8 ms·

Why I Hate Buying Tickets

56 points by nickpersico 14y ago

brackin 14y ago
Sadly there's very little space for startups to fix this. Live Nation/Ticket Master have a monopoly. I'm not sure how on earth they were allowed to merge. It's like merging all of the record labels with Apple/iTunes. Yes, you can buy tickets on other sites but there's very little space for innovation and they hold the key, if they don't want you to do something innovative they can stop you and if you do succeed you're still funding your competitor.
- nickpersico 14y ago
  Well, it seems that no one likes a monopoly. It would be a pretty compelling mission for anyone who attempts it. :-)
  - lisper 14y ago
    The problem is that it's very hard to penetrate Ticketmaster's market because of the sneaky way they maintain their monopoly. They offer large up-front payments (a.k.a. bribes) to venues in exchange the exclusive rights to sell tickets to events at those venues over the Internet. Ticketmaster than passes those costs on to the consumer. It is not unlike the way in which credit card companies maintain their monopoly by offering "deals" (miles, cash back, whatever, it all amounts to the same thing: bribes) to consumers to use their cards and then extract the costs of those bribes from the merchants who end up passing the costs back to the consumers. Credit card rules until recently have forbidden merchants from passing those costs on selectivey to credit card users, so the net result is essentially that credit cards users are subsidized by non-users, which provides a strong incentive for people to use credit cards, which maintains the monopoly. It's an underhanded strategy IMHO. But it's also quite effective.
    - rhizome 14y ago
      I think perhaps an angle to this would be that venues that have received tax dollars should not be allowed to sign these exclusive agreements.
- michaelt 14y ago
  In my country, ticketing is per-venue. So if I want to go see an act at venue A, I go to their website and book from there. Acts' websites have lists of venues and dates, and direct people to the venues' websites to book. Most venues - at least the ones hosting things I attend - are independent of one another. This doesn't seem like a natural monopoly to me - a new startup can sign up venues one at a time. Is the situation different in America?
  - austenallred 14y ago
    That was the situation, but they all signed with TicketMaster because TicketMaster had the best point of sale software for tickets. Technically ticketing is still per-venue and they are independent, they just all use TicketMaster. This isn't always 100% true, as some venues have similar owners, but that's a bit beside the point.
- austenallred 14y ago
  I think you're slightly mistaken there. The merger that created this monopoly was TicketMaster and TicketsNow. TicketsNow was one of the largest names in the secondary market (what most people will commonly refer to as brokers and scalpers), where TicketMaster and LiveNation were both primary ticketing suppliers. The National Association of Ticket Brokers have been lobbying against this as a vertical monopoly, and have shown significant evidence that TicketMaster, when under contract to sell tickets at a certain price, will sell first to TicketsNow and then sell them at the market value on TicketsNow. They've lost a lot of money in law suits as a result and will continue to do so. TicketMaster and LiveNation did merge in 2010, but that would be more like Apple and Google merging than Apple and iTunes.
  - brackin 14y ago
    I'm not talking about Apple and iTunes merging but Live Nation (That owns the rights to the musicians and puts on the shows) and Ticket Master, who sells the tickets).
  - brucehart 14y ago
    I was under the impression that TicketsNow had very little market share. Aren't (EBay owned) StubHub, EBay and Craigslist the major players in the secondary market (excluding scalpers at the event)? I have college basketball season tickets and my online account is integrated with TicketsNow (one click to electronically list my tickets to any game). I've tried using it as a seller and have had no interest in my tickets. The same tickets usually sell within a few days on StubHub. As a buyer, I have checked TicketsNow on occasion and rarely find any tickets available for the event. One time I did find a great deal: 5th row center court tickets to a sold out game at face value. I think I got them because no other buyers had looked on the site.
    - austenallred 14y ago
      It depends on if you're a consumer or a broker. If you're a consumer, sure, StubHub and CL will probably do the best for you, but that's because you're not a broker. I'll definitely make some brokers angry by explaining this, but there are a few ticketing networks, the largest being TicketNetwork (TN). TN is a SaaS play that costs somewhere in the $2500/year range, and goes up or down depending on which services you need. If I'm a broker I can simply get on TicketNetwork and list my tickets. We'll say I bought a ticket for $50 and I want to sell it for $100. I put it on the network at $100. TicketNetwork automatically updates it so that it's selling on your site for $100. Since it's on the network every other ticket broker has access to it, and they resell it for different amounts (standard is your price + 20%). So another ticket broker in my city would try to sell the ticket for $120 - they pay me $100, and I dropship it directly to the customer with a white-label packing slip. There are about 800 brokers on the network at any given time and about $1 Billion in inventory. Some won't sell, most will. The affiliate payout in the ticket industry is among the highest, since it's super high margins. As a broker it's great, because as soon as you throw a ticket on the network you have 800 people trying to sell your ticket. But not just anyone can be on the Network - you have to pay a pretty penny for that opportunity, that keeps people like you out. Where TicketsNow makes most of its money is in the selling. They have excellent marketing, great affiliates, and they are selling an absurd amount of tickets. They let you post your tickets on TicketsNow, but that's not where the real money is made, the real money is in selling other brokers' tickets that are much higher margins.
kenjackson 14y ago
I'm in the US but I recently bought tickets via Ticketmaster to a show in Canada. I was going to order parking too, but they wanted to charge $30 to ship the parking passes. One sheet of paper to ship 200 miles, cost $30? And no option to print it out. Feels like it should be illegal.
- nickpersico 14y ago
  Agreed.
jack7890 14y ago
I run a ticket startup (SeatGeek) and thus have some familiarity with the industry. In response to to the proposed solutions: "Someone Needs To Create A New Ticketing Platform" Creating it is one thing. Getting venues to agree to use it is much, much harder. Venues usually sign long-term (5-10 year) contracts with Ticketmaster to make them their exclusive ticket platform. These contracts usually include a large upfront payment from Ticktmaster to the venue. Given that LiveNation is the by far the biggest promoter in the US, it would be an enormous risk for a venue to forsake Ticketmaster and go with an alternative. "Venues/Artists Need To Ditch The Big Guys" See the above. Pearl Jam rather famously tried this in the mid-1990's, with disastrous results (http://goo.gl/xJItB http://goo.gl/xJItB). Not playing in Ticketmaster venues forced them into the netherlands of American live music venues. "All-Inclusive Pricing Model" To Ticketmaster's credit, they're getting a lot better at this, but they still have a way to go. It's worth noting that the majority of the fees that the author complains about are not kept by Ticketmaster; they are kicked back to the event promoter. The promoter does this so that they can advertise low face values (appearing fan-friendly) while maintaining margins. "Offer More Music/Merchandise + Ticket Packages" This is a bit of a non-sequitur. The author writes the entire article from the perspective of making ticket buying better, and then throws this in "for the content creators." It will indeed make more money for artists, assuming it doesn't hurt conversion rate (which it does) but strong-arming consumers into buying more stuff when they purchase tickets doesn't seem fan-friendly to me. "Forget Everything I Just Wrote, We Should All Learn From Louis C.K." Totally impractical. Louis C.K. could pull this off because he performs at comedy clubs. If you're Coldplay...not an option (see above). There's no question that ticketing needs reformation. But this is an industry (like payment processing) where considering change from a detached, naive perspective is fruitless. It's important to understand the intricacies before avenues for upheaval can be found.
- austenallred 14y ago
  This is a great explanation (greetings from a former founder of Stubtopia - I met some SeatGeek guys at TicketNetwork tradeshows, but can't be sure if it was you). By my estimation the next big chance for a software company to go after ticketmaster would be in 2015 - a lot of major venues expire, but it would be extremely difficult. You'd have to have an entire ticketing platform already built, which to build one as robust as ticketmaster would be extremely expensive, but then there's no guarantee venues will sign with you. Venues generally have no incentive to work with anyone other than TicketMaster, especially since the LiveNation merger. Basically all you have to do if you're a venue is plug into the TicketMaster platform and everything else is taken care of - from the ticketing to the promoting and the entire point of sale mess online. Reality is as a consumer you will keep taking it in the shorts for some time - TicketMaster is a 1000 pound gorilla that will be very difficult to knock off. I've talked with dozens of would-be TicketMaster competitors over the years, and they all end up going after different markets where they can get more bang for their buck. But even in smaller/different markets you have the likes of Paceolan.
zbowling 14y ago
The dirty secret is that many of these "fees" are actually from the venues and performers. TicketMaster and others are actually taking the heat as the bad guys on behalf of the venues and performers. We hate on TicketMaster and we can put the blame all on them (and the artists and venues sometimes even guide us to do so). But if it's so bad then why do they keep using TicketMaster? Surely I'm not buying a ticket to a performance only because I can find it on the TicketMaster web page or box office right? They don't really offer anything substantial over the buying experience I can get anywhere else so the monopoly argument is silly (although they do have a good patent portfolio it's not anything can't innovate around). It's simply because they will take the heat for them when the artists and venues want to tack on extra fees. That is not say TicketMaster's fees are not high but most of the "extra fees" are extras from the venues and performers. The same goes with Fandango. You think that extra $1 for buying a ticket online Fandangos fee?? Nope. It's the fee for the movie theatre wants. I've worked in this ticketing industry in a previous startup so I understand the game well. It's not really crazy the stuff that gets pulled.
- rhizome 14y ago
  So you're saying that maybe a law could be passed to identify these kickbacks. Think of an ingredients list on food packaging, where all portions of the fee are accounted for up front.
  - zbowling 14y ago
    Well the fees are actually not really "kickbacks" but really just normal fees with standard crazy markups that are vague on who actually gets the money. They aren't required to list out who makes what money on things. They are just not allowed to lie and commit fraud and they do make sure to stay inside those bounds. "General processing fee" is really just a processing fee as it sounds (but it doesn't say who gets the money, why does that mater? they are not committing fraud by claiming something it isn't). They have a right to tack on any fees they want and you have the right not to buy it. They could put a fee on there at checkout for making a purchase on a full moon. Whatever, it doesn't mater. Now if they are charging you for fees after you make the purchase of a product or service, you do have some consumer protections but not when they are tacking them on up front. You are buying a ticket and how the money is used isn't really something that isn't provided. Your only real right as a consumer is to buy or not buy. If you want more info about how money is spent and they won't provide it you have the right to not buy it but you can't force private businesses to be publicly audited.
cdcarter 14y ago
The problem has so many facets it's hard to count. Where to start? a) charging by subscription instead of by transaction. This is nice. This is a great idea for patron happiness. Unfortunately the patron isn't the customer at a ticketing agent. The customer is the presenter/promoter or venue. As a patron, I don't NOT buy Japandroids tickets because TicketMaster is the ticketing agent. This plan causes the ticketing agency to almost assuredly lose money or customers (price too low they lose money, price too high they lose smaller venues). b) The "big guys" are also probably that artist's promoter, or they own the venue. LN/TM promote most big names and own a good portion of the venues. It's vertical. c) No band wants their promoter or agent to deal with merch. Merch is where a lot of the money comes in at the venue, and they want as much control of that as possible. Most venues already require a certain percentage of merch sales be given back in settlement. The only way to make this work would be for the label or artist to sell the merch package ahead of time with a voucher for tickets to be used at the agent. It doesn't help that ticketing a very large likely to sell out show is HARD. It doesn't help that convenience charges are accepted in the industry and quite frankly, if you're a venue that runs a hard box office with an online agent, you love that they charge a convenience fee. The only real solution without major disruption by a major act leaving the LN/TM world is for TM to show final price, and have all the settlement be secret. I honestly would prefer to see the fees as they break down, so I know how much is going to the box office settlement.
- cdcarter 14y ago
  I think the place for a great disruptive startup would be at the promoter level. It's not something that you can just throw a lot of tech at, but at this point LN seems a lot more disruptable than TM.
nickpersico 14y ago
Thanks for the great insight guys! Are the promoters/venues adding these fees because their Ticketmaster contract forces them to do it? Or are they doing it because the industry allows them to do so. What's their opinion towards it?
hncommenter13 14y ago
There is lots of useful and interesting detail about how the ticketing industry works in this thread, and I certainly sympathize with the post's complaint. But I'd like to briefly (and mildly) chastise the idea for a more abstract reason, if you'll indulge me. The post advocates starting a company in order to build and sell a new software application. If this resembles every other business app I've ever written or used, the developer will quickly run into a complex set of rules and requirements that is almost impossible to fully anticipate or characterize a priori. The motivation for doing so is admittedly egregious fees charged by an incumbent vendor. Imagine one is successful in building the app, despite all of the unforeseeable obstacles. All the incumbent would have to do is lower its prices, either accepting slightly lower margins to maintain the fee pass-thru to its partners or eliminating such fees as the hypothetical startup would do. In other words, the proposal is to dedicate years of effort to a problem in order to compete on price by 10-25%. This is generally a losing proposition. If one can achieve a 90% lower price for the same or slightly better functionality that an incumbent will find difficult to match (the famed 10x price/performance improvement), then one may have something sufficient to build a business around, depending on how difficult/capital intensive it is to create the product--ignoring all of the other barriers to adoption that exist in this or another industry. But faced with a narrow price-performance improvement, incumbents can either lower prices or, if it's a functional improvement, invest a similar or lesser amount of capital (they already have employees, a brand name, a salesforce, etc. that a startup would have to build from scratch) to match to the feature set. Don't get me wrong: I don't want to talk anyone out of the desire to start a company, to improve a process or an application, or to return excess profits to the consumer in the form of lower prices. But part of being a successful entrepreneur is picking the right battles and bringing an unfair advantage to bear against tough competition, something I and many others still struggle to achieve. In this case, I don't see the unfair advantage or the 10x improvement, and I think we should challenge each other to be hard-nosed realists about where we focus our collective entrepreneurial talents.
- wpietri 14y ago
  Excellent analysis. But I think you've missed an important point. Unfortunately, the real customers in this market aren't the people buying the tickets, because they aren't the ones deciding whether or not Ticketmaster gets the gig. Ticket-buyers are the veal. If you want to displace Ticketmaster, you need to find something that's 10x better for the venue, not the buyer. Or you need to find a way to disrupt the venue/artist relationship sufficiently that the venue's choices don't matter.
pud 14y ago
> 23.8% Of My Ticket Price Were Charges & Fees 23.8% of the cost of your Big Mac is also charges and fees. The fact is, people don't like transparency when it comes to pricing. You'd rather not know how much the wholesale price is when paying retail. I believe artists & venues force TicketMaster to show you the wholesale price. TicketMaster would likely prefer you didn't know their profit margin, like almost every other company you buy things from.
- mst 14y ago
  > 23.8% of the cost of your Big Mac is also charges and fees ... people don't like transparency when it comes to pricing. In the UK, the sticker price is what you pay at the till. To my knowledge, in the US the sticker price plus a known, standard percentage of sales tax is what you pay at the till. I still don't really understand why US places don't include sales tax like we include VAT.
  - blahedo 14y ago
    > I still don't really understand why US places don't include sales tax like we include VAT. A lot of people seem to be under the impression (false as far as I can tell, in every jurisdiction that I know of) that businesses are legally required to list only the price excluding tax. I have had many, many people give me this explanation when I've complained about this. (They often follow it up with a disparaging comment about the nanny-state government.) I suppose it's possible that that's true someplace, although I think it's unlikely as 1st Amendment provisions should at least make it possible to list both. But true or not, it's at least a widely held belief.
    - waterlesscloud 14y ago
      Some businesses include tax in the price. Vending machines, for example. Bars often do too. Movie tickets. Clearly it's not illegal.
- rwallace 14y ago
  It's not the transparency that annoyed him, it's the slow reveal. If the site announced upfront that the total price is $60, and provided a footnote with a breakdown of where the money goes, that would be fine. General rule, don't tell customers "oh by the way the price will be twenty percent higher than we said it would be." If you're going to piss people off, do it for more money than that.
ams6110 14y ago
I for one don't begrudge these fees at all. What's the alternative? Go down to the venue (driving, parking) and stand in line at the box office? My time is worth something.... I think these fees are more than fair. It's not really about what it costs TicketMaster to do this stuff, it's about what it's worth to the buyer.
- dagw 14y ago
  It's not so much the fees, but the way the pricing information is presented that piss people off. If you went to the ticketing site, got told that tickets where $60 each, bought 4 tickets and got charged $240 I doubt most people would complain. But if you're told tickets are $45 each and then all of a sudden get charged $240 for 4 tickets that's when people get annoyed.
dooq 14y ago
Brown Paper Tickets is excellent up-and-coming ticketing company that I've used multiple times for alternative events in the pacific northwest. I'd love to see more companies take on the ticketmaster empire. https://www.brownpapertickets.com https://www.brownpapertickets.com
- omrim 14y ago
  I'm in the PNW as well, but not too fond of Brown Paper Tickets. One company that I believed in was Bookr - they took away the ticketing fees (well actually they bundled it into a final price... so it was 'hidden'). They were working with local venues to give customers a clear price for the tickets they paid for. Unfortunately Bookr didn't make it :(
Wingman4l7 14y ago
Wired had a good piece about companies going after Ticketmaster, back in November 2010: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/11/mf_ticketmaster/ http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/11/mf_ticketmaster/
guelo 14y ago
Ticketmaster and Comcast alternate as the #1 and #2 most hated companies in consumer surveys year after year. But it doesn't seem to matter, their monopolies have been stable for many years. I thought maybe the acquisition by Live Nation would help with Ticketmaster abuses but there haven't been many changes. Unless the government steps in it looks like this will be the state of affairs for a long time.
mjw 14y ago
You probably guessed this but: promoters often have deals whereby they get a cut of the ticketing agency fees, say in exchange for exclusivity. So really the distinction presented to the consumer between fees and the face price of the ticket is all a bit bogus. And that's before you look into the sort of practices around tickets being released by the agency to a secondary ticket vendor (perhaps one which they own...) and sold on at great markup with a cut going back to the agency and perhaps even back to the promoter. I suspect the problem is that while the author is happy to pay $60 all-inclusive with no questions asked, a lot of live music fans are young-ish and on the kind of budget where it isn't an easy decision to spend $60 on a night's entertainment. You might persuade them to pay, but harder if you put them off with a big upfront ticket price than if you spring it on them in hidden extras. I'm sure ticketmaster have done their research and wouldn't be doing it this way if it didn't increase their revenue, and that promoters wouldn't be using them if these tactics didn't improve theirs. Also part of the problem is that there's this social pressure in the music industry around fans and ticket pricing and around artists 'selling out'. In the open market, tickets for big shows are usually worth a lot more than the face price, but promoters (or at least, artists) are reluctant to be seen to capture all that value because of the negative PR involved. A lot of people have wanted to see Ticketmaster taken down a peg for a long time. It's probably easier to do if you limit yourself to small-to-mid-size gigs, independent artists etc, and there are already some great non-abusive ticketing agencies in this space for example http://www.wegottickets.com http://www.wegottickets.com ...
paulsutter 14y ago
Maybe the way to change the model is to start with small bands/shows/venues. Get the model working well for them, and gradually work they way up. Spotify and Pandora know what obscure bands are popular near every small venue. Booking managers should have access to this data to decide what bands to book. Once they've booked a show, they should be able to promote the shows back to the exact Pandora or Spotify users that like the bands, perhaps using realtime bidding on an ad exchange (since users are rarely watching the Pandora or Spotify pages). I listen a hundred plus bands via streaming. I dont even know their names, much less when they play nearby. A system like this could increase the number of small shows, and make it possible for more musicians to make a living as musicains. Start with the little guys first, eventually you can work your way up to dethrone Ticketmaster.
droithomme 14y ago
I read the article. Here is my summary: "Blah blah blah, and then I bought the tickets because the price was worth it to me." Well OK then. That means they are pricing things correctly. Should, someday, these stories ever change to "Blah blah blah, and then I cancelled the order and did something else with my time that day because the cost was not acceptable to me", then perhaps something would change if enough people actually did this. But as long as there are sold out shows, prices, and even fees, should be increased, not decreased. Sold out shows means you are not charging enough.
crazygringo 14y ago
The U.S. passed a law saying that displayed airline tickets on sites (expedia.com, etc.) have to include all fees. That was a great thing, because suddenly you could accurately compare between sites that included and didn't include the fees up-front. Seems to me that ticket purchases would be another great area to pass a law saying advertised prices must reflect all fees. It won't stop them from charging them, but at least they'll "feel" built-in, rather than feeling like a bait-and-switch. Heck, no companies should be allowed to display prices that don't include minimum mandatory fees. (Except for sales tax, since people expect that.) It's kind of ridiculous they can get away with it in the first place.
- cdcarter 14y ago
  The fees are only levied online, not at the hard box office. So the promoter can advertise the ticket price, and the ticketing agent adds fees.

56 points by nickpersico 14y ago

Sadly there's very little space for startups to fix this. Live Nation/Ticket Master have a monopoly. I'm not sure how on earth they were allowed to merge. It's like merging all of the record labels with Apple/iTunes. Yes, you can buy tickets on other sites but there's very little space for innovation and they hold the key, if they don't want you to do something innovative they can stop you and if you do succeed you're still funding your competitor.

nickpersico 14y ago
Well, it seems that no one likes a monopoly. It would be a pretty compelling mission for anyone who attempts it. :-)
- lisper 14y ago
  The problem is that it's very hard to penetrate Ticketmaster's market because of the sneaky way they maintain their monopoly. They offer large up-front payments (a.k.a. bribes) to venues in exchange the exclusive rights to sell tickets to events at those venues over the Internet. Ticketmaster than passes those costs on to the consumer. It is not unlike the way in which credit card companies maintain their monopoly by offering "deals" (miles, cash back, whatever, it all amounts to the same thing: bribes) to consumers to use their cards and then extract the costs of those bribes from the merchants who end up passing the costs back to the consumers. Credit card rules until recently have forbidden merchants from passing those costs on selectivey to credit card users, so the net result is essentially that credit cards users are subsidized by non-users, which provides a strong incentive for people to use credit cards, which maintains the monopoly. It's an underhanded strategy IMHO. But it's also quite effective.
  - rhizome 14y ago
    I think perhaps an angle to this would be that venues that have received tax dollars should not be allowed to sign these exclusive agreements.
michaelt 14y ago
In my country, ticketing is per-venue. So if I want to go see an act at venue A, I go to their website and book from there. Acts' websites have lists of venues and dates, and direct people to the venues' websites to book. Most venues - at least the ones hosting things I attend - are independent of one another. This doesn't seem like a natural monopoly to me - a new startup can sign up venues one at a time. Is the situation different in America?
- austenallred 14y ago
  That was the situation, but they all signed with TicketMaster because TicketMaster had the best point of sale software for tickets. Technically ticketing is still per-venue and they are independent, they just all use TicketMaster. This isn't always 100% true, as some venues have similar owners, but that's a bit beside the point.
austenallred 14y ago
I think you're slightly mistaken there. The merger that created this monopoly was TicketMaster and TicketsNow. TicketsNow was one of the largest names in the secondary market (what most people will commonly refer to as brokers and scalpers), where TicketMaster and LiveNation were both primary ticketing suppliers. The National Association of Ticket Brokers have been lobbying against this as a vertical monopoly, and have shown significant evidence that TicketMaster, when under contract to sell tickets at a certain price, will sell first to TicketsNow and then sell them at the market value on TicketsNow. They've lost a lot of money in law suits as a result and will continue to do so. TicketMaster and LiveNation did merge in 2010, but that would be more like Apple and Google merging than Apple and iTunes.
- brackin 14y ago
  I'm not talking about Apple and iTunes merging but Live Nation (That owns the rights to the musicians and puts on the shows) and Ticket Master, who sells the tickets).
- brucehart 14y ago
  I was under the impression that TicketsNow had very little market share. Aren't (EBay owned) StubHub, EBay and Craigslist the major players in the secondary market (excluding scalpers at the event)? I have college basketball season tickets and my online account is integrated with TicketsNow (one click to electronically list my tickets to any game). I've tried using it as a seller and have had no interest in my tickets. The same tickets usually sell within a few days on StubHub. As a buyer, I have checked TicketsNow on occasion and rarely find any tickets available for the event. One time I did find a great deal: 5th row center court tickets to a sold out game at face value. I think I got them because no other buyers had looked on the site.
  - austenallred 14y ago
    It depends on if you're a consumer or a broker. If you're a consumer, sure, StubHub and CL will probably do the best for you, but that's because you're not a broker. I'll definitely make some brokers angry by explaining this, but there are a few ticketing networks, the largest being TicketNetwork (TN). TN is a SaaS play that costs somewhere in the $2500/year range, and goes up or down depending on which services you need. If I'm a broker I can simply get on TicketNetwork and list my tickets. We'll say I bought a ticket for $50 and I want to sell it for $100. I put it on the network at $100. TicketNetwork automatically updates it so that it's selling on your site for $100. Since it's on the network every other ticket broker has access to it, and they resell it for different amounts (standard is your price + 20%). So another ticket broker in my city would try to sell the ticket for $120 - they pay me $100, and I dropship it directly to the customer with a white-label packing slip. There are about 800 brokers on the network at any given time and about $1 Billion in inventory. Some won't sell, most will. The affiliate payout in the ticket industry is among the highest, since it's super high margins. As a broker it's great, because as soon as you throw a ticket on the network you have 800 people trying to sell your ticket. But not just anyone can be on the Network - you have to pay a pretty penny for that opportunity, that keeps people like you out. Where TicketsNow makes most of its money is in the selling. They have excellent marketing, great affiliates, and they are selling an absurd amount of tickets. They let you post your tickets on TicketsNow, but that's not where the real money is made, the real money is in selling other brokers' tickets that are much higher margins.

kenjackson 14y ago

I'm in the US but I recently bought tickets via Ticketmaster to a show in Canada. I was going to order parking too, but they wanted to charge $30 to ship the parking passes. One sheet of paper to ship 200 miles, cost $30? And no option to print it out. Feels like it should be illegal.

nickpersico 14y ago
Agreed.

jack7890 14y ago

I run a ticket startup (SeatGeek) and thus have some familiarity with the industry. In response to to the proposed solutions: "Someone Needs To Create A New Ticketing Platform" Creating it is one thing. Getting venues to agree to use it is much, much harder. Venues usually sign long-term (5-10 year) contracts with Ticketmaster to make them their exclusive ticket platform. These contracts usually include a large upfront payment from Ticktmaster to the venue. Given that LiveNation is the by far the biggest promoter in the US, it would be an enormous risk for a venue to forsake Ticketmaster and go with an alternative. "Venues/Artists Need To Ditch The Big Guys" See the above. Pearl Jam rather famously tried this in the mid-1990's, with disastrous results (http://goo.gl/xJItB http://goo.gl/xJItB). Not playing in Ticketmaster venues forced them into the netherlands of American live music venues. "All-Inclusive Pricing Model" To Ticketmaster's credit, they're getting a lot better at this, but they still have a way to go. It's worth noting that the majority of the fees that the author complains about are not kept by Ticketmaster; they are kicked back to the event promoter. The promoter does this so that they can advertise low face values (appearing fan-friendly) while maintaining margins. "Offer More Music/Merchandise + Ticket Packages" This is a bit of a non-sequitur. The author writes the entire article from the perspective of making ticket buying better, and then throws this in "for the content creators." It will indeed make more money for artists, assuming it doesn't hurt conversion rate (which it does) but strong-arming consumers into buying more stuff when they purchase tickets doesn't seem fan-friendly to me. "Forget Everything I Just Wrote, We Should All Learn From Louis C.K." Totally impractical. Louis C.K. could pull this off because he performs at comedy clubs. If you're Coldplay...not an option (see above). There's no question that ticketing needs reformation. But this is an industry (like payment processing) where considering change from a detached, naive perspective is fruitless. It's important to understand the intricacies before avenues for upheaval can be found.

austenallred 14y ago
This is a great explanation (greetings from a former founder of Stubtopia - I met some SeatGeek guys at TicketNetwork tradeshows, but can't be sure if it was you). By my estimation the next big chance for a software company to go after ticketmaster would be in 2015 - a lot of major venues expire, but it would be extremely difficult. You'd have to have an entire ticketing platform already built, which to build one as robust as ticketmaster would be extremely expensive, but then there's no guarantee venues will sign with you. Venues generally have no incentive to work with anyone other than TicketMaster, especially since the LiveNation merger. Basically all you have to do if you're a venue is plug into the TicketMaster platform and everything else is taken care of - from the ticketing to the promoting and the entire point of sale mess online. Reality is as a consumer you will keep taking it in the shorts for some time - TicketMaster is a 1000 pound gorilla that will be very difficult to knock off. I've talked with dozens of would-be TicketMaster competitors over the years, and they all end up going after different markets where they can get more bang for their buck. But even in smaller/different markets you have the likes of Paceolan.

zbowling 14y ago

The dirty secret is that many of these "fees" are actually from the venues and performers. TicketMaster and others are actually taking the heat as the bad guys on behalf of the venues and performers. We hate on TicketMaster and we can put the blame all on them (and the artists and venues sometimes even guide us to do so). But if it's so bad then why do they keep using TicketMaster? Surely I'm not buying a ticket to a performance only because I can find it on the TicketMaster web page or box office right? They don't really offer anything substantial over the buying experience I can get anywhere else so the monopoly argument is silly (although they do have a good patent portfolio it's not anything can't innovate around). It's simply because they will take the heat for them when the artists and venues want to tack on extra fees. That is not say TicketMaster's fees are not high but most of the "extra fees" are extras from the venues and performers. The same goes with Fandango. You think that extra $1 for buying a ticket online Fandangos fee?? Nope. It's the fee for the movie theatre wants. I've worked in this ticketing industry in a previous startup so I understand the game well. It's not really crazy the stuff that gets pulled.

rhizome 14y ago
So you're saying that maybe a law could be passed to identify these kickbacks. Think of an ingredients list on food packaging, where all portions of the fee are accounted for up front.
- zbowling 14y ago
  Well the fees are actually not really "kickbacks" but really just normal fees with standard crazy markups that are vague on who actually gets the money. They aren't required to list out who makes what money on things. They are just not allowed to lie and commit fraud and they do make sure to stay inside those bounds. "General processing fee" is really just a processing fee as it sounds (but it doesn't say who gets the money, why does that mater? they are not committing fraud by claiming something it isn't). They have a right to tack on any fees they want and you have the right not to buy it. They could put a fee on there at checkout for making a purchase on a full moon. Whatever, it doesn't mater. Now if they are charging you for fees after you make the purchase of a product or service, you do have some consumer protections but not when they are tacking them on up front. You are buying a ticket and how the money is used isn't really something that isn't provided. Your only real right as a consumer is to buy or not buy. If you want more info about how money is spent and they won't provide it you have the right to not buy it but you can't force private businesses to be publicly audited.

cdcarter 14y ago

The problem has so many facets it's hard to count. Where to start? a) charging by subscription instead of by transaction. This is nice. This is a great idea for patron happiness. Unfortunately the patron isn't the customer at a ticketing agent. The customer is the presenter/promoter or venue. As a patron, I don't NOT buy Japandroids tickets because TicketMaster is the ticketing agent. This plan causes the ticketing agency to almost assuredly lose money or customers (price too low they lose money, price too high they lose smaller venues). b) The "big guys" are also probably that artist's promoter, or they own the venue. LN/TM promote most big names and own a good portion of the venues. It's vertical. c) No band wants their promoter or agent to deal with merch. Merch is where a lot of the money comes in at the venue, and they want as much control of that as possible. Most venues already require a certain percentage of merch sales be given back in settlement. The only way to make this work would be for the label or artist to sell the merch package ahead of time with a voucher for tickets to be used at the agent. It doesn't help that ticketing a very large likely to sell out show is HARD. It doesn't help that convenience charges are accepted in the industry and quite frankly, if you're a venue that runs a hard box office with an online agent, you love that they charge a convenience fee. The only real solution without major disruption by a major act leaving the LN/TM world is for TM to show final price, and have all the settlement be secret. I honestly would prefer to see the fees as they break down, so I know how much is going to the box office settlement.

cdcarter 14y ago
I think the place for a great disruptive startup would be at the promoter level. It's not something that you can just throw a lot of tech at, but at this point LN seems a lot more disruptable than TM.

nickpersico 14y ago

Thanks for the great insight guys! Are the promoters/venues adding these fees because their Ticketmaster contract forces them to do it? Or are they doing it because the industry allows them to do so. What's their opinion towards it?

hncommenter13 14y ago

There is lots of useful and interesting detail about how the ticketing industry works in this thread, and I certainly sympathize with the post's complaint. But I'd like to briefly (and mildly) chastise the idea for a more abstract reason, if you'll indulge me. The post advocates starting a company in order to build and sell a new software application. If this resembles every other business app I've ever written or used, the developer will quickly run into a complex set of rules and requirements that is almost impossible to fully anticipate or characterize a priori. The motivation for doing so is admittedly egregious fees charged by an incumbent vendor. Imagine one is successful in building the app, despite all of the unforeseeable obstacles. All the incumbent would have to do is lower its prices, either accepting slightly lower margins to maintain the fee pass-thru to its partners or eliminating such fees as the hypothetical startup would do. In other words, the proposal is to dedicate years of effort to a problem in order to compete on price by 10-25%. This is generally a losing proposition. If one can achieve a 90% lower price for the same or slightly better functionality that an incumbent will find difficult to match (the famed 10x price/performance improvement), then one may have something sufficient to build a business around, depending on how difficult/capital intensive it is to create the product--ignoring all of the other barriers to adoption that exist in this or another industry. But faced with a narrow price-performance improvement, incumbents can either lower prices or, if it's a functional improvement, invest a similar or lesser amount of capital (they already have employees, a brand name, a salesforce, etc. that a startup would have to build from scratch) to match to the feature set. Don't get me wrong: I don't want to talk anyone out of the desire to start a company, to improve a process or an application, or to return excess profits to the consumer in the form of lower prices. But part of being a successful entrepreneur is picking the right battles and bringing an unfair advantage to bear against tough competition, something I and many others still struggle to achieve. In this case, I don't see the unfair advantage or the 10x improvement, and I think we should challenge each other to be hard-nosed realists about where we focus our collective entrepreneurial talents.

wpietri 14y ago
Excellent analysis. But I think you've missed an important point. Unfortunately, the real customers in this market aren't the people buying the tickets, because they aren't the ones deciding whether or not Ticketmaster gets the gig. Ticket-buyers are the veal. If you want to displace Ticketmaster, you need to find something that's 10x better for the venue, not the buyer. Or you need to find a way to disrupt the venue/artist relationship sufficiently that the venue's choices don't matter.

pud 14y ago

> 23.8% Of My Ticket Price Were Charges & Fees 23.8% of the cost of your Big Mac is also charges and fees. The fact is, people don't like transparency when it comes to pricing. You'd rather not know how much the wholesale price is when paying retail. I believe artists & venues force TicketMaster to show you the wholesale price. TicketMaster would likely prefer you didn't know their profit margin, like almost every other company you buy things from.

mst 14y ago
> 23.8% of the cost of your Big Mac is also charges and fees ... people don't like transparency when it comes to pricing. In the UK, the sticker price is what you pay at the till. To my knowledge, in the US the sticker price plus a known, standard percentage of sales tax is what you pay at the till. I still don't really understand why US places don't include sales tax like we include VAT.
- blahedo 14y ago
  > I still don't really understand why US places don't include sales tax like we include VAT. A lot of people seem to be under the impression (false as far as I can tell, in every jurisdiction that I know of) that businesses are legally required to list only the price excluding tax. I have had many, many people give me this explanation when I've complained about this. (They often follow it up with a disparaging comment about the nanny-state government.) I suppose it's possible that that's true someplace, although I think it's unlikely as 1st Amendment provisions should at least make it possible to list both. But true or not, it's at least a widely held belief.
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    Some businesses include tax in the price. Vending machines, for example. Bars often do too. Movie tickets. Clearly it's not illegal.
rwallace 14y ago
It's not the transparency that annoyed him, it's the slow reveal. If the site announced upfront that the total price is $60, and provided a footnote with a breakdown of where the money goes, that would be fine. General rule, don't tell customers "oh by the way the price will be twenty percent higher than we said it would be." If you're going to piss people off, do it for more money than that.

ams6110 14y ago

I for one don't begrudge these fees at all. What's the alternative? Go down to the venue (driving, parking) and stand in line at the box office? My time is worth something.... I think these fees are more than fair. It's not really about what it costs TicketMaster to do this stuff, it's about what it's worth to the buyer.

dagw 14y ago
It's not so much the fees, but the way the pricing information is presented that piss people off. If you went to the ticketing site, got told that tickets where $60 each, bought 4 tickets and got charged $240 I doubt most people would complain. But if you're told tickets are $45 each and then all of a sudden get charged $240 for 4 tickets that's when people get annoyed.

dooq 14y ago

Brown Paper Tickets is excellent up-and-coming ticketing company that I've used multiple times for alternative events in the pacific northwest. I'd love to see more companies take on the ticketmaster empire. https://www.brownpapertickets.com https://www.brownpapertickets.com

omrim 14y ago
I'm in the PNW as well, but not too fond of Brown Paper Tickets. One company that I believed in was Bookr - they took away the ticketing fees (well actually they bundled it into a final price... so it was 'hidden'). They were working with local venues to give customers a clear price for the tickets they paid for. Unfortunately Bookr didn't make it :(

Wingman4l7 14y ago

Wired had a good piece about companies going after Ticketmaster, back in November 2010: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/11/mf_ticketmaster/ http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/11/mf_ticketmaster/

guelo 14y ago

Ticketmaster and Comcast alternate as the #1 and #2 most hated companies in consumer surveys year after year. But it doesn't seem to matter, their monopolies have been stable for many years. I thought maybe the acquisition by Live Nation would help with Ticketmaster abuses but there haven't been many changes. Unless the government steps in it looks like this will be the state of affairs for a long time.

mjw 14y ago

You probably guessed this but: promoters often have deals whereby they get a cut of the ticketing agency fees, say in exchange for exclusivity. So really the distinction presented to the consumer between fees and the face price of the ticket is all a bit bogus. And that's before you look into the sort of practices around tickets being released by the agency to a secondary ticket vendor (perhaps one which they own...) and sold on at great markup with a cut going back to the agency and perhaps even back to the promoter. I suspect the problem is that while the author is happy to pay $60 all-inclusive with no questions asked, a lot of live music fans are young-ish and on the kind of budget where it isn't an easy decision to spend $60 on a night's entertainment. You might persuade them to pay, but harder if you put them off with a big upfront ticket price than if you spring it on them in hidden extras. I'm sure ticketmaster have done their research and wouldn't be doing it this way if it didn't increase their revenue, and that promoters wouldn't be using them if these tactics didn't improve theirs. Also part of the problem is that there's this social pressure in the music industry around fans and ticket pricing and around artists 'selling out'. In the open market, tickets for big shows are usually worth a lot more than the face price, but promoters (or at least, artists) are reluctant to be seen to capture all that value because of the negative PR involved. A lot of people have wanted to see Ticketmaster taken down a peg for a long time. It's probably easier to do if you limit yourself to small-to-mid-size gigs, independent artists etc, and there are already some great non-abusive ticketing agencies in this space for example http://www.wegottickets.com http://www.wegottickets.com ...

paulsutter 14y ago

Maybe the way to change the model is to start with small bands/shows/venues. Get the model working well for them, and gradually work they way up. Spotify and Pandora know what obscure bands are popular near every small venue. Booking managers should have access to this data to decide what bands to book. Once they've booked a show, they should be able to promote the shows back to the exact Pandora or Spotify users that like the bands, perhaps using realtime bidding on an ad exchange (since users are rarely watching the Pandora or Spotify pages). I listen a hundred plus bands via streaming. I dont even know their names, much less when they play nearby. A system like this could increase the number of small shows, and make it possible for more musicians to make a living as musicains. Start with the little guys first, eventually you can work your way up to dethrone Ticketmaster.

droithomme 14y ago

I read the article. Here is my summary: "Blah blah blah, and then I bought the tickets because the price was worth it to me." Well OK then. That means they are pricing things correctly. Should, someday, these stories ever change to "Blah blah blah, and then I cancelled the order and did something else with my time that day because the cost was not acceptable to me", then perhaps something would change if enough people actually did this. But as long as there are sold out shows, prices, and even fees, should be increased, not decreased. Sold out shows means you are not charging enough.

crazygringo 14y ago

The U.S. passed a law saying that displayed airline tickets on sites (expedia.com, etc.) have to include all fees. That was a great thing, because suddenly you could accurately compare between sites that included and didn't include the fees up-front. Seems to me that ticket purchases would be another great area to pass a law saying advertised prices must reflect all fees. It won't stop them from charging them, but at least they'll "feel" built-in, rather than feeling like a bait-and-switch. Heck, no companies should be allowed to display prices that don't include minimum mandatory fees. (Except for sales tax, since people expect that.) It's kind of ridiculous they can get away with it in the first place.

cdcarter 14y ago
The fees are only levied online, not at the hard box office. So the promoter can advertise the ticket price, and the ticketing agent adds fees.