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Comment by Ocha | Hacker News Reader

Just vote with your pocket and don’t buy tickets from them. I do that - yes I don’t get to go to major concerts but there are still so much more that is not on ticket master. I found a lot of new entertainment and was happy to pay $4 fee instead of whatever TM charges nowadays.

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They have an effective monopoly.

Not just on tickets, but on venues, catering, security, logistics. It's pretty bad.

... for a completely optional form of entertainment.

At the very least you have the choice not to go to any concerts until there are better options. You can also make that clear to your favorite bands.

lol, people and bands have been complaining about it for 30 years and it’s only gotten worse. Yes, you could skip concerts for the rest of your life, I suppose, to make a point. But it’s not going to fix anything.

Complaining yes, but how many people are actually putting their foot down? As for bands, they may actually be profiting from this scheme where ticketmaster ensures higher prices while taking the blame. If they really cared enough they could chose not to deal with Ticketmaster. Sure, that would limit their choices in venues which could mean lower potential for profit. Probably not going to be a real issue for the the more popular groups.

And yes, if there are no concerts with acceptable terms (and that's really a hypothetical if) then don't go to any for the rest of your life. You make it sound like this is some kind of required part of the human experience when it is just one of many possible ways to spend your time. Even if you are really into music, concerts are just one way to experience it - and when it comes to audio quality, a fairly crappy one.

It's possible you can put your foot down, lots of venues will sell you paper tickets at the box office. It's inconvenient but they also don't charge TM fees sooo. It's what I do since they open the box office during any of their events. Just get tickets for the next few shows right there.

> Even if you are really into music, concerts are just one way to experience it - and when it comes to audio quality, a fairly crappy one.

This fundamentally misunderstands why people go to see live music and honestly maybe what people enjoy about music entirely.

The bands are absolutely profiting.

Ticketmaster is basically “customer punching bag ad a service”.

The bands at the top are absolutely not profiting, they’re losing money over it. Instead of a healthy ecosystem of promoters willing to pay them market rates, they’re dealing with a monopsony that depresses earnings. They HAVE to go through TicketMaster venues, because TM has locked up 85% of large ones, which means they have to accept whatever fee the promoter (LiveNation, same company) is willing to pay them. That’s part of why AEG sued them, they are a giant international promoter who is effectively boxed out of the American market by TMs stranglehold on venues and vertical integration.

Venue owners are profiting. LN/TM can pay them a lot for exclusive rights thanks to their monopoly-inflated profits.

The bands get more than a small cut of the various fees, and especially the upcharge things like Platinum tickets.

No they don’t, that’s not how the money works in concerts. The bands get paid a flat fee by the promoter. You can Google this if you don’t believe me but I know from working with concert promoters.

Why would Ticketmaster/live nation pay them at all? They don’t have to, the bands don’t have any other places to play and they make most of their income from live shows.

Platinum Tickets are priced by the artists who get the bulk of the revenue.

Just to back this up, Robert Smith references Platinum Tickets here https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-64975160

Choice quote: "It is a greedy scam and all artists have the choice not to participate. If no artists participated, it would cease to exist."

It doesn’t say it goes to the artists. It says artists can choose not to participate. It says most of the fees go to the venue, which is true, that’s how they get exclusivity.

Perhaps they give artists a little to encourage participation in some ancillary revenue, I don’t know. I’ve mostly worked non-TM venues. But I’m sure the promoter gets most of that too and it’s not a lot of the overall ticket sales.

I can tell you for sure, everyone but the venues feels they would get more without the monopsony. There is not a functioning market for concert promotion once you get to the 10,000+ seat level, and TM is actually even buying up the ones below that too.

Your only end run around it is the festival circuit since a lot of them are out in a field rather than a venue, but guess who is buying those up now also…

Also note how they say ticket master passes on fees to the promoter. That’s a clever way of phrasing because it makes it look like they’re not greedy, but the promoter is almost always LiveNation, which is the same company.

I am fairly sure that’s not true, and also that platinum tickets are a small percent of tickets.

Do you have a source for that statement? The article about it linked below does not back up either assertion. I’m pretty sure they’re dynamically priced by a TM algo, and I’d bet little of it goes to the artists.

The extra fees are shared with venues and bands. Keeps them on TM's side.

On large venues for big name artists.

Granted, I live in NYC, which probably has one of the most vibrant local music scenes in the country. But it's not like nowhere else has local bands that play at small venues.

It feels like a lot of the people that complain about ticketmaster's monopoly have never branched out from Billboard chart artists.

It's weird?

Even the most 'hole in the wall' places around here have deals with LN/TM, short of a bar-band or niche-local joint.

One of the more 'fun' ways that LN/TM did shenanigans at the past I observed: Metal shows at smaller places in the Detroit area like Harpo's (famous place but known for the sketch area) or Token Lounge (literally a bar with a dance floor and stage, pretty fun tho) you'd have one of the local small/startup bands selling tickets, often -below- cost at the box office.

Why? If they sold enough tickets, they got to play as an opener. Yes some scammers would try to fake this, but I never saw anyone actually get 'taken'. And yes I'd buy them if I didn't already have them to help the locals out.

That said, the concerts at those smaller venues, despite being TM/LN, were in the 20-30 dollar range after fees. Not 'top billboard' type stuff per se but Children of Bodom, Lacuna Coil, and other 'popular but niche' bands in the 2005-2007 timeframe.

There are a lot of musicians that aren't on the charts that play in Ticketmaster-controlled venues.

That's the secret.

If nobody used them, they would go away.

Our options shouldn’t be see no concerts from successful musicians or pay monopoly pricing. This is something government should solve.

Expecting the US government to properly handle monopolies and anti-trust issues is a fool's errand. It's like saying the US government should solve the issue of gun proliferation in the US: it's simply not going to, in our lifetimes.

I don’t think that’s accurate. They’ve successfully handled plenty of anti trust issues in the past and very recently got on this one.

When was the last time they did it?

I googled "us government anti trust wins" and found a few articles that point out some recent ones, e.g. Adobe and Figma in December 2023, and an Apple lawsuit in March 2024.

Biden's FTC and Justice Department are in the process of suing Apple, Facebook, and Google for antitrust violations. And Ticketmaster.

On the contrary, the US government is probably a lot easier to influence than an entrenched monopoly.

It probably would require less money.

You're right, of course, those shouldn't be our options. But that's just how it is. If you aren't willing to stop playing, the game will never end.

Again, not true, that's a false dichotomy. Political pressure is an alternative. The justice department is already suing. Clearly it can be done.

You writing your congressperson is more likely (albeit, still not at all likely) to make a difference than you not going to your annual concert.

That's why they've done so much to force performers to use them.

While this is literally true, solutions in the form of "if everyone would just X" are not solutions at all.

That's not really possible, because they contractually require venues and performing artists to only perform at their venues

This kind of gross exclusionary contract should be illegal (it's kinda the same BS that Google does with Android OEMs - contractually force them to [1]), but for some reason antitrust avoided acting on the matter (including allowing acquisitions in the space) for quite some time

[1] > Predicating the availability of any of Google’s apps, including the Google Play Store, on OEMs not taking advantage of the open source nature of Android on devices that will not include Google apps seems much more problematic than Google insisting its apps be distributed in a bundle. The latter is Google’s prerogative; the former is dictating OEM actions just because Google can. https://stratechery.com/2018/the-european-commission-versus-...

That might have been true in decades past.

They now, having merged with LiveNation, have effective ownership of all major and semi-major venues around the country. They also aren't just doing concerts, they're doing sporting events and other live entertainment as well.

They aren't going anywhere. They are just too big, and too ingrained.

See Tickets seems to be on the rise recently, which I've been glad for

I did that for several years. I don't really consider it voting though because nobody is counting the votes -- they still sell out of tickets with higher profits each year.

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