TicketMaster and Live Nation Agree to $2.5 Billion Merger | Hacker News Reader

TicketMaster and Live Nation Agree to $2.5 Billion Merger

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14 pointsfallentimes13 comments

How do you innovate around a potential monopoly like this? If ticketmaster starts becoming more like a scalper in its operations, then the secondary ticket market becomes pretty useless. Or, do the ticket prices just increase even more in the secondary market.

Normally, I'd say this would make ticketmaster RIPE for disruption, but they're the gatekeepers. You can't get tickets any cheaper than what they sell them for. If they also interlock with the record labels, it's going to desperately slow innovation in the music industry around concert tickets and alt. revenue sales.

Thoughts from the ticketstumbler guys?

>You can't get tickets any cheaper than what they sell them for.

Yes you can. I've been to two local music stores that sell tickets and they charge a low transaction fee, under $3. Ticketmaster on the other hand has charged me $9 or so, for random shit.

"two local music stores."

That's about half as many as are in my city now in total, and it's a major metropolitan area. They're able to sell tickets to shows only where there isn't a preexisting deal with TM, and only because they cut deals directly with local venues.

Ticketmaster has deals that are already semimonopolistic both vertically and horizontally. How do you compete with that at scale?

how does ticketmaster operate? ie- where can local merchants, music stores, or others sell tickets in addition to ticketmaster? I'm assuming it's only for smaller shows and such.

I'm afraid you would have to beat them at their own game - making relationships with each venue (convince them you will help them sell more tickets, or give them a larger cut).

At its heart its not a technology problem, although you'd have to employ technology to operate cheaper that ticket master. (Which includes preventing bots or scalpers from grabbing all the good tickets for hot shows right after they go on sale).

my 2c

Edit: Perhaps one way around this problem is to provide an easy way for venues to sell their own tickets. Let them setup their own web-front where they can sell will-call or even mailed tickets. Allow for features like will-call ticket transfers. The question is if venues that don't already do this will be convinced to. I'm not sure what is keeping venues like The Fillmore from using any web presense other than Live Nation and TicketMaster. Hopefully its just technophobia, not any actual lock-in...

Yeah, it is lock-in. Live Nation owns The Fillmore (and 130 odd other live music sites). So they aren't going to be interested in any web solution you could come up with. They don't care about any new customer friendly features because there's no where else for customers to go. If you want to see your favorite artist, it's not like you can buy tickets to the other show at the venue across the street the next night.

Individual events (or venues) can do this already. For example, ticketleap.com

You'd need a lot of capital. The second tier players (e.g. ticketweb.com, tickets.com, etix.com) have either been bought by Ticketmaster or can't compete directly. Tickets.com tried to do playoff ticketing for the Rockies and it was an utter failure. Live Nation has had tons of problems doing primary ticketing for big events. Ticket sales have been getting hammered in this economy so I'm sure this deal made a lot of sense based on the candy land projections made by the myriad VPs of Corporate Whatever found at both companies. But I can't think of a time where projected cost savings have actually fully materialized. For the consumer, this sucks.

There's actually been some small/middle market competitor decks floating around in VC circles, but there's no way they get funded in this economy. From the TicketStumbler perspective, we don't include any of their tickets on our main listings (too many clicks & hoops to buy) just on our ticket blog where we publish presale passwords for free.

Monnnnopoly!

I wouldn't even mind so much if TM was less evil, but this is ridiculous.

Where is Pearl Jam when you need them? ;-)

I think this will get blocked in antitrust. Presumably Obama will be more active here than Bush was.

I think in the current economic climate it will pass. Ticketmaster/Live Nation will say the only way they can be profitable is to consolidate.

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