US Justice Department to seek breakup of Live Nation-Ticketmaster
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Because the promoters, talent, and talent management are all in on it, TM just agrees to take the heat for its cut.
That is not to say that separating TM from the venues will not help concert goers, but maybe not as much as you might think.
I was a fly on the wall for a conversation with someone who runs a 12k seat venue. They guaranteed Harry Styles $5 million for 2 nights and made it work because.... "secondary". Even the venues are in on the scalping.
With this in mind, to continue your rant…
The anticompetitive behavior of Live Nation is toxic to the music and performing arts industries. It’s the Walmart effect, except consumers end up paying way more because exclusivity contracts prevent competition. Artists sign exclusivity contracts with Live Nation, and onlt play Live Nation Venues. Venues purchased by live nation outbid independent venues until those venues sign exclusivity agreements with Live Nation or die, and then Live Nation pushes up the price.
American politics are full of superlatives, and very devoid of any real actions. Once the hero or the devil gets elected, nothing happens much.
Weren't there similar predictions back in 2016? How is it different this time? Or to back up a bit, what exactly does "democracy existing as we know it today" mean? It could mean anything between "US becomes North Korea" and "the whitehouse revoked the press credentials of someone who said something mean about trump".
That the coup failed and Congress wasn't murdered doesn't mean they didn't try.
Of course "it wasn't wrong" if claims are vague like "democracy as we know it", which means they can be used in a motte-and-bailey manner to initially imply that the US is going to turn into China/North Korea or whatever, but then later be walked back on to whatever the predictions don't really pan out.
>That the coup failed and Congress wasn't murdered doesn't mean they didn't try.
Was the claim back then that they'll "try" (however poorly planned/executed), or that they'll actually succeed?
There was a lot of equivocating that it was all some campaign schtick, the media was misrepresenting him, etc. "4D chess" and all that.
It turned out that the straightforward analysis was the correct one. Sometimes a spade really is a spade.
This round he's playing for double or nothing - having broken a bunch of laws is slowly catching up with him. He continues playing the victim while indignantly expressing a desire for overt revenge. We've already seen the mechanisms by which this will happen (paralysis of federal law enforcement, mobilization of paramilitary goon squads into the power vacuum, and political reality distortion field justifying everything as if President is equivalent to Dictator). So yeah by any reasoned analysis, 2024 really is Trump xor America - you decide.
(Once again, standard disclaimer - unaligned libertarian here. I'd never voted for a major party candidate before 2020. Specifically, I considered a 2016 a toss up between two differently-bad options, and still have no regrets there. But now that we've seen a concrete track record as opposed to mere vacuous campaigning, it would be utterly foolish to ignore it)
So to confirm you're predicting that if he gets elected he'll stay in power beyond 2025?
That's typically how coups go, as far as history go.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/05/22/t...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-69045271
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/21/politics/trump-nazi-allus...
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/after-backlash-trump-pulls-...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/21/dona...
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/21/trump-unified-reich...
https://apnews.com/article/trump-election-2024-rhetoric-germ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/20/us/donald-trump-reich-vid...
Once there is backslash, just blame a junior staffer instead of making the head honcho resign for not controlling what goes into an important PR stream.
(Just for context here, lest the postmodern fence-sitters write me off as some rabid partisan - I'm an unaligned libertarian who had never voted for a major candidate in a national election before 2020)
It's a very old mispelling that I'm sticking with.
> I'd be interested in seeing a non-crank source for your assertion. Everything I've read suggests that it'll likely be inflation-neutral or slightly reduce inflation over the next 10 years.
Over the next 10 years, maybe. But circulating money that didn't exist before (that's what happens when the government increases the debt) devalues existing currency proportionally. It is, by definition, inflation. It's effectively a flat tax which disproportionately affects the poor (as all flat taxes do).
The result is an _immediate_ spike in inflation that _maybe_ cools if the projected revenue is real (it often isn't). That inflation had been staved off for the last... two decades or so by lowering interest rates, encouraging people to spend money they wouldn't otherwise (or borrow it themselves) thereby increasing their buying power and offsetting their devalued currency.
Unfortunately, you can't lower interest rates forever and so, when they reach rock bottom, all your inflation chickens come home to roost.
> Even if spending on it gets up to a trillion dollars over a ten year span, you're still talking about one tenth of what gets spent on defense contractors and the military every year.
Spending more money you don't have is worse than spending less money you don't have.
> I'd be interested in seeing a non-crank source for your assertion.
Back to that though... The reason why the government is spending the way it is recently is because of Modern Monetary Theory[1]. Politicians love it because it says they can spend as much money as they want and debt doesn't matter. They don't really believe it though because they only implement the part where they get to spend all the money you want and the debt doesn't matter. I don't think it's very controversial to consider the "mainstream" (in quotes because the reason they are mainstream is because politicians and political think tanks love them, they aren't actually mainstream among economists) MMT sources to be the cranks.
Hahaha. Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I agree, but VP? There's a reason why there's a Veep TV show.
It's better but it's still a half measure and far away from the blanket pardons that the President (any president) needs to be signing asap.
I get the whole "progress is slow thing" but this is a case of politicians being the only slow ones. A supermajority of the public supports alcohol/marijuana parity.
They know the judges won't let anything bad happen to their friends so they can pretend to act tough every four years (when the billionaire class's preferred candidate/party is in office of course).
That's the trick. What material thing happened?
Over the years, hundreds of thousands (?) of people have been ripped off.
If I did that I'd be in jail.
The US as a democracy isn't supported by evidence.
> “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
If you have causes you are passionate about but you refuse to participate in the (hard won, bloodily won) civic right of voting, then your ability to affect those causes will evaporate. No matter how much you think your government doesn't care now, they will care even less when it is truly, wholly, dictatorially unaccountable to you. And then what? What was your anti-voting stance for?
A substantial chunk of the electorate seems to prefer losing and then whining about outcomes as long as it allows them to pat themselves on the back for 'staying above it all and seeing the futility all along'. I implore you instead to care, hold your officials accountable, and vote. A bad future is not inevitable.
"Francis's term "anarcho-tyranny" refers to armed dictatorship without rule of law, or a Hegelian synthesis when the state tyrannically or oppressively regulates citizens' lives yet is unable or unwilling to enforce fundamental protective law."
> Dictators can actually get something done for you, I'd prefer that to our current [x]
the historical track record of that sentiment is both plenty long and plenty awful. Are you ignorant of that history or dispute it or think it’ll be different this time or what?
The primary thing that causes drift from fairness is lack of voter turnout.
Artists set their ticket prices, tickmaster is a middleman/scape goat. Pretending to go after the scapegoat is just for show.
What are you referring to here?
There is a great deal of documentation and discussion, but this document covers some of it, here are a couple of on-topic quotes:
>"Documents from and testimony by FTC managers show that Chair Khan marginalized the litigators and investigators at the FTC who had the skills necessary to win cases."
>"One manager consulted with his team and reported to the Chief of Staff that Chair Khan was “[s]capegoating the career staff for the FTC’s ‘underenforcement’ of the antitrust laws”26 and “contributing to an external narrative that denigrates staff.”"
This document reads like political theater because it is political theater.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/...
It's been nonstop for the whole duration of the admin.
The Sherman Antitrust Act is one paragraph long.
9 constitutional amendments are only one sentence long, not even a paragraph!
It's all case law.
But judges care way more about constitutional amendments than Sherman Antitrust Act. Most have limited intellectual interest in the problems it tackles.
And really, who cares about the price of concert tickets, online ads and in-app purchase fees? These guys went to law school not business school.
They. Just. Don't. Care.
Could the DoJ and FTC make them care as much about antitrust as like, at least 2 amendments? Yes.
I have no idea how the DoJ and FTC have failed to drum up excitement about this stuff. Nobody is going to rule against the status quo without passionate feelings about it.
[0] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinion/23
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-21_3e04.pdf
Judges can just as easily find pet causes that don’t align with your interests, I don’t think that’s the mechanism you or I want our country to rely on.
The original Sherman Act has 7 sections (one additional was later added) one of which has two subsections, none of which have multiple paragraphs, for a total of 8 paragraphs.
More to the point, US antitrust law isn't just the Sherman Act and case law, because:
1. There are two other main antitrust-related statutes, the Clayton Act and the Federal Trade Commission Act, and
2. The FTC Act as well as its direct mandates also creates regulatory authority for the FTC,
3. In addition to federal antitrust law in the US, there is also state antitrust law.
> But judges care way more about constitutional amendments than Sherman Antitrust Act.
I'm not sure what the bases for your intuition about how much judges care about those things are; there is certainly a sense in which Constitutional provisions definitionally have priority over statute and administrative law, but its hardly as if antitrust law isn't an area that has gotten extremely detailed judicial attention.
Taylor Swift didn't become a billionaire because of Ticketmaster fees.
Additionally, if artists were to continue the high prices in a more transparent manner without them, then that’s fine - it’s a free country and a free market.
This is exactly why this board is a waste of time. Half of what you read on here are people talking about things they have no idea about and/or no vested interest in the outcome.
Just a large collection of wankers.
Here’s an article (gift link, so no paywall) that describes the whole situation:
Good interview with Jon Stewart:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM
Simple examples are:
- Kroger and Albertson’s (grocery stores)
- Illumina and Grail (cancer detection)
- Amazon for dark patterns regarding signing up for prime, and for privacy violations with Alexa and Ring
- Lost challenge to Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard (good to look into, not sure about the specific case)
- FTC released a framework for anti-trust that should be a regulatory win.
I think the problem is that some corporate america WOULD be a fan of her, but they either died or had no opportunity to exist in the first place.
That’s not meant to be a political statement about Biden. But I’m assuming you are talking about the current DOJ/FTC.
I want to see them go after the credit card companies. They can start by passing usury laws that cap interest at 10%.
Violating antitrust law is illegal.
---
You don't violate federal law just by being the only company to sell canine banana hammocks.
I am pointing out that being a monopoly (i.e. the only business choosing to offer a product/service) is not illegal.
Engaging in anticompetive behavior is illegal. And the Justice Dept has accused Ticketmaster of doing that.
[Artist that was super popular in 2006ish] tickets when we went at the absolute height of his popularity were $40 for lawn seats at a local venue
[Same artist] at the same venue in the same lawn seating is now $380.
What's the difference? Guess who bought the venue.
Off to buy some late 90s band tickets!
Disposable income of target audience.
Greater number of people in target audience.
Fewer shows.
Technology enabling more accurate pricing so each customer is able to be targeted to pay as much as they can afford (price discrimination).
Etc.
People who are really opposed to this will probably think this is wildly off base, but if it came to pass...isn't that worse than one company absorbing the other because although the endgame is similar, it's messier and doesn't necessarily improve the overall situation.
An example: Barclays acquisition of Lehman Brothers business in North America in 2008 after the latter imploded. They had an agreement in principle, but the government balked, so it happened after the fact...bringing an even larger crisis along with it.
Personally, I think that if a company can’t survive with competition, it shouldn’t survive. That is a fundamental and necessary tenant of capitalism. It may cause pain in the short term, but it will eventually lead to a healthier market.
As was often repeated back in the Great Recession, if a company is too big to fail, then maybe it’s too big to exist.
Live Nation-Ticketmaster only gets the monopoly power delegated from the artists and venues. If you break that up into competing ticket providers, that doesn't do anything to the underlying prices, tickets will still be resold on secondary markets until the prices reach supply-demand equilibrium.
Busting LN-TM hypothetically doesn't even do anything to the fees. The market is set by what customers will pay, and it doesn't matter to them what the breakdown is between going to the middlemen or going to the artist. At most, busting LN-TM does create competition for lower fees, so that the artist gets more of the revenue. But it's not clear at all that that's a matter for courts to forcibly impose.
(I see the downvotes. The Internet hivemind will always think it's entitled to ignore the laws of supply and demand, even on HN. Ticket prices are high because demand exceeds supply and customers choose to pay it, not because of a monopolistic reseller entity.)
The issue here isn't that top artists can't sell their tickets at a high price. It's that venues have exclusivity deals w/ ticketmaster/livenation and ticketmaster/livenation ultimately charge outrageous fees to consumers no matter what. Then often their own reselling arm is involved in the scalping behavior.
The artists aren't reaping these fees. Ticketmaster/livenation is capturing the entirety of the profit and artists don't really have a choice in using a different ticketing vendor in most cases (since it's common for every major venue in a city to have strong-armed exclusivity contracts w/ ticketmaster/livenation).
By and large, it is the venues and promoters that set large fees. The reason they like TM is because TM will take the blame for charging those fees when in reality, they're kicked back.
Of course, the problem is that in many cases now, Live Nation owns the venues and acts as the promoters, so those kickbacks started going, ultimately, to the company charging them.
This is not true. The fees are just there to mask the cost of the ticket:
>>According to Ticketmaster, the fees are determined “in collaboration” with its clients, all of whom receive a cut from the charges.
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/national-international/ho...
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/bruce-springst...
And this is why "the market" isn't perfect, and flat-out sucks for some things. It doesn't have to be this way. Springsteen should be able to say "I want to charge $40 per ticket so my loyal fans, no matter what their financial situation, can see me perform", without having to deal with the scum of the earth buying up those tickets and reselling them for $300 each. (Whether or not he would want to do this is another question.)
The funny thing is that this setup is perfectly possible now that we have all this digital infrastructure. Back when tickets were just a piece of paper that people bought anonymously from a box office, it was damn near impossible to stop people from scalping them. Today we can tie a ticket to a person's real name, and check IDs at the venue. We can prohibit ticket transfers, or at least require that they be done via the same marketplace where they were purchased, so they can only be resold for the amount they were originally paid for.
Supply and demand are only laws when you allow a market to set prices, instead of letting a the seller price how they want, and sell directly to only their final end customers.
- Auction
- Lottery system
- A combination of all 3
None of these are perfect, especially if demand greatly exceeds supply, but there's plenty of flexibility in how an artist could sell tickets to their fans, if it weren't for monopolies like TM/LN. The "Market" would still be in play here, as an artist could decide to cater to specific people (i.e. the rich) via bids, or be more accessible but elusive via ticket lotteries.
Isn't the secondary market for tickets- scalpers and such- significantly more expensive than what Ticketmaster is selling the tickets for? Which is to say, aren't the tickets sold below market value?
I'm not entirely clear on how there being more competition would help consumers.
Consumers are also the people running the concerts themselves (performers and whatnot) who have bad experiences with Ticketmaster but don't really have an alternative. Lower fees, non-exclusivity terms, etc.
Just because tickets are on the "resale" market doesn't mean they were bought by Jane Doe and she can't go anymore so she's re-listing them. For some concerts only 8% of the tickets are actually available at the listed price, the remaining 92% are all available either as a special offer (credit cards) or given to various individuals associated with the event (such as the headliner) who can then immediately put them up for resale.
The tickets had been on sale for weeks, but in that 60 second window, scalpers just happened to buy the exact block I wanted out of 100’s of available seats.
Of course, ticket master owns some of the scalper companies.
Despite the blatant false advertising / auction fixing, I have no way to prove the above happened.
Anyway, a breakup of that company can’t come soon enough.
"Ticketmaster Has Secretly Been Cheating You With Its Own Scalpers" https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/ticketmaster-cheating-...
When I double checked and found the venue I had overpaid by 100% and StubHub refused to refund me.
That said, I would not be surprised in the least if this was being aided by ticketmaster or they were straight up doing it themselves. I just think there is a possible explanation where they are ignorant rather than malicious.
You should realize that venues and artists are equally beneficiaries of what Ticketmaster enables. In a sense they enjoy having Ticketmaster be the hated scapegoat for high prices that they then also enjoy the benefits of.
Without Ticketmaster who knows how much less tickets would sell for. And venues get paid a cut by Ticketmaster. Artists get paid a cut by Ticketmaster. Sometimes those parties are glad for that value extraction from the concertgoer to be done on their behalf, and to be blamed on an entity that diverts attention from the fact that they want more $ too.
Ticketmaster did not just emerge to prey on an unwilling helpless industry. They occupy a niche that is part of a semi willing ecosystem.
Then, add in ticket brokers, with pre-reserved sets and blocks of tickets, feeding into that, and everyone is getting a cut. Not a small cut either. I do have evidence, as I worked for two of the companies for a while.
There’s still small independent venues with realistic prices but they are being bought up.
I’ve watched the rise, domination and effects first hand as to what live nation has done. Hell, I’ve lived it! It’s an utter disaster hell scape. Only lessoned because its “entertainment.” Regardless if it was a more strategically important industry it would have already been broken up standard oil style.
Once upon a time payolla was a crime. Live nation is worse than payolla ever was and I don’t say that lightly. At least with payolla it was a simple quid pro quo pay to play. Live nation has the radio stations, it has the venues, it has the ticketing, it has the booking agents, it has the labels, it has the artists, and it has the vast majority of the personal. When theyre in a city they region lock it , which is to say if you’re not live nation you’re priced out or just playing black listed. Think the opposite of net-neutrality only physical and literally every facet of the industry up and down.
The ticket prices may be what triggered the doj because it effects the public, behind the scenes its even worse.
"Ticketmaster is such a terrible company!" he says as he buys more concert tickets from them.
Next up, replies with reasons why drinking bottled water is ok for environmentalists.
My kids have never known a time without the DoJ rubber-stamping every monopoly-building merger it could.
The web was new.
It was allowing over the top and disruption of a lot of legacy businesses.
It wasn't clear what constituted a market in those times.
However, by 2009, standards should have been reimposed. That largely didn't happen. Regulators simply got used to letting things go through, and so they kept doing that.
And I'd argue a lot of non-defense government philosophy was also following DoD's "the Cold War is over, budgets will shrink, so defense companies need to merge to survive."
https://www.reuters.com/technology/adobe-figma-terminate-20-...
> On December 18, 2023, Figma and Adobe both announced they were mutually agreeing to abandon their merger,[17][18] with Adobe citing that there was "no clear path to receive necessary regulatory approvals from the European Commission and the UK Competition and Markets Authority."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figma#Attempted_acquisition_by...
Only if you count UK/EU regulators.
if( $Voters_Apathetic && ( $Political_Donations_From_Monopolists > $Political_Donations_From_Antimonopolists ) )
then {
...Gotta remember Ticketmaster's margins are actually pretty thin.
[1] https://investors.livenationentertainment.com/sec-filings/al...
In fairness though, I did misspeak. The margins on ticket resale are quite big (and that's a driver of much of the profit margin in that report). That's usually not what people are referring to when they say "junk fees".
When people refer to "junk fees", they're normally talking about the fees associated with primary ticket sales, which have much lower margins (closer to 7-8%), because most of the money for those fees flows through to the other parties involved in the event. This has all been documented on several occasions. TM's blog actually recently put out a decent article walking people through it: https://blog.ticketmaster.com/the-truth-about-ticket-prices/.
The primary ticket sales service game is largely about volume. You've got an absurd amount of money being exchanged, so taking a small bit of it can work out to significant revenue, but it doesn't dramatically change the price people end up paying for their tickets.
To me, worse than the fees, is all the crap "promotions" that Ticketmaster tries to get you in on after you decide to buy your ticket from the venue... and it's a pretty good signal about the low margins on those sales. It's super annoying, but it makes sense for them to do it because any lost sales at the end of the funnel there are comparatively a small price to pay for the money they're getting from the promotions (which generate about half as much revenue for Live Nation as ticketing, but at less than a third of the cost).
No question that people are getting a raw deal when they buy tickets on Ticketmaster, but the perception of the problem is really different from the reality.
[For transparency: I spent 7 years in the live events industry. I now have nothing to do with it.]
We do have a tiny bit of say with the presidential election fund.
Not for war, over-criminalization, or tax breaks for megacorps, REITs, or billionaires.
This Administration, although it would hate to actually admit it out loud, actually put someone competent in charge of the agency with this enforcement responsibility and then.. to everyone's absolute surprise.. let them do their job effectively.
I think there was strategic value in keeping things close to the vest, and I'm not sure how much is in their hands and how much is how the media's reporting on all of this, but you're right, their inability to do messaging is going to lead the most economically progressive administration in half a century to be a one-term affair because their own voters haven't updated their priors.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1675/most-important-problem.asp...
Or maybe being out of touch with what people want is the biggest issue
However, if you are interested in the economy, it seems the American people are aggressively misinformed about the quantitative state of the economy too [0]. Seems like many people are out of touch with the reality of a booming economy.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/22/poll....
I worked in the ticketing industry in 2007-2010. I remember when the CEO of our small org told us that he talked to the FTC as an industry expert when they were approving the deal. He said he didn't think it would harm competition.
Everyone else, including myself, could see where this was going. I don't know how folks could be that bone-headed even back then.
So, why bring it now?
In theory.
POTUS: Mr Attorney General, it is this administrations agenda to no longer pursue these specific cases: anything with me as the defendant.
AG: Understood Mr POTUS, we'll back burner everything that cannot just be stopped or dropped.
<end scene>
Should we build a road is a classic political choice because people disagree even if it’s generally a net positive. Should we prosecute a murderer may qualify if there’s some twist (ex stand your ground) but not in the general case.
What laws get passed/repealed are decided on by people elected to office. Policies and priorities for departments are decided upon by political appointees. Decisions on cases though? Those are generally delegated to the civil service.
Now, from a practical standpoint, there's obviously ways you can muck with policies and priorities that can impact a particular case, just like there are ways that you can change the laws to muck with a particular case (you may recall when Florida went after Disney, they had to bend over backwards to draw up the law such that they could claim they weren't explicitly going after one company), but that's exactly the kind of stuff that draws criticism (and there are rules against it). There is absolutely a principle of independence & impartiality of the DOJ that's been the norm, even if recently that norm has been eroded.
"No!"
Fires leadership
"I want you to make sure this case goes nowhere, can you do that?"
"You got it!"
Hires
There certainly is some of this every administrative change over.
Trying to guess at the internal machinations for how a bureaucracy sets priorities and budgets is a bit of a fools errand though
What leads you to believe it would most likely be dropped?
That is a deeply cynical view on the nature of politics.
> So, why bring it now?
Why help anyone else if you can't score political points off the back of it? Possibly because it's the right thing to do and ideologically motivated people actually do successfully exist in government.
How? If the bid for re-election is lost, they leave office Jan 20th. That's not cynical. That's being able to read a calendar.
If you think a new administration, specifically the one that would be coming in, will not immediately reverse a lot of things, then you just have not been paying attention.
The incoming challenger is riding on a "populist" base. These polices are legitimate "populist" policies. The strategy here is obvious.
Okay, buddy.
Regardless of your political leanings, Biden himself extended a deeply reviled policy on handling border refugees. I think the “cooler” view is that they’re just figureheads.
This will not prevent any future execs from aggressively building another such monopoly, causing years of financial and other harm.
They still walk away with their bags of cash. Their names won't even be tarnished so they can go right back to doing the same thing.
They really pushed it head & shoulders above the rest, regardless of how much alternative orgs have aspired to this type of pursuit.
It couldn't happen to a more deserving bastion of the music industry !
One can only hope they promptly receive their just rewards for everything they have done, and then some, as a shining example to others who might aspire to such a level of accomplishment.
For security reasons the ticket format should probably be the venue's choice, the bulk/block rate would probably include a specific time window for the bulk buyer to have their bonded agent print off the tickets on the venue's hardware.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/ticketmaster-taylor-s...
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taki... (1995)
Justice Department to file antitrust suit against Live Nation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40047094 - April 2024 (378 comments)
I know that Ticketmaster's role is to play the bad guys and most artists are in on the scam because they get some of the "fees" without the blame. But this is ridiculous. I found some old tickets that I saved as mementos and some were as low as $20. I saw someone posted pics from a show in the 80s that was $5. This is just absurd.
Take them down. As one of my favorite bands would say (Floyd) "cut them into little pieces."
There's a concert in Monaco for about the same price.
Neither is using Ticket master.
Ticketing is relatively easy since the early days so competition should help. We also need better laws defining what can and cannot be a fee. Fees should only be for things which are truly optional and declinable.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2020/12/...
[2] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...
[3] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/...
Won't break up Google, telecoms, banks ,agriciltural behemoths, and a myriad of other monster corporates that control prices.
Color me not surprised.
If Ticketmaster is the original seller, you do have to go through them to transfer the digital ticket but many venues still have physical ticket options.
The monopoly is on the supply side. "Obama’s Justice Department reviewed the [Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger] and allowed it to move forward as part of a settlement in which the company promised it wouldn’t retaliate against concert venues that opted against using Ticketmaster."
Most (all?) large venues in the country are exclusively contracted to use Live Nation, which means performers are locked into using Live Nation, which means fans are obligated to pay its fees, directly or indirectly.