Hacker News Reader

Ticketmaster uses their monopoly power to unfairly squeeze the venues and the artists too. They're using their monopoly power to squeeze all sides of the live music marketplace - fans, artists, venues, and promoters. So the bad guys are really Ticketmaster, not the artists.

View on HN

They own the venues. And the artists are to blame because without them ticketmaster would have no product. Pearl Jam took a huge career hit trying to fight them.

Yeah Pearl Jam did take a huge career hit trying to fight them, and that's admirable, but they shouldn't have had to do that. Why should artists carry the burden of having to sacrifice their careers to fight an illegal monopoly? That's the role of government. You may as well say that fans are to blame for going to ticketmaster-promoted concerts and buying tickets on ticketmaster because they were enabling ticketmaster. Both fans and artists are being harmed by the ticketmaster monopoly.

They also buy rivals. I worked for a small, out of the way company that added a really good ticketing app for some niche scenarios.

They basically bought us for the tech and integrated the rest of the company into various other companies that were spun off. I ended up with stock in several of them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com