Yet even with all that, it seems no competitor has been able to reasonably get off the ground and poise a viable alternative. What gives? What's their moat/why do they have a monopoly?
Artists not signing deals with Ticketmaster lose access to venues, and venues not signing exclusivity deals with Ticketmaster lose access to artists.
There are enough of these on both sides that neither wants to lose the other so they sign.
Side note: I worked at a small ticketing software shop circa the Ticketmaster/LiveNation merger. The CEO got a call from the feds(FTC?) doing background work on the industry's view on how it might affect competition. For the life of me I can't imagine why he said it wouldn't really matter, but I have to assume that Ticketmaster was already so locked in to the industry that perhaps it didn't.
~15 years ago, I was working with venues to see how we could handle ticketing, etc. They ALL had exclusive deals where the venue could ONLY sell online through TicketMaster and then TM would handle ~100% of the back office reporting, tracking, etc and even the onsite credit card processing for walk up sales.
It was one end to end system/suite and to replace any of it, you had to replace ALL of it once the contract was up. Not a fun space at all.
[0] https://congressionaldish.com/cd267-the-monopoly-powers-of-l...
I do too! I get so sick of Ticketmaster's fees upon fees upon fees and "sorry, your browser isn't Chrome" junk.
TM makes more money for everyone, that's why they use it.
Consumers?
Specifically about Ticketmaster or what has FTC done more broadly?
Proposed a rule against hidden fees (10 days ago). It's also supposed to give FTC enforcement mechanism so that it'd be more effective than state laws that were passed and basically ignored.
Also filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon (less than a month ago) for how they're treating third-party sellers. And if I remember correctly a lawsuit against Facebook is supposed to proceed in December, in which the FTC is asking the court to force Facebook to sell Instagram and WhatsApp (I wouldn't get my hopes up on this one).
FTC definitely has some teeth now, but they can't wish monopolies out of existence, they have to go through a years-long court process against an army of lawyers employed by tech companies with a budget that's orders of magnitude higher than FTC's.
Monopolies are not inherently illegal.
If a business obtains a monopoly by offering superior products or innovation, or through superior business acumen, the monopoly is legal. Antitrust issues arise when a monopoly is achieved or maintained by exclusionary or predatory acts.
Ticketmaster is big but it’s not Amazon or banking.
A string of losses will set precedent that will get harder and harder to overturn. It's not clear from the outside if Ticketmaster would be a stronger case but something to ponder.
But, alas, that money too good.
This one. Not only does ticketmaster have contracts with most venues unless they own them outright, they're also a very convenient foil as they serve as ire-magnets.
On one hand, free markets involve sellers and buyers coming together freely which exclusivity contracts prohibit, but on the other hand exclusivity contracts are nominally voluntary agreements which is a free exchange. Perhaps free-exchange simply isn't a useful framing here.
What I find strange is that people aren't usually reluctant to sign exclusivity agreements because it's very limiting. How did ticketmaster get so big to begin with to force / convince people of signing exclusivity clauses?
By dangling more money.
In the 1980s, Ticketmaster beat the competitors (e.g. Ticketron) by offering the venues a better financial deal.
Ticketron charged the venues a service fee. Venues pay Ticketron.
Ticketmaster flipped that around and made a clever proposal: instead of charging the venue, we'll charge the concertgoing fans extra service fee(s) and we'll give the venue a percentage of the fees collected. To sweeten the deal, we'll even pay the venue _upfront_ money as part of signing an exclusive deal.
https://thehustle.co/the-sneaky-economics-of-ticketmaster/
That's why most ideas about creating a new ticketing startup to "disrupt Ticketmaster" are naive about how the underlying business deals actually work. E.g. if the well-meaning programmers have idealistic motivations to create a new "fair ticketing" system that doesn't charge outrageous fees, the venues will not sign up with you which means you have no tickets to sell at the "cheaper & fair price".
Why would the venues use your new "fair ticketing" system if it means they get less money?!? That's the financial puzzle a viable Ticketmaster competitor has to solve.
One way would be to sign deals reserving venue space in advance for a good chunk of the year. Artists wanting to perform there on dates reserved to Ticketmaster would need to sign exclusivity deals.
This has a network effect. The more they do, the more effective is the strategy and the easier it gets to keep doing it.
I think we would need some entity on the scale of the NFL to fix this. Ticketmaster is too big to take on any other way.
While it's true Ticketmaster does have these exclusive deals, it's demonstrably false that this is the reason why TM still hasn't been replaced.
If you've been around the industry for a while, you'll remember that LiveNation & Ticketmaster were distinct companies. In fact, LN tried to leave Ticketmaster. LN was the one with the exclusive deals with artists. LN was the one who owned the venues.
Yet LN failed. They dumped hundreds of millions into building a ticketing platform unsuccessfully. And eventually just bought Ticketmaster.
It a good data point that even if you have the right contracts, you'll fail if you don't have the right tech.
Artists can play small venues, venues can book small artists, but that's not where the money is.
At least it might come with some renewed interest in competition getting in on game with a better playing field before the monopoly starts forming again in new ways.
Ticketmaster then tries to offload some of the blame to unknown "scalpers" but I think it's very likely that most of the scalpers are either Ticketmaster itself or entities contracted with them.
it's the only logical explanation since if they really wanted to solve the scalping problem, it would be the easiest thing in the world to solve. just make the tickets non-transferable.
Biden is probably the first President since Carter to have even acknowledged the issue, we have 40 years of both Democrats and Republicans at every level of government slopping at the trough at this point.
antitrust enforcers starting with Lina K are so incompetent that they cant win open and shut cases
Exhibit A: action against a merger between Amazon and a robo-vaccum company, iRobot.
Let that sink for a minute.
Ticketmaster wasn't set up to handle the unique setup Prince wanted, popular tour in both arena and intimate venues with scheduled sales. When all Prince's music club fans were trying to buy the tickets to a 300 seat venue at 12 noon on a Friday, Ticketmaster had trouble.
Prince being Prince ditched the studio for his music, and bypassed Ticketmaster for his tickets, for what he wanted to do. Over the course of a few weeks, working for his incredibly talented and creative webmaster Sam Jennings, we built and hosted a system that could handle the flash traffic and sell the correct number of NPGMusicClub tickets for these small venues in the milliseconds the event started.
Musicology Live 2004ever went on to do $87.4 million from 77 shows in 52 cities across the United States, selling more than 1.4 million tickets.
It didn't occur to us we should make a business out of having been able to do that. But being 6 feet from his guitar playing in Webster Hall NYC is quite the memory, so no regrets.
That's a weird example to pick out, as if Prince was 'fighting the system', and yet I'm sure you know he exclusively signed & got paid up-front from the 2nd positioned monopoly in the game.
Cool story that you got to sit side stage and wrote code behind his fan club ticketing (which I'm sure you and AMEX shared for <= 7% total tickets sold, and AEG _definitely_ didn't finance as part of the exclusivity deal on the whole run) but come on... I know you know all you've done is present an alternative story that's supposed to garner upvotes but anyone who knows, knows you were the next one in line to fuck this entire industry and rake it off top.
Edit: Google says fans also know. https://prince.org/msg/7/247733
Having a close second competitor is still a step in the right direction, even if you disagree with their business practices.
Please don’t don’t do this. Ugly and Boring.
- A talent-owned, co-op live music ticket and venue platform
- A talent-owned, co-op music streaming service on all the devices (Spotify as the benchmark, Tidal is better quality but less convenient)
- A talent-owned, co-op label
Pick any or all 3. The only way to get money back to the creators is for them to own it because the megacorps never will give more than pennies without a fight. The major are only have the perception of a lock on distribution by the inertia of popularity that celebrity influencers can readily overcome.
They have a vertically integrated monopoly.
In fact, Pearl Jam sued TM for being a monopoly in 1994, about 15 years before LN bought TM.
https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/1994-when-pearl-jam-took-ti....
Take a look at the largest venues in the country. Most of them aren't owned by LN, but they still use TM for ticketing. If anything, TM has helped LN to acquire more venues than the other way around. In general, TM has a much more dominant share of the ticketing business than LN has of the venue or promotion business.
Source: I used to own a night club in San Francisco.
"Founded in 1996 by Robert F. X. Sillerman as SFX Entertainment, the company's business was built around consolidating concert promoters into a national entity to counter the oversized influence of ticket behemoth Ticketmaster."
It's kind of amazing how the present distorts our perspective of the past.
The point being: TM already had the market power before LN was on the scene, and all of LN's market power wasn't enough to get people to use their ticketing platform instead of TM. Saying LN is the reason everyone uses TM is very much getting it backwards.
Surely, if LN's dominance is what is needed to lock up the ticketing market, LN's ticketing platform should have been able to compete with TM quite well, and TM should have been struggling to succeed in the ticketing market prior to being acquired by LN.
The first thing to point out is that the question itself is flawed. Ticketmaster has a number of competitors (StubHub, Eventbrite, AXS, Seatgeek). Nevertheless, artists do seem to always gravitate to companies like Ticketmaster, even when neither they nor their venue have any affiliation.
What we should ask is what problems a naive artist would face selling their tickets like any other commodity:
- They overprice it: No one shows up, people are angry at the artist, the artist is in debt to the venue for overbooking.
- They underprice it: The tickets are hoovered up by scalpers who capture most of the ticket's true value, fans are disappointed they can't attend because finding a ticket is much harder.
Ticketmaster's (et al) primary service is to capture as much of the value of each ticket as possible (through phased ticket rollouts, faux-sellouts, variable pricing, attendance modelling, etc.) and package the event wholesale for the venue and artist. Both parties are can be guaranteed of some portion of the event before tickets even go on sale and the risk for them both is diminished.
Obviously I'm not trying to say Ticketmaster is all sunshine and lollipops, but if you want to make an argument about Ticketmaster's success, saying that they've cornered the ticketed events market globally is ludicrous.
Artists will want play at more than one venue, surely, and I should imagine that TM's stance is "If you want to play at any of our venues, you sign with us". Might be possible for a small indie band to completely avoid any TM venues but for any moderately popular band, it's probably not possible.
https://www.npr.org/2018/09/20/649666928/ticketmaster-has-it...
Those are reseller platforms (StubHub, Seatgeek) and independent entities (Eventbrite & AXS) that aren't associated with the venues/rooms they're playing in.
So your examples either:
1) Resell tickets from Ticketmaster + the list you mentioned + all other providers, or
2) They don't have the ability to flex on people because they don't own & operate the rooms across the entire planet, and in turn can't hit them with exclusivity clauses in their contracts the second they step foot into one of XXXXX rooms they'd like to play.
> Nevertheless, artists do seem to always gravitate to companies like Ticketmaster, even when neither they nor their venue have any affiliation.
Are you sure those non-affiliated venues don't have 10+ year exclusive ticketing contract that came with a fat lump sum when the ink dried in order to modernize & sustain their business?
I'd also question which rooms are slanging TM tickets without being owned by the overarching entity? I don't think I've ever seen that and I'd appreciate you presenting some examples of this.
> What we should ask is what problems a naive artist would face selling their tickets like any other commodity:
So anyone outside the TM system is naive? Wow... 0k... proceed...
> - They overprice it: No one shows up, people are angry at the artist, the artist is in debt to the venue for overbooking.
Please explain to me how the artist is in debt to the venue? There isn't a promoter in between the two? The artist is signing loan agreements and going into debt to the venue? Tell me you have zero clue what you're talking about without telling me you don't know a single thing about this industry...
> - They underprice it: The tickets are hoovered up by scalpers who capture most of the ticket's true value, fans are disappointed they can't attend because finding a ticket is much harder.
Again, no idea what you're talking about.
1) TM is GASSED UP when scalpers hoover up. They have multiple reselling platforms for exactly this scenario, including one that's TM branded. They _love_ this.
2) In reality, the promoter/venue is totally fine with this. They build offers against the proposed ticket price & sellable capacity, and a sell out is a sell out. Sure, hindsight is 20/20 and they'll reference historicals and adjust accordingly when the agent hits them up for the next play, but nobody is mad at a sell out.
> and package the event wholesale for the venue and artist. Both parties are can be guaranteed of some portion of the event before tickets even go on sale and the risk for them both is diminished.
They own & operate the venues. The artists are paid cash up front to sign the exclusive tour contract. They're not working for _anyone_ other than Ticketmaster... you're tripping my guy...
> Obviously I'm not trying to say Ticketmaster is all sunshine and lollipops
Ayyyyy no worries anyone with any exposure to this industry and half of a brain has already determined you have no idea what you're talking about, you're wrong & confused & way out of pocket, and we already know TM isn't sunshine & lollipops... back into your text editor you go (please)...
Why?
Livenation and Ticketmaster controls like 70+% of the market for shows (https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/did-ticketmasters-mar...). They own fuck tons of venues and literally can’t be competed with in a lot of instances. Theres not a competitor because it turns out that acquiring vast numbers of venues is expensive and is only something that a market leader like Livenation could do.
> Anything essential to our conferences is processed in-house. E.g. When you register for an event we personally handle the process to generate your ticket—removing spying middlemen like Ticketmaster.
It saves thousands in Ticketmaster fees which is life-changing when you're indie. We don't have to overcharge ticket holders.
I'd be interested in turning this into a polished webapp other organizers can install and use. Sadly, building your own replacement doesn't address the monopoly TM has with the biggest venues.
I was initially quite a big fan until I purchased “sold out” tickets to a music festival a year in advance with the assurance that I could resell them if I changed my mind, only to see the resale queue disabled many months before the festival due to “lack of demand”. This didn’t seem to align with the festival being sold out, and apparently the tickets were released in batches which allowed them to claim it was “sold out” despite there being plenty of tickets still available. I’m not sure if this was the fault of Dice or the festival itself but soured my impression significantly.
Dice is still leagues better than Ticketmaster both in terms of UX and fees, but to me Resident Advisor is still the gold standard; unfortunately it seems a lot of the sort of shows that would be listed on RA are now on Dice instead.
(1) The ticketing system you want as a consumer is not the ticketing system that artists/venues/promoters want. As a consumer, you hate those Ticketmaster fees. The others? They love those fees. That's how they get paid. There are almost no standard fees for Ticketmaster. Every fee is contract specific and split between the parties. From the convenience fee to the print-at-home-free -- cuts of those got to everyone.
You could build the consumer-friendly platform, but it's not going to be used anyone, and certainly not by top artists. Top artists expect to get get 95% to 105% of the ticket price (yes, more than 100%). That leaves everyone else (including the promoter & venues reliant on other revenue streams like fees.
(2) The business requirements make it a technical beast to solve. Nevermind your LAMP-based ecomm site. Tickets aren't fungible. That creates a lot of problems. Thing selling airline tickets, not widgets on Amazon. Venues can be configured in countless ways. Pricing strategies are complex, often unique per show & dynamic. Most shows don't sell out. The promoter is the one who took the financial risk and needs to figure out how to maximize the revenue per show. Once the show is over, those unsold tickets are worthless.
(3) Scaling is hard. Massive spikes during onsale, but very low QPS at other times. The hardware cost profile is challenging than most non-FAANG services.
(4) Creating a ticket system for a small theatre with fixed seating, or purely GA events isn't that hard. What's hard is a top tier artist going on tour across the country. (And that's where most of the profit is.)
(5) Ticketing isn't that profitable. You'd have to invest a lot of resource for not much gain. The last serious attempt was LiveNation. They dumped hundreds of millions trying to build their own platform. Then gave up & bought Ticketmaster.
Ticketmaster's service is to provide something to point a finger at. People hating them instead of their clients is just their product working as intended.
Literally a web search will give you plenty. The NYT even did an article about it.
Streaming services pay peanuts and nobody outright buys albums anymore.
Also, since artists make almost all of their money from tours, they know trouble will arise with the mess that is ticket/venue sales. If they go full capitalist and someone like Taylor Swift starts charging what the market will bear(maybe $10k/ticket ?), many people will revolt, since there is zero chance they can afford that.
Instead, they can lay 100% of the blame on Ticketmaster, and nobody hates the artists for the mess.
So artists are not incentivized to try and fix the mess, and venues are not really incentivized either, since they also get to lay the blame on Ticketmaster.
Ticketmaster in the meantime takes all the blame, does nothing and keeps depositing fat stacks of cash in their bank account.
Some incentive will have to change, for this to get fixed. Perhaps govt will slap some regulations on Ticketmaster? Perhaps people will stop blaming Ticketmaster and make venues and/or artists accountable for their continued contracting with Ticketmaster? I don't know, but until something changes, don't expect Ticketmaster to behave or a competitor to show up.
Also, Ticketmaster influence wasn’t that big in France to begin with because many concert halls and arenas have their own ticketing website. Music events were also not that pricey compared to other neighboring countries, probably because the state pumps a lot of money in the music system.
Of course now we also have huge expensive festivals owned by Live Nation and the likes and the model is changing: festival are going from 30€ a day to almost 80€+
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/pearl-jam-war-with-ticketmaster...
does ticketmaster monopolize small venues, as well?
maybe those venues could also sell streaming access as well as in-person viewing, to attack ticketmaster from 'below'. Other than Pearl Jam (and Prince, RIP), the big concert attractions seem to be happy with the current ticketmaster situation.
I don't know, but I do know that about half of the small venues in my town use Ticketmaster. I notice because it means that I have to remember which small venues I'm willing to see shows at.
> Yet even with all that, it seems no competitor has been able to reasonably get off the ground and poise a viable alternative. What gives?
To the extent that you're complaining about scalping, that's not something ticketmaster does. Scalping is a choice made by whoever originates the tickets. If the facial price is $20 and the market value is $700, scalping is going to occur regardless of whatever platform(s) may be involved. And if the facial price is $20 and the market price is $5, scalping won't occur regardless of whatever platform(s) may be involved.
But the other side of the coin, is people don't really care that much about who the ticket vendor is for a big show, they just want to go to a big show.
The artists want as much as possible. Ticketmasters practices allow as much profit for themselves as possible and for the artist. A lot of the 'fees' that people hate, ticketmaster take the blame, but it's just a stealth way of increasing the ticket price and making the band not look like they are ripping off there fans.
Tickets are only $60, but then there are $30 worth of fees. Oh and dynamic pricing which means the ticket actually costs you $180 + fees, but the band can get away with it, rather than just outright putting them at $200, ticketmaster are the ones that look like they are ripping off the fans, not the acts, when they are in it together.
Here in the UK, the problem is, all the major venues are owned by Live nation who own ticketmaster, band wants to play there? have to use ticketmaster. They also bought up a lot of the festivals here, so the issue is they control everything.
They don't go down when there's a big ticket sale. If you've ever used these alternative ticket sites, they will struggle under the load.
The reason it is hard is because there is a flood of people all hammering your site at once, all doing credit card transactions. There's bots. There's people hitting refresh constantly.
They are lame for a lot of reasons, but they don't suck in this department. And I imagine that is important for a lot of people.
Of course she might be an extreme end of the market :)
Kind of like back in the day when Intel & Microsoft imposed drastic licenses on Dell and HP that you couldn't get Windows license if you shipped ANY linux or non-windows laptops, Ticketmaster has the tremendous power of blacklisting non-conforming venues.
And then there's the REALLY SHADY stuff they do like hiring competitor executives who bring over their passwords, excels and accounts (https://www.directitcorp.com/blog/ticketmaster-caught-access... and other ridiculously wrong stuff like this https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ticketmaster-resellers-las-... . Just start google search with "TicketMaster Caught..." and you'll find fascinating stuff that should be made up but isn't.
Basically they are a big evil bully.
Ticketmaster seems to just still have a hold on the AAA shows (which I never visit) but they seem to have lost everything else.
This means it has pretty much “full stack” control over live music events at from the top end of the market down - it’s got relationships with artists, venues and promoters who want to book artists and put shows on sale.
If you’re in the live music business you will almost certainly be doing business with part of Live Nation.
That’s why no one can really challenge Ticketmaster.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/10/spotify-starts-selling-liv...
From what I've heard from folks in the industry, literally no one else is capable of handling the biggest artists like Taylor Swift.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/ticketmaster-taylor-sw...
Essentially they’ve captured the market.
Venues and artists are no longer in the free market.
It needs a big powerful player with deep pockets, startups don’t stand a chance.
I live in a mid-size metropolitan city. We are kind of a perfect size because we are a large enough city that most A-list celebs will actually stop here on tours (albeit near the end their tours or for 1-2 shows only). We also have some awesome minor league sports teams with enthusiastic fanbases, and we get lots of visits from large sports teams like NHL, NBA, etc in pre-season travel games. Anyway, the point being that forever, our stadium had some non-ticketmaster product to manage ticket buying. It was usually terrible. Tickets would get bought out from under you mid-purchase, reservations would get double-booked, finding available seats was clunky on a computer and almost impossible on a phone. The site was slow and burdensome and the tickets got emailed to you and needed to be printed out. On the flip side, our events were really cheap. We already paid lower-than average for these events and then our ticket fees were like a tier-based price of either $2 (tickets under $30), $4 (tickets under $80), or $6 (tickets over $80) depending on the pricing tier of the ticket.
That all changed last year. Ticketmaster came in and became the exclusive provider for our stadium. The change was dramatic. First of all, there was an awesome mobile app that works really well. It was modern and fast and made is very easy to find and reserve a seat. No more glitches with people buying the same tickets as you or failing during checkout. It was easy to find upcoming games or events and pre-buying was fast and efficient. Plus now we could sell unused season ticket games on the aftermarket (which wasn't possible before). A lot of boring ticket management features that used to require phone calls between 10am - 3pm (Mon-Thur) could now be done anytime on the app, day or night, even on weekends, and even hours before a game or event. You can also now buy last-minute tickets even after a game has started now because of Ticketmaster, which wasn't possible before. We had an NHL team come into town for a pre-season game and we could buy pre-order tickets super easy, and the previous year the website actually crashed when they opened up these tickets. Oh and my favorite feature now is being able to use contactless tickets through my Apple Wallet. Lines are shorter when we get to the stadium as a result and just an incredible improvement of quality of life for me and my family. So there are a ton of big benefits to Ticketmaster.
The downside is the fees. A lot of the tickets we buy are only $30-40. I routinely pay close to 50% in fees with ticketmaster when I previously was paying 5-10% in fees. And worse, I don't actually know or understand the fee structure at all. I've even asked employees and no one seems to know. As far as I can tell, they basically handed over the keys to the stadium, giving full responsibility of ticket management to TicketMaster and so everything from the website, the pre-orders, the season tickets, the aftermarket, mobile checkin, last minute auctions, are all just part of the package deal that Ticketmaster offers.
As a result, I used to pay $34 for a hockey or basketball game, and I now pay ~$65 for the exact same seat that I bought last year. The team doesn't get anymore money, the stadium doesn't seem to be either. My ticket prices are still the same until you get to the fees. Two years ago I could go to an event for under $100 all-in for my family of 3. Now it costs me about $200.
So I wanted to provide perspective on what Ticketmaster offers. They do offer a lot for stadiums, who truly aren't equipped to manage a distributed and scalable ticket management product. So there is value in what ticketmaster offers. But do they deserve to make as much as the artists or athletes that I am paying to see? Hell no, and that seems to be the current pricing model. So I want to see Ticketmaster competed with. The problem is that no one else seems to offer a product that comes close.
For anyone out there that wants to start a competitor, you just need to offer a package deal for stadiums. Ticketmaster offers an all-in-one deal for stadiums so they don't have to worry about any app or web development, maintenance, ticket sales, or anything else.
Remember stadiums are owned by corporate real estate. They just want to collect their rent and keep values high on property. They outsource all labor, food, and management of the events to different people. So for ticket sales they don't really care what Ticketmaster charges, they just like to hand over the keys and know that the job gets done and to them that means that butts are in seats. That's all they care about, because if the stadium stays filled, then rent stays high, good artists and sports want to play there, and they keep getting paid. If Ticketmaster can do that while charging 50% fees to customers, and the company that only charges 10% can't. Then Ticketmaster is getting the contract. That's how it works.
Ticketmaster has a good product, people need to acknowledge that. That is why the upstarts and startups fail. But we need to see competition here, because the fees are getting out of hand and that is a direct result to ticketmaster being a monopoly.
The entertainment business is not very technical. TM serves as their IT department. By the nature of the business, everyone wants to differentiate themselves from everyone else. So literally every client wants some special feature that no one has seen before. TM is the only place that can afford to say, "sure, we'll do it" to all of them, and since most of the clients (sports teams being the major exception) aren't that technically sophisticated, so they're not in a position to do the differentiation on their own.
Startups usually don't succeed by having more features than entrenched competitors. They succeed, but delivering a small bundle of features that create a huge value difference. If one were to do that, it'd be great for the first few clients that used them, and then it'd be "old hat" and everyone else would want tons of new, differentiated features, which would cause the startup to lose focus. The industry doesn't want a handful of outstanding features. They all want to be snowflakes.
> I constantly see people complaining about ticketmaster with scalping
Ironically, the reseller market is the one part of the ticketing market that TM hasn't dominated. It's kind of ironic that people talk about TM when they complain about scalping.
Eventbrite
Dice
Ticketfairy
ResidentAdvisor
Partiful
so I dont know, it seems pretty fragmented to me