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Comment by ape4 | Hacker News Reader

Could somebody please disrupt this business! No user likes Ticketmaster and their "service fees".

You can't disrupt Ticketmaster's service fees because it's the venues and the peformers that are also profiting from those service fees.

Apparently, Ticketmaster's business model is based on taking the negative public relations hit for charging higher prices on behalf of their customers.

If you create a startup called CheaperTickets.com with the noble intention of not charging those hated service fees, you won't get any customers. (Keep in mind it's the venues & the artists that are the real customers of Ticketmaster and not the ticket buyers). The venues want the lucrative cut of the service fees while Ticketmaster gladly takes the heat.

[1]http://www.laweekly.com/music/ticketmaster-and-servants-band...

[2]http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1xlt0i/til_ti...

That sounds plausible to me, I'm not an expert, but it's not always a choice for the bands.

Pearl Jam tried to stand up to Ticketmaster with a boycott and lost.

I don't know TM's numbers, but I know it is correct that processing fees are not always going 100% to the ticketing company. My company is in the music business and one of our products is for internal ticket sales. We collect fees on behalf of the seller. The sellers portion varies, but is usually about 75% of the fee - meaning that we, the processor, are only getting 25% of the fee that the customer sees.

Similarly, I've worked for an organization that charges a per ticket service fee. They take a 100% cut off this, when you consider their ticketing contract was negotiated as a fixed annual cost, not a per-ticket or %-of-revenue.

Enter Dice https://dice.fm/

Ticketfly is doing a good job. They do charge some fees, but not to the egregious extent of Ticketmaster, and have a much better interface that holds up against traffic.

Unfortunately, Ticketmaster has a habit of just buying/merging with competitors (including Live Nation, in a merger that should have never been allowed to go through).

Plus, Live Nation actually owns a lot of venues, so you'll never see them use another ticketing provider: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Nation_Entertainment#Venu...

Also TicketWeb, and Northern Tickets (acquired by Ticketfly now?)

They did, StubHub (not the only offender) buys bulk tickets, doubles the rates for you, and still adds service fees.

Ticketmaster is practically a saint next to them in my eyes.

This just tells me that the original venues were not charging enough for tickets. If the tickets were priced ideally then StubHub would not be able to do this; the margins would be too low for the amount of risk involved.

Most business don't maximize short term revenue in that way. Compare it to any new tech gadget, especially ones with hard supply limitations like the limitations that exist for live events (thus preventing a true market meeting point of supply and demand). I'm sure Apple could sell a lot of iPhones at $1500 until supply stabilizes, reduce the price $200, then rinse and repeat. That might reduce the secondary market and be the ideal pricing strategy, but it would be a bad business decision especially from a public relations standpoint. Just like there will always be people waiting in line at Apple stores on day 1 to grab a device and throw in on eBay, there will always be ticket brokers doing the same.

> Ticketmaster is practically a saint next to them in my eyes.

Ticketmaster owns a Stubhub competitor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TicketsNow

Do you have proof of StubHub actually doing that? I buy/sell a lot on the secondary ticket market and don't think StubHub is purchasing tickets themselves (except to cover a gurantee.)

Now individual/corporate ticket brokers are for sure buying up bulk tickets and putting them on the secondary market through StubHub... but StubHub doesn't have anything to do with that besides being the platform utilized.

This business doesn't need disruption in the technical sense; there are plenty of alternatives, which in some cases, are even very easy to switch to.

The barriers are the very typical ones that big companies (as a matter of fact, I assume that the venue with the greatest exposure are in fact big companies) face towards innovation: bureaucracy, lock-in, inertia, PHBs, and so on.

Not that TM doesn't have any positive side - it's just a very typical example of the business workings of large companies (not all, of course).

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