What Ticketmaster doesn't want you to know: tickets were cheaper for decades
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In the UK, booking fees above £5 are considered an obscenity and would put people off buying a ticket.
I am surprised more artists don’t refuse to work with ticketing companies who extort customers like this. Seems like an easy way to garner loyalty from fans (beyond being morally right).
Although, I imagine - like the healthcare system - the whole food chain (music labels, artists) are all in on the scam
Thanks for saving us money by making us think twice about buying these tickets, Ticketmaster!
This is in the same category of technically correct but imaginary problem as if I take this medicine I will still eventually die. Or, if I repair my windshield it will one day break again.
If it’s a problem, and the solution is better than its cost, it’s worth solving. Even if that doesn’t solve it perfectly forever. I’d like to say perfect is the enemy of the good, but you’re defining perfection so unrealistically as to require disproving the heat death of the universe.
I see three providers at the bottom and one at the top. 3 > 1 [1].
Also, a lot in the middle, which was fortunate, since it’s around when dial-up and cell phones were becominh a thing.
[1] citation needed
There’s ongoing antitrust litigation about this. Ticketmaster has exclusive contracts with many venues, and in most scenarios artists aren’t going to have a menu of a dozen different venues they could realistically pick.
(https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-live-...)
The fees are split into thirds—TM, the venue, and artist. Which makes the artist appear that they wanted lower prices while also still getting more money. Lower album sales than in the past is also a factor.
That's why it has worked so well.
I would love to see the government break of ticket master.better innovation to avoid scalping by a company that does not benefit from i. The banning of reselling on platforms that sell the original tickets. Caps on fees
I’m a higher earner who loves music and rarely go to stadium size shows because the costs for anything is typically $500+. How does that make any sense?
Basic math tells you the margin on a stadium seat is huge.
Other factors to consider: More is spent on marketing and promotion than ever before, but the cost of digital marketing is a fraction of marketing costs decades ago - especially with the ability to target fans.
The market is willing to bear these higher costs because experience are more valuable to generations today than 20+ years ago.
Artists are also complicit to an extent but reasonably so. The market for paid music has collapsed, touring is how you generate revenue as a musician
What does that mean?
This doesn't mean what Ticketmaster is doing is right, but they are hardly the only ones. E.g. cinemas or theme parks don't use them.
People in those days demanded “experiences” just as much as people today.
I also remember festivals getting more expensive 15-ish years ago, so my friends and me often decided to go hiking instead. IDK if that's a typical case but there are alternative "experiences". With the rise of social media I could understand there's additional incentive to go to more well-known events for the photos, over smaller live-music venues. At least it seems like a lot of photos are taken.
This is all anecdotes, so makes for an unsatisfying answer. But I think it's possible (certain) "experiences are more valuable to generations today". It's at least interesting to consider.
While NFT sales and token releases on ethereum and other chains with smart contracts are absolutely botted and scalped/sniped very aggressively, there has been a lot experimentation on how to avoid this. Whitelists are one (bad, IMO) solution, various type of auctions are a fairer solution that aren't that popular in crypto because people are mostly interested in flipping the asset rather than obtaining it at a fair market price.
For things like tickets to a concert or things that people actually want to keep/consume, auctions make a lot of sense.
I didn't quite understand what you're referring to with this. Would you mind elaborating a bit? Honestly curious.
The goal is just the same as ticket scalping. The botters/snipers will just list the the asset on the market immediately at anywhere from 2x-10x the original sale price.
At its peak during NFT mania there were tips of millions of dollars being paid in tips to miners to buy up 75% of the supply of an extremely anticipated NFT collection for another couple of million dollars ( the sale price ) and still coming out in profit.
Thanks to Spotify (and streaming media in general), where music is almost worthless, artists need to tour and sell merchandise just to keep break even.
It's a sad state to be in really :(
So while the industry likes to complain that they are losing income, they’ve figured out that they can make up for album revenue by simply increasing ticket prices.
It would be great if artists had a way to force people to use it. Hopefully that's the plan.
What you are seeing now in the last few years is with industry consolidation following the same playbook Ticketmaster applied to the music industry since at least the 1990s, to Pearl Jam's dismay.
The video summarizes this long history well.
In economic terms tickets are only "too expensive" if they can't find buyers.
To start with, who are you quoting with "too expensive"?
Second, your analysis does not explain why it is cheaper to fly to Europe to see Taylor Swift on the same tour as in the US. https://apnews.com/article/taylor-swift-europe-eras-tour-fan... attributes the cost difference due to "restrictions on ticket fees and resales", rather easy of purchasing.
Just like in the video.
Ultimately concerts and events tickets are optional leisure/luxury items and, as I mentioned, we can argue all we want about bad monopolies but as long as the tickets sell it means the price is fine, so why would they be cheaper? It's not an ideological belief about anything or a rejection of anything.
This is a natural monopoly anyway. There are no competing Taylor Swift concerts for instance and, at least for popular events the number of available tickets is going to be smaller than the number of people interested and the basic law of supply and demand applies.
When we see how prices often still massively inflate on resale it seems to me that official prices could often still be higher if they wanted to but it then becomes a PR issue. We've recently seen that here in the UK with dynamic pricing for tickets to the Oasis reunion.
Perhaps they are simply getting more effective, and with fewer qualms, at extracting the best prices possible.
ticketmaster ensures this doesn’t happen by controlling the market, so venues that don’t use them get locked out from artists and artists who don’t play ticketmaster only venues get locked out from too much of their audience.
Odd that so many people feel that they are somehow entitled to low prices for something that is totally optional and by its very nature always in short supply.
This a dishonest characterization of criticism of monopoly abuse of the market. Those fees aren’t going to the artists, they’re highlighting the way competition has been removed from the market. This affects both sides of the equation: it’s not just that ticket buyers have few options but also that bands and venues also have little choice – if they buck Ticketmaster they’ll be shut out of a lot of deals which everyone else would like to happen. It’s hardly entitlement to think that market competition would be better for everyone except Ticketmaster.
Again, I don't understand the aggressivity here over such a trivial topic...
Look at your posts and the way you’re responding to other people. For example, if you ignore their points and then dismiss them as “entitled” you don’t have much standing to tone police everyone else.