If Live Nation-Ticketmaster is not a monopoly then there is no such thing as a monopoly.
Violating antitrust law is illegal.
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You don't violate federal law just by being the only company to sell canine banana hammocks.
[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.
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.
Off to buy some late 90s band tickets!
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.
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.
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.
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.)
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/bruce-springst...
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...
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.