16 ms·

Ticketmaster's tech problem isn't a tech problem

46 points by passwordoops 4y ago

nells 4y ago
Siri, show me the early life section of the Irving Azoff article
mhb 4y ago
Taylor Swift has a net worth over $400M. Why can't she rent venues?
- passwordoops 4y ago
  The venues have a lock-in with the Ticketmaster monopoly, so she - and every other artist, such as Pearl Jam in the 90s (as described in the article) - would still need to go through them
- metadat 4y ago
  She might not have $10-30m liquid sloshing around her couch cushions. And even if the problem were fixed for TS events, what about all the other ever present ticketmaster rip-offs?
  - rockostrich 4y ago
    > She might not have $10-30m liquid sloshing around her couch cushions. I have no doubt that she could equity finance it considering she can guarantee sell-outs at every venue she plays. > And even if the problem were fixed for TS events, what about all the other ever present ticketmaster rip-offs? This is the real problem. The biggest artists doing this might hurt Ticketmaster's bottom line, but there are a ton of smaller venues that book artists that don't have the guarantee of selling out and can't just decide to self-finance tours on public grounds...
- justinator 4y ago
  She actually could do this. Buy her own PA system and just tour country fair grounds. Her core fans would absolutely adore this.
- latchkey 4y ago
  Crazy enough, I used to own a nightclub in San Francisco SOMA district. She can. The issue is that she will overwhelm them and that becomes a public safety issue. Police, fire dept, etc... they all get involved. Fact is that the venues large enough to hold her are ALL owned or at least have some sort of connection to Live Nation. It goes deeper than that though. One time, `Bone Thugs and Harmony` were in town for a show on Saturday (at a LN venue). Friday night, they wanted to perform to a smaller audience of their core fans, so we agreed to host them at the last minute. We made a radio spot to let people know. The text that was read got modified at the very end to say "the show has sold out" (I even have a recording of it somewhere on my computer). We didn't put that in there. It was wild, nobody showed up and we were out of $50k. Who modified it? Well, LN owns the radio stations too. They were pissed that BTH would even consider playing at a non-LN club. I couldn't afford to sue LN, so we just ate the loss. It sucked and did some real damage to my business.
  - monetus 4y ago
    Did the radio ad account for most of that cost, if you don't mind my asking? Still pretty expensive despite the changed ad landscape huh
    - latchkey 4y ago
      We paid some large amount to the band. I think it was about $30-40k. Then we lost on staffing and other costs. The radio spot was relatively cheap... I forget how much. We could have easily made the $50k+ in bar sales + tickets + share of merch sales. It was a last minute event on a night we didn't have otherwise filled, so breaking even was fine. Instead, we ended up in debt. Fuck Live Nation (at the time it was just Clear Channel). I hope this Taylor thing blows the doors off their monopoly.
- angryasian 4y ago
  You're assuming TS cares. She could have easily done a lot to fix this. Restrict resale of tickets. Price tickets higher. Hand out specific codes to only people in her fan club to buy tickets. She made hundreds of millions on this tour. Its funny you all think that maximizing her profit wasn't the goal here
fatnoah 4y ago
Even the old "go to the venue box office" option of avoiding fees is no longer an option in many places. Here's what the website for my local big venue says: "Please note the TD Garden Box Office does not sell tickets at the public on sale. All tickets should be purchased via www.ticketmaster.com"
- itslennysfault 4y ago
  Also, some venues box office is operated by ticket master and you still get hit with the fee. I had that happen to me years a go. I haven't tried buying tickets in person in a long long time, but I'd imagine this is still a thing where you can buy them in person.
- darkwizard42 4y ago
  In the Bay Area, you can't even guarantee tickets at the box office! They start the sale online BEFORE the box office opens so when you show up, the show might have already sold out! Truly annoying.
powera 4y ago
The service Ticketmaster provides is largely to have people get angry at Ticketmaster, rather than at the musician involved. And there is simply no way to let 5 million Swift fans each buy one of a million tickets while keeping the tickets cheap. It is a recipe for disaster. People claim it is “evil scalpers”, but if you got lucky and bought a $400 ticket you can flip for $3000, they probably would be doing so as well. A lot of the Ticketmaster “fees” people hate are actually part of the ticket price, requested by and paid directly to the artist (or the venue), but charged separately to make the tickets seem cheaper. Don’t blame me, blame human psychology.
- triceratops 4y ago
  Following this whole brouhaha I read that Garth Brooks plays night after night in a city until the shows stop selling out. So there is a way to let all the Swifties buy a ticket. I don't know how he keeps a venue booked for an indeterminate number of shows. How far ahead does his team plan? But for the road crews and performers it must be easier. They don't have to set up and tear down their gear every 3 days. On the other hand, Taylor has more fans and more cities she has to visit than Garth. If she did that, it might turn into a perma-tour until her popularity crests.
  - teratron27 4y ago
    It would be physically impossible for her to keep doing shows until they stop selling out. Here voice and body would give out way before her popularity did
- gbalduzzi 4y ago
  The ticket should be assigned to a specific name, so that it can not be sold on a secondary market. The Ticketing service itself should provide a channel to sell a ticket at its original price if someone wants it. In Italy that's the method since a similar fiasco happened years ago and it works pretty well
  - djbebs 4y ago
    Why should people not be able to sell what they own freely?
programmer_dude 4y ago
Boycott Ticketmaster and its venues. Just don't go to these concerts.
- ozzydave 4y ago
  Life is short, and lots of people want to see these artists live.
- samiam_iam 4y ago
neallindsay 4y ago
"Consumer harm" from monopolists is very much a trailing indicator. Organizations that have even a smidge of sense will put that off for a long time as they accumulate power. Having all your regulation set up to wait until that point is bad policy. That said, Ticketmaster has been terrible forever. It's baffling how they've gotten this far while being so blatantly bad.
- mikestew 4y ago
  That said, Ticketmaster has been terrible forever. That's not true. Granted, one would have to go back at least 35 years, but there was a time that TicketMaster was just the outsource vendor to sell tickets. They'd tack on a few bucks for the privilege, sorted. Don't like it? Go to the box office. I don't recall having any reason to complain. But that's the trick: no one had reason to complain, and more and more venues used TM while TM gobbled up competitors. Now that there is reason to complain, it's apparently too late.
xhkkffbf 4y ago
A monopoly? My event last night was ticketed with EventBrite. There seem to be a dozen or so similar systems out there. And if I were willing to roll my own software, I could probably spin up some version of Drupal pretty quickly with some open source plugins. The problem isn't that it's a monopoly. It's that the venues don't shop around, probably because they don't pay the price. The consumer does.
- spencerflem 4y ago
  The venues are owned by ticketmaster
- Nycto 4y ago
  I’m guessing the venue you’re talking about is tiny. There are only 1 or 2 major venues in the US that aren’t owned by live nation. Anecdote != data Cyber did an episode that covered this in more detail, btw: https://www.vice.com/en/article/z348k3/cyber-why-concert-tickets-are-so-expensive https://www.vice.com/en/article/z348k3/cyber-why-concert-tic...
francisofascii 4y ago
Eh, it's more of an unprecedented demand problem. You would think 50 shows would be enough. So you can't really blame Swift for the lack of shows. Maybe you can blame her for being so likable that millions of people are willing to spend hundreds of dollars for a ticket. Or blame those fans who can outspend the cash strapped fans. It is almost as if Swift has a monopoly on this genre. Who are her competitors? Maybe go see them? And if she has none, that would be a problem worth solving.
- noirbot 4y ago
  She's always going to have a monopoly on being Taylor Swift. Sure, you may also like some other musician, but it's not like you can just drop in replace her with a different singer. Art is, somewhat by definition, a monopoly. There's no way around that, the only thing you can do is have more concerts/supply of it, but that's literally more work for the artist involved. I think it's Garth Brooks that's notorious for planning his tours where he'll just keep adding more concert dates in a city until they stop selling out at $30 tickets and then move to the next town and repeat it. That works, but you also have to be willing to play the same town 10 days in a row or something, which isn't free for a musician to do in terms of exhaustion and effort.
  - vanilla_nut 4y ago
    That's a really interesting solution to the problem! I wonder why Swift keeps planning these giant "big bang" tours instead of trying something similar. Maybe some artists don't like being perpetually on tour? I'm sure living out of an RV or hotel in a random city and playing a concert every night or two feels pretty constraining.
    - noirbot 4y ago
      I think it's also different how much of a show it is. If your concert is mostly just you with a guitar and a mic, then it's easy to just load that up and stay somewhere for as long as needed, and it's easier to find smaller venues where you can play a week of shows. If you're Taylor Swift or the like, you're playing 30k person stadiums and have a stage setup that takes most of a full day or two to set up and tear down. You likely have to book the venue years in advance, and the logistics of getting you, your 30 backup musicians and dancers, all your stage tech, and god knows what else around the world is the sort of thing that's not really amenable to just adjusting on the fly. Once you're big enough that you're competing with like... international sports events and entire music festivals for space, you're just working in a different world of constraints. In some ways, it's similar to scalability in computing. If your personal website or side project blows up, it's easy to find the space to double or even 10x the resources. If you're Netflix and somehow you double your demand, there may not even be available resources in the world to help you, and you can't just fall back to doing something smaller by choice.
matai_kolila 4y ago
Maybe I'm the only one who doesn't really see a problem with ticket prices being as high as they are. There is much more demand for these tickets than there are supply of tickets, so my econ 101 tells me the price should go up until the demand drops to match the supply. Any other argument just feels like sour grapes from folks who don't have the means to buy this luxury item. Separately, Ticketmaster's monopoly is concerning, but in this case I don't see that impacting prices. In fact it seems like Ticketmaster did try to do a handful of things to artificially lower ticket prices, those things just were not effective due to technical issues (so the article title may be wrong). Music fans like to moralize about how they "deserve" to go to concerts, but the reality is nobody deserves to go anywhere; attending a concert is not something you must do in order to survive. It's not even a thing you must do in order to enjoy an artist's music or support that artist. There is absolutely no imperative or necessity to attend this tour, and in cases like that I have no problem with pricing matching demand and supply pretty directly.
- jasonjayr 4y ago
  I think the thing is (a) TM's take of the sales, (b) TM's owning the scalping/auction system post initial sale, (c) TM's exclusive hold on Box Offices at venues & (d) TM's propensity to drop fees as line-items with on-the-nose labels on the tickets they sell. Basically, they've abused a monopoly position, and painted a target on their backs by trying to nickle and dime folks.
  - omniglottal 4y ago
    Given the very nature of a monopoly position, I'd semantically argue that they are not abusing the position, but rather just using it. Much like a murderous criminal simply uses a garotte. That's what they're effectively for!
    - iudqnolq 4y ago
      > I'd semantically argue that they are not abusing the position, but rather just using it. Much like a murderous criminal simply uses a garotte. That argument has been tried in court, and doesn't work. That murderous criminal can still be punished, despite the fact the reason they killed someone was because it was part of their role as a criminal.
abigail95 4y ago
Is there consumer harm from ticketmaster? I thought the tickets were selling well below a normal market clearing price.
- darkwizard42 4y ago
  The consumer harm is they have a monopoly on the entire experience...I have less concern about how expensive tickets are (just simple demand >> supply) I have issues with how they are profiting from the entire chain of custody of the ticket (with little alternative for customers). They own the ticketing of certain artists' tours, they own the rights to ticketing many venues (so there is no way for any artist to play certain places without signing to be ticketed by them), and they own the reseller platform. They have end to end control on the pricing and fees across the music ticketing ecosystem and continue to nickel and dime consumers. There is nothing convenient about their convenience fees and they aren't innovating to benefit customers (or artists to be honest).
  - abigail95 4y ago
    What's the dollar harm to all of that, to the consumer? I will be pretty annoyed if they break up ticketmaster and the avg price paid by concertgoers increases due to competition between ticket sellers, done under the guise of "consumer harm". I can see people purchased taylor swift tickets from ticketmaster at an 80% discount compared to resellers. That goes away in a competitive market.
  - angryasian 4y ago
    >they own the reseller platform They don't own the reseller platform. Stubhub is the largest in this category. >There is nothing convenient about their convenience fees and they aren't innovating to benefit customers (or artists to be honest) You're pretending the goal here is not to maximize artist profit. Theres a lot that the artist could demand to fix all of these problems. They don't
shmatt 4y ago
An artist can demand no resale of tickets, and ID check at the door (TM tickets have the buyers name printed on them), LCD Soundsystem has done this when their fans got angry at a similar scenario. Swift hasn't. And probably won't in the future, thats the gist of it. TM claimed (and I have no reason to not believe them) they got 5 billion requests when tickets went live. So you break up the monopoly and Swift can now sign with a different ticket seller next tour. Which other website will handle the 5 billion requests properly? Without hours of queues or random raffles? Fans are lucky the TM website didn't completely shut down for 2 days because of the traffic As long as the tickets are sellable, as long as people will pay more for a ticket than a new car, people (even diehard fans) will resell
- justinlkarr 4y ago
  This varies by US state. In some states - including New York - it is illegal to prohibit transfer of tickets and therefore illegal to prohibit resale.
  - lostgame 4y ago
    Makes sense. What if someone close to you passes away or you get COVID or something and you can't go? That money is just wasted? :/
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      More fundamentally: once you buy the ticket, it's yours. It should be your decision to resell it if you choose, for any reason. It's a "First sale doctrine" sort of thing in my mind.
- ticviking 4y ago
  The lure of being the competitor who can handle that traffic will bring some competition. In the meantime some entry level competitors who we could use for local scene ticketing and give a better share to the artists would open breathing room in the market for early career artists and smaller venues to put performances on in 3rd and 4th tier cities.
ineedasername 4y ago
Am I the only one who took it as a potential publicity stunt? Plenty of lukewarm fans on the bubble probably saw all this and are drawn into the whole vapid drama of it all. Even if it was purely accidental, the incentives that ensuing PR brings when it happens mean there’s not going to be much concern about fixing things. Sure you could argue that antitrust attention is bad for them, but what’s the realistic outcome there? Lip service punditry, maybe even a congressional hearing! And nothing. Not many politicians are going to wast limited political capital against a fleeting issue their base won’t care about in a month from now.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
samiam_iam 4y ago
vlad 4y ago
> The problem, as this new generation of fans is learning, isn’t just that Ticketmaster is a bad system. The problem is Ticketmaster is the only system. It’s a monopoly. More competition might reduce fees, but won't turn ticketing sites into state lotteries. Just like some domain name registrars, these sites provide a service but also benefit from powering the technology.
justinlkarr 4y ago
At the risk of being obvious, I don't think that is what Stoller is saying. I think he is saying it is a tech problem whose root cause is a monopoly problem (leading to long-term underinvestment). This one caught TM sideways, clearly, and something scaled badly. I'm hoping we get a good technical post-mortem at some point. But nailing on-sales is one of Ticketmaster's main value props for clients. As they say, nobody got fired for having Ticketmaster sell their tickets. I've been on the inside for very successful high-demand on-sales run by the TM VerifiedFan team. They worked.
- angryasian 4y ago
  >(leading to long-term underinvestment). Even Google and Amazon struggle on huge black friday events. This is ridiculous.
passwordoops 4y ago
General comment on the "I don't see consumer harm because prices aren't that high" argument. It fails to capture the true danger of monopoly, namely: -lack of competition leads to lack of innovation (Stoller's argument) -lack of innovation results in less spending on R&D -less innovation means the most efficient way to maximize profit is to find "efficiencies" in the business -those "efficiencies" manifest as: -less spending on R&D because there is no need; -lower salaries to employees; -fewer employees overall; -worse quality: -Squeeze suppliers and contractors, putting more pressure across the board to consolidate and reinforcing the Cycle across the entire chain If left unchecked (as the "consumer harm" doctrine has for the past 40 years or so), the results are: -overall concentration of power and wealth -greater wealth disparities -less investment and innovation -fewer choices that provide worse consumer experience This pattern has been pretty well documented across many industries, from shipping to cheerleading
TheRealPomax 4y ago
This is one of those examples where we all know how bad it is, we all know they run a scam, have a monopoly, etc. etc. and yet we keep letting them do what they do because the US stopped caring about its antitrust laws pretty much after the whole AT&T thing. In fact, if anything the idea of each market segment having one top player buying up anyone who gets big enough to cut into revenue has become aspirational and admired as much if not more than it was in the Gekko days.
masukomi 4y ago
speaking as someone who literally worked on a bot mitigation project for Ticketmaster: They have an effing HUGE tech problem. The site crashing isn't because of "demand for the tickets" at least not by normal people's definition. It's not that there's really "There is much more demand for these tickets than there are supply of tickets" as matai_kolila suggested here. Ticketmaster's problem is very much that there are huge bot swarms attacking it for every popular ticket sale, because reselling tickets is WAY more profitable, than pointing a few thousand bots at it for a few hours. Anyone who's tried to order tickets from ticketmaster in the past decade knows that it's a massive pain in the ass of hurdle jumping. That hurdle jumping has nothing to do with the humans attempting to buy tickets. It's bot mitigation. It is not in ticketmaster's interest to facilitate scalping. 1. they don't profit from it. (no $) 2. humans blame them for it. (bad pr) 3. artists blame them for it (potential loss of $) now, they've got a bunch of stadiums lock in to literal hundred year contracts so, to some degree they're safe financially as far as big performances go because those artists can't go anywhere _other_ than the stadiums they have locked down. Practically speaking Taylor Swift can't perform at your local bar and announce it. A) there'd be a mob. B) it wouldn't be profitable enough for anything other than just testing out songs. > Why was Ticketmaster’s system so poorly structured? I can't say that it is or is not poorly structured. I can say, that regardless of how good of a job Ticketmaster's devs do, they are fighting an unwinnable war. All they can do is gain and loose a little ground against the bot makers every round. This post was obviously written by someone with no clue of the existence, or significance, of the technological warfare Ticketmaster is constantly involved it. To be clear, I am, in no way, commenting on the practices of the company, or their business decisions. I am ONLY saying that they have a HUGE tech problem and when the site goes down or is otherwise effed, it is a _very_ safe bet, that it has nothing to do with the humans trying to buy tickets.

46 points by passwordoops 4y ago

nells 4y ago

Siri, show me the early life section of the Irving Azoff article

mhb 4y ago

Taylor Swift has a net worth over $400M. Why can't she rent venues?

passwordoops 4y ago
The venues have a lock-in with the Ticketmaster monopoly, so she - and every other artist, such as Pearl Jam in the 90s (as described in the article) - would still need to go through them
metadat 4y ago
She might not have $10-30m liquid sloshing around her couch cushions. And even if the problem were fixed for TS events, what about all the other ever present ticketmaster rip-offs?
- rockostrich 4y ago
  > She might not have $10-30m liquid sloshing around her couch cushions. I have no doubt that she could equity finance it considering she can guarantee sell-outs at every venue she plays. > And even if the problem were fixed for TS events, what about all the other ever present ticketmaster rip-offs? This is the real problem. The biggest artists doing this might hurt Ticketmaster's bottom line, but there are a ton of smaller venues that book artists that don't have the guarantee of selling out and can't just decide to self-finance tours on public grounds...
justinator 4y ago
She actually could do this. Buy her own PA system and just tour country fair grounds. Her core fans would absolutely adore this.
latchkey 4y ago
Crazy enough, I used to own a nightclub in San Francisco SOMA district. She can. The issue is that she will overwhelm them and that becomes a public safety issue. Police, fire dept, etc... they all get involved. Fact is that the venues large enough to hold her are ALL owned or at least have some sort of connection to Live Nation. It goes deeper than that though. One time, `Bone Thugs and Harmony` were in town for a show on Saturday (at a LN venue). Friday night, they wanted to perform to a smaller audience of their core fans, so we agreed to host them at the last minute. We made a radio spot to let people know. The text that was read got modified at the very end to say "the show has sold out" (I even have a recording of it somewhere on my computer). We didn't put that in there. It was wild, nobody showed up and we were out of $50k. Who modified it? Well, LN owns the radio stations too. They were pissed that BTH would even consider playing at a non-LN club. I couldn't afford to sue LN, so we just ate the loss. It sucked and did some real damage to my business.
- monetus 4y ago
  Did the radio ad account for most of that cost, if you don't mind my asking? Still pretty expensive despite the changed ad landscape huh
  - latchkey 4y ago
    We paid some large amount to the band. I think it was about $30-40k. Then we lost on staffing and other costs. The radio spot was relatively cheap... I forget how much. We could have easily made the $50k+ in bar sales + tickets + share of merch sales. It was a last minute event on a night we didn't have otherwise filled, so breaking even was fine. Instead, we ended up in debt. Fuck Live Nation (at the time it was just Clear Channel). I hope this Taylor thing blows the doors off their monopoly.
angryasian 4y ago
You're assuming TS cares. She could have easily done a lot to fix this. Restrict resale of tickets. Price tickets higher. Hand out specific codes to only people in her fan club to buy tickets. She made hundreds of millions on this tour. Its funny you all think that maximizing her profit wasn't the goal here

fatnoah 4y ago

Even the old "go to the venue box office" option of avoiding fees is no longer an option in many places. Here's what the website for my local big venue says: "Please note the TD Garden Box Office does not sell tickets at the public on sale. All tickets should be purchased via www.ticketmaster.com"

itslennysfault 4y ago
Also, some venues box office is operated by ticket master and you still get hit with the fee. I had that happen to me years a go. I haven't tried buying tickets in person in a long long time, but I'd imagine this is still a thing where you can buy them in person.
darkwizard42 4y ago
In the Bay Area, you can't even guarantee tickets at the box office! They start the sale online BEFORE the box office opens so when you show up, the show might have already sold out! Truly annoying.

powera 4y ago

The service Ticketmaster provides is largely to have people get angry at Ticketmaster, rather than at the musician involved. And there is simply no way to let 5 million Swift fans each buy one of a million tickets while keeping the tickets cheap. It is a recipe for disaster. People claim it is “evil scalpers”, but if you got lucky and bought a $400 ticket you can flip for $3000, they probably would be doing so as well. A lot of the Ticketmaster “fees” people hate are actually part of the ticket price, requested by and paid directly to the artist (or the venue), but charged separately to make the tickets seem cheaper. Don’t blame me, blame human psychology.

triceratops 4y ago
Following this whole brouhaha I read that Garth Brooks plays night after night in a city until the shows stop selling out. So there is a way to let all the Swifties buy a ticket. I don't know how he keeps a venue booked for an indeterminate number of shows. How far ahead does his team plan? But for the road crews and performers it must be easier. They don't have to set up and tear down their gear every 3 days. On the other hand, Taylor has more fans and more cities she has to visit than Garth. If she did that, it might turn into a perma-tour until her popularity crests.
- teratron27 4y ago
  It would be physically impossible for her to keep doing shows until they stop selling out. Here voice and body would give out way before her popularity did
gbalduzzi 4y ago
The ticket should be assigned to a specific name, so that it can not be sold on a secondary market. The Ticketing service itself should provide a channel to sell a ticket at its original price if someone wants it. In Italy that's the method since a similar fiasco happened years ago and it works pretty well
- djbebs 4y ago
  Why should people not be able to sell what they own freely?

programmer_dude 4y ago

Boycott Ticketmaster and its venues. Just don't go to these concerts.

ozzydave 4y ago
Life is short, and lots of people want to see these artists live.
samiam_iam 4y ago

neallindsay 4y ago

"Consumer harm" from monopolists is very much a trailing indicator. Organizations that have even a smidge of sense will put that off for a long time as they accumulate power. Having all your regulation set up to wait until that point is bad policy. That said, Ticketmaster has been terrible forever. It's baffling how they've gotten this far while being so blatantly bad.

mikestew 4y ago
That said, Ticketmaster has been terrible forever. That's not true. Granted, one would have to go back at least 35 years, but there was a time that TicketMaster was just the outsource vendor to sell tickets. They'd tack on a few bucks for the privilege, sorted. Don't like it? Go to the box office. I don't recall having any reason to complain. But that's the trick: no one had reason to complain, and more and more venues used TM while TM gobbled up competitors. Now that there is reason to complain, it's apparently too late.

xhkkffbf 4y ago

A monopoly? My event last night was ticketed with EventBrite. There seem to be a dozen or so similar systems out there. And if I were willing to roll my own software, I could probably spin up some version of Drupal pretty quickly with some open source plugins. The problem isn't that it's a monopoly. It's that the venues don't shop around, probably because they don't pay the price. The consumer does.

spencerflem 4y ago
The venues are owned by ticketmaster
Nycto 4y ago
I’m guessing the venue you’re talking about is tiny. There are only 1 or 2 major venues in the US that aren’t owned by live nation. Anecdote != data Cyber did an episode that covered this in more detail, btw: https://www.vice.com/en/article/z348k3/cyber-why-concert-tickets-are-so-expensive https://www.vice.com/en/article/z348k3/cyber-why-concert-tic...

francisofascii 4y ago

Eh, it's more of an unprecedented demand problem. You would think 50 shows would be enough. So you can't really blame Swift for the lack of shows. Maybe you can blame her for being so likable that millions of people are willing to spend hundreds of dollars for a ticket. Or blame those fans who can outspend the cash strapped fans. It is almost as if Swift has a monopoly on this genre. Who are her competitors? Maybe go see them? And if she has none, that would be a problem worth solving.

noirbot 4y ago
She's always going to have a monopoly on being Taylor Swift. Sure, you may also like some other musician, but it's not like you can just drop in replace her with a different singer. Art is, somewhat by definition, a monopoly. There's no way around that, the only thing you can do is have more concerts/supply of it, but that's literally more work for the artist involved. I think it's Garth Brooks that's notorious for planning his tours where he'll just keep adding more concert dates in a city until they stop selling out at $30 tickets and then move to the next town and repeat it. That works, but you also have to be willing to play the same town 10 days in a row or something, which isn't free for a musician to do in terms of exhaustion and effort.
- vanilla_nut 4y ago
  That's a really interesting solution to the problem! I wonder why Swift keeps planning these giant "big bang" tours instead of trying something similar. Maybe some artists don't like being perpetually on tour? I'm sure living out of an RV or hotel in a random city and playing a concert every night or two feels pretty constraining.
  - noirbot 4y ago
    I think it's also different how much of a show it is. If your concert is mostly just you with a guitar and a mic, then it's easy to just load that up and stay somewhere for as long as needed, and it's easier to find smaller venues where you can play a week of shows. If you're Taylor Swift or the like, you're playing 30k person stadiums and have a stage setup that takes most of a full day or two to set up and tear down. You likely have to book the venue years in advance, and the logistics of getting you, your 30 backup musicians and dancers, all your stage tech, and god knows what else around the world is the sort of thing that's not really amenable to just adjusting on the fly. Once you're big enough that you're competing with like... international sports events and entire music festivals for space, you're just working in a different world of constraints. In some ways, it's similar to scalability in computing. If your personal website or side project blows up, it's easy to find the space to double or even 10x the resources. If you're Netflix and somehow you double your demand, there may not even be available resources in the world to help you, and you can't just fall back to doing something smaller by choice.

matai_kolila 4y ago

Maybe I'm the only one who doesn't really see a problem with ticket prices being as high as they are. There is much more demand for these tickets than there are supply of tickets, so my econ 101 tells me the price should go up until the demand drops to match the supply. Any other argument just feels like sour grapes from folks who don't have the means to buy this luxury item. Separately, Ticketmaster's monopoly is concerning, but in this case I don't see that impacting prices. In fact it seems like Ticketmaster did try to do a handful of things to artificially lower ticket prices, those things just were not effective due to technical issues (so the article title may be wrong). Music fans like to moralize about how they "deserve" to go to concerts, but the reality is nobody deserves to go anywhere; attending a concert is not something you must do in order to survive. It's not even a thing you must do in order to enjoy an artist's music or support that artist. There is absolutely no imperative or necessity to attend this tour, and in cases like that I have no problem with pricing matching demand and supply pretty directly.

jasonjayr 4y ago
I think the thing is (a) TM's take of the sales, (b) TM's owning the scalping/auction system post initial sale, (c) TM's exclusive hold on Box Offices at venues & (d) TM's propensity to drop fees as line-items with on-the-nose labels on the tickets they sell. Basically, they've abused a monopoly position, and painted a target on their backs by trying to nickle and dime folks.
- omniglottal 4y ago
  Given the very nature of a monopoly position, I'd semantically argue that they are not abusing the position, but rather just using it. Much like a murderous criminal simply uses a garotte. That's what they're effectively for!
  - iudqnolq 4y ago
    > I'd semantically argue that they are not abusing the position, but rather just using it. Much like a murderous criminal simply uses a garotte. That argument has been tried in court, and doesn't work. That murderous criminal can still be punished, despite the fact the reason they killed someone was because it was part of their role as a criminal.

abigail95 4y ago

Is there consumer harm from ticketmaster? I thought the tickets were selling well below a normal market clearing price.

darkwizard42 4y ago
The consumer harm is they have a monopoly on the entire experience...I have less concern about how expensive tickets are (just simple demand >> supply) I have issues with how they are profiting from the entire chain of custody of the ticket (with little alternative for customers). They own the ticketing of certain artists' tours, they own the rights to ticketing many venues (so there is no way for any artist to play certain places without signing to be ticketed by them), and they own the reseller platform. They have end to end control on the pricing and fees across the music ticketing ecosystem and continue to nickel and dime consumers. There is nothing convenient about their convenience fees and they aren't innovating to benefit customers (or artists to be honest).
- abigail95 4y ago
  What's the dollar harm to all of that, to the consumer? I will be pretty annoyed if they break up ticketmaster and the avg price paid by concertgoers increases due to competition between ticket sellers, done under the guise of "consumer harm". I can see people purchased taylor swift tickets from ticketmaster at an 80% discount compared to resellers. That goes away in a competitive market.
- angryasian 4y ago
  >they own the reseller platform They don't own the reseller platform. Stubhub is the largest in this category. >There is nothing convenient about their convenience fees and they aren't innovating to benefit customers (or artists to be honest) You're pretending the goal here is not to maximize artist profit. Theres a lot that the artist could demand to fix all of these problems. They don't

shmatt 4y ago

An artist can demand no resale of tickets, and ID check at the door (TM tickets have the buyers name printed on them), LCD Soundsystem has done this when their fans got angry at a similar scenario. Swift hasn't. And probably won't in the future, thats the gist of it. TM claimed (and I have no reason to not believe them) they got 5 billion requests when tickets went live. So you break up the monopoly and Swift can now sign with a different ticket seller next tour. Which other website will handle the 5 billion requests properly? Without hours of queues or random raffles? Fans are lucky the TM website didn't completely shut down for 2 days because of the traffic As long as the tickets are sellable, as long as people will pay more for a ticket than a new car, people (even diehard fans) will resell

justinlkarr 4y ago
This varies by US state. In some states - including New York - it is illegal to prohibit transfer of tickets and therefore illegal to prohibit resale.
- lostgame 4y ago
  Makes sense. What if someone close to you passes away or you get COVID or something and you can't go? That money is just wasted? :/
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    More fundamentally: once you buy the ticket, it's yours. It should be your decision to resell it if you choose, for any reason. It's a "First sale doctrine" sort of thing in my mind.
ticviking 4y ago
The lure of being the competitor who can handle that traffic will bring some competition. In the meantime some entry level competitors who we could use for local scene ticketing and give a better share to the artists would open breathing room in the market for early career artists and smaller venues to put performances on in 3rd and 4th tier cities.

ineedasername 4y ago

Am I the only one who took it as a potential publicity stunt? Plenty of lukewarm fans on the bubble probably saw all this and are drawn into the whole vapid drama of it all. Even if it was purely accidental, the incentives that ensuing PR brings when it happens mean there’s not going to be much concern about fixing things. Sure you could argue that antitrust attention is bad for them, but what’s the realistic outcome there? Lip service punditry, maybe even a congressional hearing! And nothing. Not many politicians are going to wast limited political capital against a fleeting issue their base won’t care about in a month from now.

deleted 4y ago
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samiam_iam 4y ago

vlad 4y ago

> The problem, as this new generation of fans is learning, isn’t just that Ticketmaster is a bad system. The problem is Ticketmaster is the only system. It’s a monopoly. More competition might reduce fees, but won't turn ticketing sites into state lotteries. Just like some domain name registrars, these sites provide a service but also benefit from powering the technology.

justinlkarr 4y ago

At the risk of being obvious, I don't think that is what Stoller is saying. I think he is saying it is a tech problem whose root cause is a monopoly problem (leading to long-term underinvestment). This one caught TM sideways, clearly, and something scaled badly. I'm hoping we get a good technical post-mortem at some point. But nailing on-sales is one of Ticketmaster's main value props for clients. As they say, nobody got fired for having Ticketmaster sell their tickets. I've been on the inside for very successful high-demand on-sales run by the TM VerifiedFan team. They worked.

angryasian 4y ago
>(leading to long-term underinvestment). Even Google and Amazon struggle on huge black friday events. This is ridiculous.

passwordoops 4y ago

General comment on the "I don't see consumer harm because prices aren't that high" argument. It fails to capture the true danger of monopoly, namely: -lack of competition leads to lack of innovation (Stoller's argument) -lack of innovation results in less spending on R&D -less innovation means the most efficient way to maximize profit is to find "efficiencies" in the business -those "efficiencies" manifest as: -less spending on R&D because there is no need; -lower salaries to employees; -fewer employees overall; -worse quality: -Squeeze suppliers and contractors, putting more pressure across the board to consolidate and reinforcing the Cycle across the entire chain If left unchecked (as the "consumer harm" doctrine has for the past 40 years or so), the results are: -overall concentration of power and wealth -greater wealth disparities -less investment and innovation -fewer choices that provide worse consumer experience This pattern has been pretty well documented across many industries, from shipping to cheerleading

TheRealPomax 4y ago

This is one of those examples where we all know how bad it is, we all know they run a scam, have a monopoly, etc. etc. and yet we keep letting them do what they do because the US stopped caring about its antitrust laws pretty much after the whole AT&T thing. In fact, if anything the idea of each market segment having one top player buying up anyone who gets big enough to cut into revenue has become aspirational and admired as much if not more than it was in the Gekko days.

masukomi 4y ago

speaking as someone who literally worked on a bot mitigation project for Ticketmaster: They have an effing HUGE tech problem. The site crashing isn't because of "demand for the tickets" at least not by normal people's definition. It's not that there's really "There is much more demand for these tickets than there are supply of tickets" as matai_kolila suggested here. Ticketmaster's problem is very much that there are huge bot swarms attacking it for every popular ticket sale, because reselling tickets is WAY more profitable, than pointing a few thousand bots at it for a few hours. Anyone who's tried to order tickets from ticketmaster in the past decade knows that it's a massive pain in the ass of hurdle jumping. That hurdle jumping has nothing to do with the humans attempting to buy tickets. It's bot mitigation. It is not in ticketmaster's interest to facilitate scalping. 1. they don't profit from it. (no $) 2. humans blame them for it. (bad pr) 3. artists blame them for it (potential loss of $) now, they've got a bunch of stadiums lock in to literal hundred year contracts so, to some degree they're safe financially as far as big performances go because those artists can't go anywhere _other_ than the stadiums they have locked down. Practically speaking Taylor Swift can't perform at your local bar and announce it. A) there'd be a mob. B) it wouldn't be profitable enough for anything other than just testing out songs. > Why was Ticketmaster’s system so poorly structured? I can't say that it is or is not poorly structured. I can say, that regardless of how good of a job Ticketmaster's devs do, they are fighting an unwinnable war. All they can do is gain and loose a little ground against the bot makers every round. This post was obviously written by someone with no clue of the existence, or significance, of the technological warfare Ticketmaster is constantly involved it. To be clear, I am, in no way, commenting on the practices of the company, or their business decisions. I am ONLY saying that they have a HUGE tech problem and when the site goes down or is otherwise effed, it is a _very_ safe bet, that it has nothing to do with the humans trying to buy tickets.