Internal emails reveal Ticketmaster helped scalpers jack up prices, FTC says
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
We tried selling it on Ticketmaster, where you can in theory set your own price, or accept their "best offer". Our best offer was somewhere in the neighborhood of $150, and given that it was the night of the show, we accepted it.
We paid $54 per ticket in "processing fees" when purchasing, and paid $50 in more "processing fees" when selling. I'm sure the eventual buyers of our tickets probably had to pony up something like that as well.
If I had a magic button that made everyone above a certain level working there destitute and homeless, I'd probably break my finger pushing it.
No. It’s based on monopoly. There are a limited number of venues that can host a modern superstar, generally no more than one per geography, and Ticketmaster made it a point to represent all of them. Which means any modern superstar and their fans must work through Ticketmaster. Which, in turn, enables this nonsense.
The cause is monopoly. Not “bullying, dark patterns and ripoff;” those are effects.
The venue contracts with Ticketmaster to hike all the fees and shit, which then get kicked back in some percentage to the venue (and sometimes the band) and Ticketmaster takes the heat.
So the 50% that goes to “Ticketmaster” may be 80% to the venue.
I thought their business model was to bankrupt venues and then buy them at auction.
When people talk about ticket prices, I always tell them: "Come hear my band for 15 bucks at the door, and free street parking." But of course I know that it's not a comparable experience.
So even a mid sized venue can’t cross them because they can retaliate
From the site guidelines:
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Much like the corporations that use private homes as gambling chips.
Much like many organizations playing on the ongoing slump of Western values.
This will however allow people to pay for bots that will purchase tickets on their behalf. But I believe a verification system can prevent that from happening if one would like. But the incentives aren’t there to do so.
Or two people buy seats together, one can’t make it, and now the other person is stuck sitting with a stranger. And they have a friend who also wants to go who is also sitting alone.
The venue might still sell out but it’s a worse experience for everyone. Even groups who all get in together get annoyed by people trying to swap seats or cram in the aisles to be with their friends. Venue staff are stuck dealing with crowd control issues.
Offer the stranger $20 to swap seats.
Accept reservations (maybe with a token deposit or a card authorization to discourage making too many claims) for a week. Then at the end, draw winners for each block of seats; if they don't claim them in 48 hours, draw from remaining reservations. Repeat a fixed number of times and then scrum-sale anything that didn't go through.
There's no more risk of "the website crashed for everyone but scalpers" if you have a full week to place your request.
i felt like i accidentally made money on some esoteric stock market
There are plenty of local concerts and events that are like $15 cover and significantly more fun.
Live Nation had been engaging in a venue refit programme to make a higher percentage of venue seating - 40% or so - ‘premium’ seating where they can charge far higher rates.
As someone in this thread pointed out the biggest problem with tickets is that (at the top end) musicians certainly but sports teams also sell tickets far below market rates.
It’s a catch 22: if you are a sports team and only sell $1000 tickets you might sell out the show but you alienate your core base who buy lots of other stuff like shirts and caps and beer. If you’re only selling to VIPs you slowly kill what makes your team valuable.
For music it’s harder: for superstar artists you could almost certainly sell out a stadium at crazy prices. But the fans are going to feel gouged and are going to be very vocal and for a lot of musicians that is a red line. There’s been a lot of controversy recently over airline style ‘dynamic’ demand-driven pricing for concerts, and a lot of big name artists have come out against it.
Again, it kills the golden goose. Better to have fans who will pay $100 a ticket every time you tour for the next 20 years whether you are fashionable or not than sell out three years for $1000 a ticket to people who won’t want to buy if you’re not the hot thing.
That core base is also the taxpayers that fund your next stadium. If you get too greedy you'll be paying for it out of pocket.
For major arena shows, face price floor seats can easily run $500+, going up to $1000+ for the first rows. Even lower level bowl seats can run you that much for front row.
And that's if you managed to get scalpers to them during the original sale. Resale can commonly range as high as 200% - 500% of face price.
For example, for Nine Inch Nails' recent arena tour, face price for pit tickets (GA floor) were around $150-$200, depending on the city. But they were nearly impossible to get, so most fans ended up having getting them on resale, where prices of $300 - $400 dollars were common. You can wait for tickets to drop the day of the show but that doesn't always happen. I know someone who ended up paying $800 for a pit ticket on the day of the show after they shot up to over $1200 at one point.
It is frankly completely out of control.
Do you think the founders had this outcome in mind when they started (everyone hating them and seeing them as an evil money grab)? They probably started with a different ethos.
A good reminder that what we do can change - we need to instill our values into the basics of everything we build, otherwise we'll just be building the next TicketMaster, Oracle, or Meta.
As far as I know, we get one go. Let's build things that matter and make the world a better place. Greed will even ruin concerts otherwise.
Similar to how I hear that Disney has basically made going to its resorts and scheduling Fastpass basically a second job.
Maybe not this _exact_ outcome but largely yes I suspect they did. Capitalists rent seeking all the way through their history and if you put money first in any business venture you will always feel pressure to enshitify. See 1994 Pearl Jam vs TM and monopolistic behavior 30 years ago.
Sorry, this simply isn't the case. Before TM, the best available ticket was whatever the vendor you were dealing with had in their inventory. TicketMaster was started by 3 people who wanted to make the process of getting the "best available" ticket easier than going to all the disconnected ticket-sellers and finding out who had the best ticket.
The company changed models in the 1980s when a new owner took over who was solely focused on revenue.
> See 1994 Pearl Jam vs TM and monopolistic behavior 30 years ago.
Your takeaway seems different than mine. I see a company who could have changed or been regulated 30 years ago. Now they'll slowly die or be replaced quickly by something better like an AI ticketing system. Finding someone who likes TicketMaster today is impossible. When TM launched, everyone loved it. What a loss.
As many of us here have a role in how our companies are built and what they become, it is worth asking how TM lost its way and how we can avoid bringing the same level of gross, enshittified capitalism into the world with what we build.
I highly doubt it. The merger with LiveNation made them much more than a ticketing service. They now also handle artist management, concert promotion, and venue ownership. In fact "Live Nation-Ticketmaster maintains "monopoly control" over the top 100 amphitheaters and 100 arenas worldwide" [1]
[1] https://www.economicliberties.us/press-release/new-report-ex...
Internet Explorer had something like 99% of the web browser market in 1999. It... slowly died.
May TicketMaster follow suit if they continue their greed.
You can link to how they're dominant in the market today all you want, it doesn't change the trajectory of their earned market reputation.
Locally, multiple small ticket companies are popping up to compete with TicketMaster. They've been here longer than a decade and don't even register on your charts. Everytime they sell a ticket, TicketMaster didn't. This will continue slowly over time unless something changes. As mentioned, this isn't a new problem, so why expect them to change? Thus, a replacement will rise... no matter how many charts you link to showing their current market demand.
People also said Internet Explorer would be the browser we all used forever. It's not a hard comparison to understand, nor is it disingenuous. If you have trouble understanding someone's reply, there are tools like Goblin Tools where you can copy and paste what is written and it will help explain how it is not a personal attack against you and your ideas.
- Whether 1 and 10 years, the monopoly could fall for another provider in half the median duration. In fact, venues could collide together to replace the monopoly.
- Or, if Tickermaster really provides an extra income to venues able to change the type of venue by an order of magnitude, we might see an elitist top-class of artists, and then a non-elitist second class with more popularity, more decent venues, and affordable prices.
- Then we can talk about why we always hear the same artists on radio.
I am lucky to have local independent music venues (First Avenue in Mpls, they own a few local venues) with sub $100 ticket prices that have acts I want to see, which isn’t the case for everyone. Taylor Swift fans (for example) are squeezed as hard as possible for every penny, I think it’s absolutely disgusting.
We have larger venues for larger artists, almost always international ones, and there ticket prices are often starting at around $80-100 and quickly go way up if you want a good location.
However personally I found I enjoy the sub-$40 concerts the most. Mainly because the smaller venue lets you get close, sound is usually much better and quite often I find a lot more passion on stage at these venues, which turns into more memorable experiences. And if the concert ends up not being my thing or just not that great, then I've just wasted the price of a few beers so no big deal.
One thing that keeps Ticketmaster in its reins here in Norway is our legislation, which limits the kind of processing fee shenanigans and similar they can do. Also scalpers became much less of a problem after they introduced a law that you can't charge more than the original price when reselling tickets.
And honestly? It really improved my concert-going experience.
The price was worth it to see the giant pink robots though!
Both Ellison and Zuckerberg still control their respective companies. The problem is not that they didn't instill their values.
In the case of ticketmaster, they just plain sold out.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences-and-law/economi...
>Ticketmaster's fate was changed in 1982, when Chicago investor Jay Pritzker purchased it. Pritzker, the wealthy owner of the Hyatt Hotel chain, paid $4 million for the entire company.
In the music festival world, there is a TM subsidiary, In the same venue you can see fees differ by dozens of percent based on who the Artist, the ones known for being good people are much lower even if the base ticket price is identical
That's cynical enough for me to want to believe it.
Unsure how accurate it is, but the guys who do the show have a lot of experience in the music industry.
You can find it on YouTube: Ticketmaster Sucks - Your Favorite Band Sucks Podcast
"The acts are responsible for all of it. They set the ticket prices. They created the large fees. Ticketmaster is paid to take the heat. Because the acts don’t want their fans to hate them. Even worse, the fans don’t hate them even when they’re told the acts are at fault, they just don’t believe it!"
For more insight into ticket pricing, see [1]
That said, up until I read this Ars article, I understood what Ticketmaster was and why they exist and kind of had few problems with it or moral compunctions about it; the concert business is cut-throat and it's very hard to turn a profit without some of these tactics in place. I find this new revelation about protecting revenue by actively supporting + enabling the corrupt reseller market to be quite fucking distasteful though!
[0] https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2022/11/17/ticketmaster-swift-...
[1] https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2024/03/01/the-truth-about-tic...
TM basically exists to be the thing that collects all the hate so people don't blame artists, venues, or teams.
1 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/ticketmaster-class-...
This might have been around 2011?
This PDF document from 2010 (don't let the 2018 in the URL fool you) still mentions TicketMaster. It is an announcement in connection with the 100 year anniversary (1910 - 2010):
https://www.pne.ca/files/uploads/2018/01/entertainment.pdf
Rick Beato thinks that AutoTune and whatnot killed music.
Maybe it was just Ticketmaster.
Ticketmaster is the obvious reason why fewer people go to live shows in North America, whether rock and roll or not.
In 2016, the OKC Thunder were making a playoff run. They just advanced to the finals and tickets were set to "go on sale to the public" at 10am on a certain day. I signed up for an account, got logged in, etc. and kept refreshing the page around 10am that day, card in hand to buy. The second that time elapsed, all tickets were sold out. Yet somehow thousands of tickets were available for "resale" instantly at $100+ more per ticket PLUS a transfer fee. My jaw was on the floor. Absolute and complete bullshit. I knew the gig then. It was obvious they just let all tickets get bought up by resellers/scalpers/bots without a care in the world for the actual fans. They actually make even more money allowing it to be this way due to the extra transfer fees on top of the original sale. I watched the finals on TV instead since I didn't have the money for that earlier in my career. Burn this company to the ground with the heat of a thousand suns.
First up you need to convince promoters to give you the tickets. Not artists. When an artist signs a deal with a promoter the promoter owns the tickets and can pretty much do what they want.
Problem is, a lot of good promoters in the US particularly are owned by Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster.
That’s fine though - just work with promoters who aren’t owned by Live Nation! Only problem is the venues those promoters are hiring are owned by Live Nation.
Also, a bunch of artist management companies are owned by Live Nation too.
So if you want to sell tickets for shows in non-Live Nation affiliated venues for non-Live Nation affiliated artists that’s fine.
But those are going to be small shows with relatively unknown artists. The risk increases in inverse proportion to the size of the show and profile of the artist. The promoter you’re dealing with is going to want cash up front, so as the ticketing company you’re going to have to loan them the money. If they run or the show flops or whatever else you are left holding the can.
And because you’re tiny and dealing with unknown shows you’re never going to get allocation for big name shows, so you’re not going to be able to build a valuable list of consumers that you can cross sell shows to.
And for the shows you’re selling you’re going to be left with remnant inventory and so you need someone with good lists who can shift that for you. So you’ll probably end up giving Ticketmaster 30-40% of your allocation from the promoters you are working with.
But what do I know, I'm better with computers than people.
eTix is good. The quoted price for a show was $20. I wound up paying $21.65 after fees. The fees were obvious at checkout. I didn't have to sign up for anything or download an app, either (which I don't like about Dice, but they are similarly good otherwise).
The problem is mostly vertical integration & abusing a monopoly over venues of a certain size. I understand I live in a place where there are more independent venues than other places and I'm glad I happen to be into the acts that play them...
I think this is a knock on effect of wealth inequality. People on here are talking about buying $700 tickets. My first thought is that the price sounds insane, but my second thought is to recognize that some folks have way more disposable income than I do. So $700 might be just another night out for someone else...
They feel like different hobbies and communities nowadays, and I don’t think that was always so true.
Don't think of this as "regular concert spending"; think of this as "anniversary dinner" spending.
(But, yes, we both work, and can afford to buy the $700 tickets, and eat most of the cost as well when we couldn't attend the show last minute.)
Ticketmaster still double-dips on running a resale platform and charging a "processing fee" for reselling a ticket, but it means the original ticket purchased for €100 + €10 "fees" is resold for €100 + €10 "resale fees" and not more than that.
Double-dipping? Triple, at least.
Ticket brokers are generally willing to take on the risk of buying up tickets to events on the primary market and constrain supply to turn a profit on the secondary market.
This works because TM and secondary platforms can claim ignorance and control the narrative: “we do our best to prevent bots”/“fans should be free to resell their tickets”
The only way around it is for the government to regulate prices, like they do in the UK (i.e. you can’t resell tickets for more than face value)
That means that TM/venues likely aren’t guaranteed as much profit, and ticket brokering businesses disappear, but both of those things are ultimately net negatives for consumers anyway.
I believe some states have tried that but it runs afoul of individual rights and first sale doctrine. Once I buy something, it's my property and I'm free to sell it for whatever price I can get.
This isnt the only way at all
As a technologically literate libertarian, I will say that word HN hates: “blockchain”.
Yes, a lot that you think you need to place trust in large institutions for, can now be done with smart contracts.
Take for example the idea of not allowing secondary sales. You simply say that the ERC-20 token cannot be sent to any address other than the official ones you bought from. You can get a refund but that’s it. And just like that - no scalping!
Now if you want to maximize the amount for the venue, you do price discovery. You make a “bonding curve” (like an auction) whereby tickets in a section go up in price the more people buy them (or not — have whatever monotonically increasing curve you want). And people can get a refund if they return the ticket. You pay out after the concert, and take your cut, and all of it is guaranteed, with no middleman. You (the artist and the platform and the venue) keep the windfall.
No need to attract speculators who buy tickets and then expect to get a larger amount later.
(You can see this in the spoof movie Airplane II: The Sequel from 1982, where our hero boards the Lunar Shuttle buying a ticket from a scalper.)
So this policy is younger than Google.
If Ticketmaster enjoys such market dominance, they become responsible to prevent widespread misuse of their own platform, lest they become negligent. They are owned by livenation which is a public company.
Scalping has existed since forever.
The thing was it was local promoters + local sales (aka criminals) who would get tickets from management (yes thats the artists management) and kick the money back to the artist if they were lucky (if not the management kept it).
Now TM owns the venue, they are the promotor, they are the manager(to an extent) and have full control of the tickets, and the secondary market. The artist is now 100 percent in on the action making fans buy a fan club membership then get "face value" tickets at presale only with expensive meet and greet packages that range from a few hundred bucks to a 1000. An artist can tack on 50k to several 100k doing this at every date/venue.
As for TM's uncharges, most of that is because the artist either demands they do it (my prices are reasonable) making TM the scape goat, or they want a sum that is the total of the door and TM needs to cover venue costs and make profit so that just gets baked in as a "fee".
Just to put a fine point on this. In the old model promoters, venues all of those entities being separate and charging a markup made sense. When TM consolidated they didnt change the markup they just kept the margin...
Its in both parties benefit to find a mutually lucrative deal. More so when the customer is not that bright and motivated by "passion" and "fan culture". That same sort of passion (about music) leads to all parties underpaying a lot of staff (people want to be in the industry for some reason). Tech has its own version of this, see game development for over worked and under paid talent who does the job out of "passion".
"Influencers" selling burgers, backpacks, sports drinks and screw drivers is no different than concert t-shirts, posters, coffins and condoms. An artist is more than just the songs they sing. It's the film / TV that work shows up in. It's the other products artists can sell (a lot of this is other peoples art but...) and the things they can promote. They can exist without TM but the same cant be said in the other direction.
And some times the artist do get screwed. When your management and TM/LN folks have a relationship that dates back to Bill Graham Presents there is likely a back side deal that gives the management an extra kick.
I remember finding some story about a contract for Ke$ha or Kathy Perry or some other pop-concoction of the previous decade getting leaked (*) , and one of the ways in which the artist got paid was trough a percentage of the tickets to distribute trough unofficial resale channels.
The issue that spawned Ticketmaster is that as a class artists are greedy, but they want to pretend they aren't. Being hated is a vital part of that company's business model.
(*) I think it must have been Ke$ha, as that one was involved in some financial dispute, but I can't find the story right now.
Excellent analysis
I wonder how many simple facts of life like that one remain hidden right under my nose.
Charge extra for each armrest. Charge extra for priority entry to the venue. Charge to bring in a purse. Charge to sit next to your family. Charge for adequate leg room. Earn points that become worth less and less as they accumulate.
Capitalism always results in monopolies and cartels. This was known 100 years ago and it is still true now, just not as publicized. I wonder why...
Economics education in America sucks. (Along with civic, legal and other education. Not for cynical reasons, but because we treat schools as job centres and day care.)
The housing debate reflects a base inability to grasp supply and demand. The antitrust debate, market failures.
Economics takes a modicum of effort to grasp. In the TikTok world, it’s easier to justify laziness by spouting nonsense about economics assuming everyone is rational or whatnot. (This confers a massive advantage to those who know what they're talking about. And perhaps this is part of what's driving the elite disparity in American today. Renters will happily protest for their landlords against new developments.)
It's totally Ticketmaster scumminess if transfer fees are ridiculous (see pavel_lishin's post). Likewise if Ticketmaster has difference standards for Big Scalp versus retail scalping. But the existence of scalpers (arbitrage traders) is inevitable if a) tickets are underpriced and b) tickets are transferable. You'd have apartment scalpers for rent-stabilized apartments if leases were transferable (which they are not).
When demand (concert-goers) greatly outstrips supply (seats), you have three options: long queues (the historical socialist approach) or lotteries (the egalitarian approach), high prices (the market economy approach), or corruption (the current approach). There is no realistic solution that makes everyone happy, but you can choose the kind of unhappiness you get. There is a strong case to be made that the artists do not want to be seen as greedy merchants, so they underprice their tickets and offload the anger onto Ticketmaster (see kevinsync's post).
But of course the problem runs deeper when we consider what you and others have been saying: it’s just too convenient for artists to reap the profits of the current system and have Ticketmaster as their scapegoat.
My solution would be some kind of auction where people put in bids of what they're willing to pay for different seating types and allocation happens so same-type seats are either sold at their reserve price or sold out at the lowest price they'd sell out at exactly, while maximising revenue -- that would give the revenues to the artists, avoid queues and disincentive scalpers. Legislating for no resale above list price and fair fees would disincentivise TM supporting scalping. TM etc could always negotiate a cut of selling-price-above-reserve to encourage them to do the best for the artist from however the auction works.