Why I Hate Buying Tickets

"Someone Needs To Create A New Ticketing Platform"

Creating it is one thing. Getting venues to agree to use it is much, much harder. Venues usually sign long-term (5-10 year) contracts with Ticketmaster to make them their exclusive ticket platform. These contracts usually include a large upfront payment from Ticktmaster to the venue. Given that LiveNation is the by far the biggest promoter in the US, it would be an enormous risk for a venue to forsake Ticketmaster and go with an alternative.

"Venues/Artists Need To Ditch The Big Guys"

See the above. Pearl Jam rather famously tried this in the mid-1990's, with disastrous results (http://goo.gl/xJItB). Not playing in Ticketmaster venues forced them into the netherlands of American live music venues.

"All-Inclusive Pricing Model"

To Ticketmaster's credit, they're getting a lot better at this, but they still have a way to go. It's worth noting that the majority of the fees that the author complains about are not kept by Ticketmaster; they are kicked back to the event promoter. The promoter does this so that they can advertise low face values (appearing fan-friendly) while maintaining margins.

"Offer More Music/Merchandise + Ticket Packages"

This is a bit of a non-sequitur. The author writes the entire article from the perspective of making ticket buying better, and then throws this in "for the content creators." It will indeed make more money for artists, assuming it doesn't hurt conversion rate (which it does) but strong-arming consumers into buying more stuff when they purchase tickets doesn't seem fan-friendly to me.

"Forget Everything I Just Wrote, We Should All Learn From Louis C.K."

Totally impractical. Louis C.K. could pull this off because he performs at comedy clubs. If you're Coldplay...not an option (see above).

There's no question that ticketing needs reformation. But this is an industry (like payment processing) where considering change from a detached, naive perspective is fruitless. It's important to understand the intricacies before avenues for upheaval can be found.

Yes, you can buy tickets on other sites but there's very little space for innovation and they hold the key, if they don't want you to do something innovative they can stop you and if you do succeed you're still funding your competitor.

Spotify and Pandora know what obscure bands are popular near every small venue. Booking managers should have access to this data to decide what bands to book. Once they've booked a show, they should be able to promote the shows back to the exact Pandora or Spotify users that like the bands, perhaps using realtime bidding on an ad exchange (since users are rarely watching the Pandora or Spotify pages).

I listen a hundred plus bands via streaming. I dont even know their names, much less when they play nearby. A system like this could increase the number of small shows, and make it possible for more musicians to make a living as musicains.

Start with the little guys first, eventually you can work your way up to dethrone Ticketmaster.

But if it's so bad then why do they keep using TicketMaster? Surely I'm not buying a ticket to a performance only because I can find it on the TicketMaster web page or box office right? They don't really offer anything substantial over the buying experience I can get anywhere else so the monopoly argument is silly (although they do have a good patent portfolio it's not anything can't innovate around).

It's simply because they will take the heat for them when the artists and venues want to tack on extra fees. That is not say TicketMaster's fees are not high but most of the "extra fees" are extras from the venues and performers.

The same goes with Fandango. You think that extra $1 for buying a ticket online Fandangos fee?? Nope. It's the fee for the movie theatre wants.

I've worked in this ticketing industry in a previous startup so I understand the game well. It's not really crazy the stuff that gets pulled.

The post advocates starting a company in order to build and sell a new software application. If this resembles every other business app I've ever written or used, the developer will quickly run into a complex set of rules and requirements that is almost impossible to fully anticipate or characterize a priori.

The motivation for doing so is admittedly egregious fees charged by an incumbent vendor. Imagine one is successful in building the app, despite all of the unforeseeable obstacles. All the incumbent would have to do is lower its prices, either accepting slightly lower margins to maintain the fee pass-thru to its partners or eliminating such fees as the hypothetical startup would do.

In other words, the proposal is to dedicate years of effort to a problem in order to compete on price by 10-25%. This is generally a losing proposition. If one can achieve a 90% lower price for the same or slightly better functionality that an incumbent will find difficult to match (the famed 10x price/performance improvement), then one may have something sufficient to build a business around, depending on how difficult/capital intensive it is to create the product--ignoring all of the other barriers to adoption that exist in this or another industry.

But faced with a narrow price-performance improvement, incumbents can either lower prices or, if it's a functional improvement, invest a similar or lesser amount of capital (they already have employees, a brand name, a salesforce, etc. that a startup would have to build from scratch) to match to the feature set.

Don't get me wrong: I don't want to talk anyone out of the desire to start a company, to improve a process or an application, or to return excess profits to the consumer in the form of lower prices. But part of being a successful entrepreneur is picking the right battles and bringing an unfair advantage to bear against tough competition, something I and many others still struggle to achieve. In this case, I don't see the unfair advantage or the 10x improvement, and I think we should challenge each other to be hard-nosed realists about where we focus our collective entrepreneurial talents.

And that's before you look into the sort of practices around tickets being released by the agency to a secondary ticket vendor (perhaps one which they own...) and sold on at great markup with a cut going back to the agency and perhaps even back to the promoter.

I suspect the problem is that while the author is happy to pay $60 all-inclusive with no questions asked, a lot of live music fans are young-ish and on the kind of budget where it isn't an easy decision to spend $60 on a night's entertainment. You might persuade them to pay, but harder if you put them off with a big upfront ticket price than if you spring it on them in hidden extras. I'm sure ticketmaster have done their research and wouldn't be doing it this way if it didn't increase their revenue, and that promoters wouldn't be using them if these tactics didn't improve theirs.

Also part of the problem is that there's this social pressure in the music industry around fans and ticket pricing and around artists 'selling out'. In the open market, tickets for big shows are usually worth a lot more than the face price, but promoters (or at least, artists) are reluctant to be seen to capture all that value because of the negative PR involved.

A lot of people have wanted to see Ticketmaster taken down a peg for a long time. It's probably easier to do if you limit yourself to small-to-mid-size gigs, independent artists etc, and there are already some great non-abusive ticketing agencies in this space for example http://www.wegottickets.com ...

a) charging by subscription instead of by transaction. This is nice. This is a great idea for patron happiness. Unfortunately the patron isn't the customer at a ticketing agent. The customer is the presenter/promoter or venue. As a patron, I don't NOT buy Japandroids tickets because TicketMaster is the ticketing agent. This plan causes the ticketing agency to almost assuredly lose money or customers (price too low they lose money, price too high they lose smaller venues).

b) The "big guys" are also probably that artist's promoter, or they own the venue. LN/TM promote most big names and own a good portion of the venues. It's vertical.

c) No band wants their promoter or agent to deal with merch. Merch is where a lot of the money comes in at the venue, and they want as much control of that as possible. Most venues already require a certain percentage of merch sales be given back in settlement. The only way to make this work would be for the label or artist to sell the merch package ahead of time with a voucher for tickets to be used at the agent.

It doesn't help that ticketing a very large likely to sell out show is HARD. It doesn't help that convenience charges are accepted in the industry and quite frankly, if you're a venue that runs a hard box office with an online agent, you love that they charge a convenience fee.

The only real solution without major disruption by a major act leaving the LN/TM world is for TM to show final price, and have all the settlement be secret. I honestly would prefer to see the fees as they break down, so I know how much is going to the box office settlement.

"Blah blah blah, and then I bought the tickets because the price was worth it to me."

Well OK then. That means they are pricing things correctly.

Should, someday, these stories ever change to "Blah blah blah, and then I cancelled the order and did something else with my time that day because the cost was not acceptable to me", then perhaps something would change if enough people actually did this. But as long as there are sold out shows, prices, and even fees, should be increased, not decreased. Sold out shows means you are not charging enough.

That was a great thing, because suddenly you could accurately compare between sites that included and didn't include the fees up-front.

Seems to me that ticket purchases would be another great area to pass a law saying advertised prices must reflect all fees. It won't stop them from charging them, but at least they'll "feel" built-in, rather than feeling like a bait-and-switch.

Heck, no companies should be allowed to display prices that don't include minimum mandatory fees. (Except for sales tax, since people expect that.) It's kind of ridiculous they can get away with it in the first place.

23.8% of the cost of your Big Mac is also charges and fees.

The fact is, people don't like transparency when it comes to pricing. You'd rather not know how much the wholesale price is when paying retail.

I believe artists & venues force TicketMaster to show you the wholesale price. TicketMaster would likely prefer you didn't know their profit margin, like almost every other company you buy things from.