavy govt interference to be free. I know that's a minority opinion, so I didn't get into it)
Sure, it’s a monopoly, but the worst case scenario here is that some people won’t get to see Taylor Swift live.
lux·u·ry an inessential, desirable item which is expensive or difficult to obtain. plural noun: luxuries "luxuries like raspberry vinegar and state-of-the-art CD players"
And using price a test of luxury in a discussion about monopolies is kind of circular; it leads to saying that anything a monopoly has successfully captured is necessarily a luxury.
That gets you to prescription eyeglasses being a luxury, because I don’t need them, people can just buy contacts, and a monopoly has driven the price to astronomical levels.
But then again I grew up in a large city in Europe, so that might skew my experience. Or maybe not, since I went to a ton of $10 concerts in NYC in my la 20s (thanks John Zorn for starting The Stone)
But here’s the thing: the law should apply equally. If the FTC did go after a couple of these ‘ frivolous ‘ monopolies, it would set the tone across the board. This is an area where everyone can meet in the middle..
This is what I think is really missing from the arguments. Antitrust enforcement and even basic law enforcement has been mostly AWOL whenever bigger players are involved. It really undermines average Joe's trust in the system as a whole. I don't really care about Swift and Ticketmaster. I am concerned that the system is seemingly falling apart ( or working as intended depending on how cynical one is ).
The way capitalism is supposed to work is that competition and supply and demand push the market price of goods to an optimal price thats economically beneficial for buyer and seller. But anti-competitive practices like bundling products and artificially limiting supply interfere with that process.
If LiveNation and TicketMaster were two different entities, there would be a lot more competition for who to use for ticket distribution and prices for tickets would be a lot cheaper, which benefits the purchaser and increases economic competition and productivity.
If people have some kind of human right to see live music why aren't her tickets cheaper in the first place?
There are some services which are obviously utilities where monopolies are either bad, or must be otherwise regulated. Power, fuel, healthcare, education - all these fit into that. I guess these are services where inefficient pricing has a broader effect on the market.
Whereas in luxuries, if the price is too high, then it has no real effect other than the peasants don't get to eat the cake.
So my two arguments against your position:
1. Even a monopoly in such a luxury industry is still protected by the law, and so must also be subject to it. Assumedly, as a peasant unable to afford Taylor Swift tickets, I am still not allowed to hack Ticketmaster's servers to get one illegally, or to break into the concert by force even though I'm causing no harm since it's a luxury good.
2. Ticketmaster's profits from its monopoly, if unchecked, allow it to crowd out other parts of the market. It can start to buy local pubs that show music, and extend its monopoly there too. Where do we stop it, and say "that's not a luxury market, so you can't have a monopoly there"?
But she also doesn’t have a monopoly on other artists performing her music, or making recordings of her songs.
Before that, you'd need her permission, and probably share some royalties with her.
Cover songs are covered under “compulsory” licenses. You can safely cover an entire album without permission as long as you pay the royalties to the writers.
The entire “songbook” genre is basically this. If you want to drill down further there is an entire category of albums which is just people covering “Dark Side of the Moon”
Musical copyright is a whole other thing.
Not being able to access water or not having a way to communicate with your community is a 'problem' for example, so we should protect those things. The right to see Taylor Swift? I'm not so sure it's a good use of precious government resources.
Seems straightforward enough. Startup threatens to disrupt incumbent. Incumbent does shady things. Startup sues. Incumbent settles for money and IP that makes the threat go away.
> Songkick shut down in October 2017 after earlier declaring bankruptcy. In January 2018, Live Nation reached a $110 million settlement with Songkick to resolve an antitrust lawsuit the startup had filed under which Live Nation agreed to acquire Songkick’s technology assets and patents.
https://variety.com/2020/music/news/ticketmaster-10-million-...
It sounds like after the sale of the part of the company not involved in the lawsuit to WMG, they basically had no reason to keep the IP so they sold it to whoever wanted it.
Which happened to be Live Nation/Ticket Master
More likely: you start out with a smallish company trying to compete with a behemoth. You do well for a while, but as soon as you become an active threat, you start hearing a lot of "we'd love to work with you, but we just signed an exclusive deal with the behemoth that gives us access to a lot of high value stuff they won't allow otherwise." Your company is starved of revenue and dwindles. Eventually you decide to sue.
That gets real messy real fast, since no matter how strong your case is, you're going up against an entity with deep pockets to keep lots of lawyers tangling things up. You don't have the cash to fund both an expensive litigation and keep paying your employees to run the actual business that is being slowly starved of oxygen by the same monopolistic practices that you're suing for and can prove are happening.
The behemoth's objective now is to make you go away with the least total cost to them. A large settlement alone would not result in you going away; if you manage to hang on for that long by borrowing against everything you own, then the cash infusion could revitalize your company enough to compete for real. But if the behemoth gets your IP, the threat to them is mostly neutralized (assuming you retain the rights to use your own IP, you'd be competing on a supposedly even playing field, but with a gorilla that can do everything you can do and set prices just low enough to finish starving you out.) So the behemoth offers you a sweet deal: a large lump of cash in exchange for handing over the IP and going away. You will try to stand on principle and refuse for as long as you can, but the writing is on the wall. And your employees' families are hungry. How willing are you to hurt them in order to hurt the behemoth?
So sure, money is speaking, but it's not saying what you think it is: it's not whispering enticements.
It is yelling threats.
[I know nothing about this specific situation, but I have seen this play out in others.]
Let's assume Songkick sued because their company is essentially doomed due to Ticketmaster's bad behavior. Then Songkick needs an outcome that addresses that. One outcome is that Ticketmaster's behavior could change. Another outcome is Ticketmaster can pay Songkick for whatever the business might have been worth if it had succeeded.
It's analogous to buying a product that has a repair, replace, or refund guarantee. Ticketmaster changing their behavior is like repair: you get to enjoy the thing you were expecting to have. Shutting down the company and selling part of it to Ticketmaster is like refund: you don't get to enjoy the thing, and you get money instead.
This outcome doesn't improve things for consumers. But it's Songkick bringing the suit, and Songkick is a business whose primary goal is to look out for themselves. If some consumer group had brought the suit, their goal would be consumer protection.
I interviewed there very early and was very impressed by the team, but I also declined as I already had experience in the music industry and I believed you had to build alternative ticketing and meaningful data for artists, promoters and venues to be in a position to move up the chain (venue size)... I also believed you had to start small and go slow and go up that chain at the same speed artists do... that a ticketing company should have their own fans, the artists... that it takes 1-2 decades to beat the Ticketmaster racket.
In the early phase Songkick were looking at a business model which was "we'll sell you merchandise for that gig you went to" and only later was "we'll sell you the tickets"... by the time they'd pivoted they'd had too much investment and needed revenue, and they took the affiliate revenue which then made it hard to pivot.
It was a good team, a good company, and I remain impressed with what they achieved as well as having the guts to sue Ticketmaster whilst taking the affiliate revenue. But in the end, I wish they'd have understood the touring aspect better and sooner.
Have you seen what Venue Pilot is up to? Product feels like it has a ways to go, but the overarching idea & presented feature set is banger IMO.
Standout to me is the integration of the entire booking flow into the ticketing backend; holds, offer, date(s) confirmed, offer produces settlement, settlement is semi or fully auto generated from ticket sales, etc etc.
Feels like that tooling is so obvious to anyone with a technical background, yet it’s completely non existent in this world of business. Not sure VenuePilot has it dialed (yet?) but I am digging where their heads are at.
The dirty little secret of Ticketmaster is that most artists actually like that Ticketmaster exists. Why? Because they are sort of a reputational sacrificial anode. They are the token bad guys.
Imagine if a band started selling tickets for $300. Fans might complain and the artists might look bad. They don't want that. But if they charge $150 and Ticketmaster charges $100 in "fees" then Ticketmaster are the bad guys. The artists take no heat from that.
So the second thing we need is transparent pricing. There should be absolutely no fee sharing between Ticketmaster and artists because that's what happens now. It's the same as "fuel surcharges" on plane tickets. That too should be illegal. The ticket just costs more. That's it.
The third leg of this are the ticket reselling sites that fuel demand. Another dirty little secret is that the artists themselves sell tickets directly on these sites too. On the principle of transparent pricing I'd like to see this outlawed too. But again artists like to just blame this on Ticketmaster and Stubhub.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....
Oh, it's not just artists who share in the fees. There's a bunch of different stakeholders, none of which trust each other. This is why, in a way, the fees do represent transparent pricing. Sure, it doesn't seem transparent for the consumer, but for all those different stakeholders, it makes it very transparent, right at the time of the ticket sale, how much their cut of the money is.
It was the first time I had ever heard of that concept, and since then I have felt that it really is the best way to create a fair market clearing price for all participants where the maker with a limited stock of product (taylor swift) and the buyers (fans) get to participate.
Edit: oops - I can't find the original article I referenced, but someone else posted this on the same concept which is now on the front page of HN: https://barnabas.me/blog/2022/11/selling-tickets-fairly/
People have to make a judgement call on the value of the tickets and purchase at an appropriate time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_auction#Dutch_reverse_...
Fans don't want a market clearing price. Artists will also say they don't want a market clearing price, and some (most?) of them are being honest when saying that. They want a price that allows a large number of their long-term fans to be able to attend their concerts, and that price will be well below a market clearing price.
For a massive artist like Swift, with huge demand and limited supply for tour dates, a market clearing price would mean only people with high levels of disposable income would be able to go to the shows. Many of those people would only be casual Swift fans. So the die-hard fan who has listened to every album a hundred times but has a low paying job can't go, but people who have never listened to an album but earn a lot of money can.
In other industries, that kind of market dynamic isn't a problem. People will accept that only very rich people can afford supercars, even if they aren't necessarily car enthusiasts, whereas lots of die-hard car enthusiasts can't will never be able to afford a supercar.
But music is its own thing, for reasons I don't entirely understand. Perhaps it's because, more than other industries, successful artists owe so much of their success to a loyal following of fans, and they want to preserve that relationship over short-term profit maximization. Or perhaps it's because many people just feel that music is an inherent part of the human experience, and shouldn't be subject to the same raw market forces that prevail in other industries. I'm not someone who goes to see a lot of live music, this is just behavior I've observed in others.
Artists and fans want some kind of system that allows long-term fans to attend shows at "fair" prices. In this context, "fair" is not determined by the market, but by some kind of intuitive and emotional sense of how much a concert ticket "should" cost. I can't say what the price is, but I can say that if the market-clearing price for Swift's latest tour turned out to be $600, the fans wouldn't say "OK, fair enough, I can't afford it but I will accept the outcome as utility maximizing for the greatest number of market participants." They would say something closer to "this is total bullshit"
So not only would they have to sell their own tickets, they'd also have to provide their own venues. Taylor Swift is powerful, but not "build my own stadium to perform" powerful.
Quote from Rolling Stone article:
The web of exclusive deals is what hurt Pearl Jam the most during its aborted ’95 tour. Locked out of mainstream venues, the group sold tickets through newcomer ETM Entertainment for shows at fairgrounds, soccer fields and state parks in such distant locales as Casper, Wyo., and Las Cruces, N.M.
Seems to us that it takes a Prince, a Pearl Jam ... or a Taylor Swift ... with the seat filling power, the independent vision, and the interest + will to take on such problems themselves instead of have it all "handled" for them by the revolving door group of industry insider managers and label execs.
To the sibling note, yes, it may also take alternative venues, or other cleverness. NPGMC for example created a "club" of "members" at scale, that allowed a variety of workarounds not available if albums or events are "public".
* Note: We already specialized in handling landing pages and sales for live streaming events because we'd found while we could deliver the online video events, even mega brand sites couldn't handle the flash traffic for scheduled sales. So, we had know-how to rapidly apply similar concepts to this.
The only real solution is to raise prices. But artists can't do that without fans being angry. So instead Ticketmaster does it for them and pays the venue a k̶i̶c̶k̶b̶a̶c̶k̶ "rebate". If the artist is popular enough, the venue pays money to the artist. Everybody is happy and Ticketmaster reaps the rewards of being the entity everybody is mad at.
...
"Live Nation indicated that those who were demanding an investigation misunderstood the consent degree as well as 'general ticketing industry dynamics.' On September 18th, Michael Rapino, who runs Live Nation, further addressed the issue at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference, which took place in New York.
Rapino insisted that, while the consent decree prevents Live Nation from threatening to block shows at venues that use a different ticketing platform than Ticketmaster, it does not prevent the company from making decisions that make economic sense.
He further said that, if a venue wants to use a ticketing platform other than Ticketmaster, the venue may not make economic sense to his company."
-- https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2019/09/19/live-nation-inve...
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senator-questions-ticket...
Not really the heartwarming david and goliath tale he is going for I think.
They went bankrupt and saved the app by selling it to Warner and selling IP to Live Nation.
And it doesn't seem like he was aiming for a heartwarming tale, the last message says "we gave it our best shot" and he is disappointed that there is no big, healthy competition.
How many times do we hear about a company completely switching what they do (“pivoting”) because it will make them more money?
I am aware of her and I am very detached from US pop culture. It is catchy.
> Defendants [LiveNation and Ticketmaster] have also recently begun using their unique multi-level leverage (which arose from their merger) to prevent artists from using Songkick’s competitive services, and to tie (1) Live Nation’s concert promotion services, Live Nation’s artist management services, Ticketmaster’s concert venue ticketing services, and/or use of the venues Defendants own, manage, and/or control; to (2) the artists’ use of Ticketmaster’s own artist presale ticketing services (recently rebranded as Ticketmaster’s “OnTour” division).
> Michael Rapino, LiveNation’s CEO and Director, has admitted that artists today make 95% of their income from live music events and that Live Nation is now the “largest single financer” of artists worldwide (more than record companies). Armed as he is with this power over artists’ careers, Mr. Rapino has used this position to intimidate artists into using Ticketmaster over any other artist presale ticketing service. Indeed, Mr. Rapino made several threats to withhold Defendants’ services if artists insisted on using Songkick’s artist presale ticketing services. He also told several artists that they could not take a single ticket off of the Ticketmaster system, period.
It's worth noting, in this context, that https://www.quinnemanuel.com/the-firm/our-notable-victories/... linked in the original thread states (though certainly from a self-promoting source) that:
> Following fact and expert discovery, the defendants moved for summary judgment on all of Songkick’s antitrust and non-trade secret claims. The Court denied that motion in its entirety on the papers. Before that decision, no antitrust plaintiff had ever withstood summary judgment against Ticketmaster, making Songkick the first. The decision also set up for trial (for the first time ever) what the defendants’ lead attorney acknowledged was a claim that put the legality of Ticketmaster’s exclusive dealing practices “squarely at issue.” Faced with Songkick’s claim and the prospect of a looming trial against Quinn Emanuel in late January 2018, the defendants resolved the dispute by paying Songkick $110 million in settlement (nearly 100% of its lost going concern value damages) and acquiring its assets for a confidential sum.
(Note that Songkick announced it would shut down in October 2017. It's very possible that Songkick was likely to succeed on the merits but was forced to take a settlement to meet the needs of its team and investors.)
IMO it's vital that this be taken seriously. An increasingly gloves-off anticompetitive Ticketmaster, in the midst of a global recession, could do irreparable damage to an entire generation of musical creators. Something has to change.
You’re responding to the original submission. You can flag it if it’s that important to you. Or just skip it in your reading list and never respond at all. Of course if you’re interested in Swift programming topics there might be a little missing from your feed as a result...;)
I feel the topic of online markets and nuances thereof have high hak-relevance to HN. As witnessed by the actual discussion. OTOH I don’t think you should be downvoted for grousing about it, as someone has obviously done for you...