8 ms·

The horizontal control of venues is only one issue. A perhaps bigger issue is the vertical integration (if that's the right term) of first-party ticket sales a

by jp57 6mo ago

The horizontal control of venues is only one issue. A perhaps bigger issue is the vertical integration (if that's the right term) of first-party ticket sales and resale in one company. Ticketmaster has no real incentive to try to prevent resellers from buying up all the tickets on first sale, because it gets to charge fees on all the resales through its platform. The more times a ticket is resold, the better. I don't believe a court would ever mandate this, but I'd like to see tickets sold by dutch auction: All tickets start off for sale at some very high price, like $10000, and the price declines by some amount every day until it reaches a reserve price on the day of the concert. Buyers can purchase as many tickets as they want, but professional resellers would have to guess the price that would let them clear their inventory at a profit. Under a system like this the best seats would go earliest (at the highest prices) while the nosebleed seats might still be available on day of the show, or not depending on demand.

sgron 6mo ago
Ticketmaster actually experimented with this https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mic.20180230 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mic.20180230
- jp57 6mo ago
  Our basic findings suggest that the auctions “worked”: price discovery substantially improved; artist revenues roughly doubled versus the fixed-price counterfactual; and, perhaps most importantly, the auctions eliminated or at least substantially reduced potential resale profits for speculators.... And yet, over the decade that has passed since the time of the data, rather than coming into more widespread use, primary-market auctions for event tickets instead disappeared.... We conclude by speculating as to why the auctions failed to take off. As discussed in the introduction.... They don't seem to mention the most obvious reason: the same companies profit from both the primary and secondary market. Why would TicketMaster want to reduce the number of resales when it collects fees on them?
  - cbsmith 6mo ago
    > They don't seem to mention the most obvious reason: the same companies profit from both the primary and secondary market. That's not true. Ticketmaster has a monopoly (or near-monopoly) on the primary market. On the secondary market they have a fraction of the market; the dominant players are StubHub, SeatGeek, and Vivid. Furthermore, most of the revenue from primary ticket sales goes to the venue and the artist/promoter, and they are usually completely disintermediated from the resale market.
srmatto 6mo ago
It should also be said that they could do anything at all to prevent these professional scalpers from scooping up all the tickets at once, including even merely closing those APIs entirely but they continue to do nothing about it. The verified re-sale thing as you have correctly pointed out just allowed them to pretend like something was being done about scalping while it actually just let them make more money on the resale fees.
- CodingJeebus 6mo ago
  It's long been speculated that they clandestinely participate in the resale market. If the goal of a business is to maximize profit and they control the market and technology around it, they have everything they need to push prices to the absolute limit that a customer is willing to pay. Based on what came out during the course of the trial, it would not surprise me at all if they are double-selling tickets.
  - doctorpangloss 6mo ago
    it's all an aesthetic experience, no? for the live entertainment business, it is aesthetically important to fans of Bruce Springsteen that his tickets have a number on them that appears on a website that feels good, and that number happens to be "price of ticket," even if hardly anyone is actually paying that number - they are usually paying more. personally, i don't think any of this legal shit matters. the sherman antitrust act is 1 paragraph long, so it is flexible in terms of how you want this stuff to work, from a, "I would like the world to work as though it were governed by a priesthood" point of view. so it's reductive to talk about, what does the law say? very little of interest. how should it work? live nation should be able to do whatever the hell it wants. it would make more money for everyone, at the cost of nothing. it would be good for the music industry to make more money. apple should not have lost the antitrust case over books either. nobody forces you to go to concerts! if you have a problem with ticket prices, make tiktoks complaining about it targeted at the artists. stop listening to their music. but IMO, the live performance cultural phenomenon, it doesn't benefit from this kind of regulation.
  - sally_glance 6mo ago
ryandrake 6mo ago
I'm always annoyed by this kind of news. The problem has existed for a long time, and finally, FINALLY, a court weighs in on some very narrow sliver of the problem, meanwhile things keep getting worse. It always feels like the scene in Lord Of The Rings where they're waiting for the Ents to deliberate on the big war that's going on, and then after an agonizing amount of time they announce that they just said Good Morning and decided their guests weren't Orcs. Like jeez can justice move any slower?
- AngryData 6mo ago
  It can move slower, just throw more money/lawyers at the problem.
autoexec 6mo ago
Why not just ban the transfer of tickets and allow refunds? You buy a ticket, you show your ID at the door. Early refunded tickets get resold online and late refunds are sold at the venue. All seats, including the best seats, go to actual fans instead of scalpers just hoping to make a profit while providing zero value. First choice in seats goes to the most passionate and attentive fans.
- echelon 6mo ago
  > Why not just ban the transfer of tickets and allow refunds? You buy a ticket, you show your ID at the door. Because everyone on the seller side - including artists - make money on this. If parties other than fans / buyers cared, it would be a solved problem.
  - ceejayoz 6mo ago
    I've seen quite a few artists opposed to it. Quick example: https://www.instagram.com/p/DWWlQS-Dhj7/ https://www.instagram.com/p/DWWlQS-Dhj7/
    - lmm 6mo ago
      Artists will claim to be opposed because fans like it when they do so.
      - ceejayoz 6mo ago
        Artists have canceled swathes of tickets for this reason. https://variety.com/2024/music/news/chappell-roan-cancels-scalper-tickets-tennessee-concert-1236130117/ https://variety.com/2024/music/news/chappell-roan-cancels-sc... I've seen quite a few cases of this. Not everyone's money-only.
        freejazz 6mo ago
        And they are free to make the tickets non-transferrable. The Cure did that. Last Phish MSG run the tickets were non-transferrable and I had to use CashorTrade to trade my tickets.
esseph 6mo ago
> A perhaps bigger issue is the vertical integration (if that's the right term) of first-party ticket sales and resale in one company. Similar problem with "healthcare" insurance companies in the US. We need a global crackdown on the breadth of markets a company can be involved in - somehow.
scarecrowbob 6mo ago
Having produced, performed in, and engineered a number of shows and festivals, this is a terrible idea for a pricing strategy. Consider portajohns for an outdoor festival- incentivizing folks to wait until the last possible minute makes it impossible to determine what the needs are there, so how do you plan for how many shitters you need to bring and maintain for, say, a 3-day festival? Consider that "festivals discount early sales" might be a kind of Chesterton's Fence, and you might question why they do that...
- jp57 6mo ago
  Not everything sells out right away, though. I've bought concert tickets on the day of the show more than once. Somehow they still managed to have all the concessions staffed. But regardless, the formula for decreasing the price could be adjusted. For example, it could be an exponential decay toward the reserve price, with the decay rate set so that most of the decline in price is early. Or, for shows that are entirely general admission, like festivals, you could use the alternative form of dutch auction: when tickets go on sale, everyone bids what they're willing to pay for some number of tickets. Then the bidding closes (with ample time for planning), and the bids are cleared in descending order of price, and everyone pays the amount of the lowest clearing bid. This method would find a price closer to the true market price of a ticket and discourage speculators.
  - scarecrowbob 6mo ago
    The issue is that most events don't even sell out. This is a terrible idea.
carlosjobim 6mo ago
> Ticketmaster has no real incentive to try to prevent resellers from buying up all the tickets on first sale The incentive would be to jack up the prices themselves and take any profit which would have gone to scammers. Supply and demand.
traderj0e 6mo ago
The reselling seems fine to me as long as other resellers can compete. It's a classic market.
GuB-42 6mo ago
AFAIK Ticketmaster doesn't decide, they are a service provider with a variety of options for their customers (the performers). The customer picks an option (no resale, limited or not resale price, etc...) and Ticketmaster does it, taking a commission in the process. Maybe the commission changes depending on the formula, but really, they don't care about the details, they are getting the money no matter what. The problem is not the situation about resale and all that, I would say that part is the customer fault, not Ticketmaster, they are the ones who picked a formula. The problem is that by being in a monopoly position, they can charge high fees, making the tickets more expensive. And by more expensive, I mean something like 30% more expensive, not 300% more expensive. I don't think Ticketmaster offers a dutch auction, but I guess that if you are big enough and if that's what you want and if you can pay, they can deliver.
toofy 6mo ago
I disagree whole heartedly. The organizations should absolutely have the choice to price tickets to their events however much they choose. And they should have recourse for people who choose to ignore their wishes. Its their product. Why would you want to take that choice away from them? An example, I spent some time working for an organization who felt strongly that retirees living on a fixed income should always be able to afford tickets to their events. They would bring in big name musicians to perform and charge a fair price specifically so those people could afford it. Why would you want to take that choice away from that organization and force them to price out the elder community members they were trying to serve? Its the organizations event, they should always have the choice to charge whatever they want.
guelo 6mo ago
What I'd like to see is the banning of real time dynamic pricing of any kind in all industries.
Nursie 6mo ago
Here in Western Australia, resale prices are capped at face-value plus 10%. IIRC the reseller platforms can still charge a fee on top, but IMHO it seems to have had the desired effect on ticket sales. Unless it's something really, really popular, you don't have to be waiting the morning they go on sale. In fact you can usually pick up tickets for events a few weeks after they go on sale, or even longer. If they run out, there's often a small amount of resale tickets available for a bit more cash but not multiples. Having come from the UK where you'd damn well better be online in the first 30 seconds or you're out of luck, and reseller sites fill up with tickets at high multiples of face value within minutes, it's a breath of fresh air. (I understand the UK is introducing similar resale price-caps soon) Of course it may partly be that Perth people just don't go out that much. Either way it's really nice.
- ikr678 6mo ago
  Most Australian states have anti-scalping laws, but more importantly the main third party reseller site (Tixel) is cheap, safe, reliable and easy to use. Ticketmaster AU have their own reselling marketplace, but it's also capped at 10%. Scalping is a solved problem, if states want it to be
aidenn0 6mo ago
Starting in the late '70s, and by the '90s it was entrenched with economists that could affect policy that vertical integration is good for consumers. In theory, this shouldn't matter, since there were laws against it, but in reality this created a large precedent of judicial decisions saying that there's no problem with vertical integration.
cbsmith 6mo ago
> A perhaps bigger issue is the vertical integration (if that's the right term) of first-party ticket sales and resale in one company. The monopoly findings were about vertical integration, but the resale issue wasn't. I think, if you do some research, you discover that the vertical integration issues they were concerned about are actually a bigger part of the problem. > Ticketmaster has no real incentive to try to prevent resellers from buying up all the tickets on first sale, because it gets to charge fees on all the resales through its platform. The incentives for to prevent abuse of the primary ticket sale is that the venues, who actually decide how tickets are sold, don't like it. If Ticketmaster doesn't make them happy, they go elsewhere and lose out on the primary market. Perhaps ironically, they are often less concerned about abuse if they still have control over the ticket resale as well, which they often do when the resale happens on Ticketmaster. In practice though, most of the resale doesn't happen on Ticketmaster; this gives both the venues and Ticketmaster plenty of incentive to combat abuse. > I'd like to see tickets sold by dutch auction. Pretty much everyone who first enters the ticketing industry thinks auctions are a better way to sell tickets until they learn how the industry works. Interestingly, Ticketmaster offers auction-based ticket sales. You wouldn't know this, because venues don't want to use it. You might think a dutch auction for tickets would be great, but people who experience the reality often don't. Dutch auctions work when you're selling a commodity where each item is effectively the same as the other. Often people value each seat for an event differently. Dutch auctions, by their very nature, require the a fixed time window for the auction, which makes them difficult to fit the outcome you're describing... that would more be handled by some form of yield management where venues release blocks of tickets for sale at specific time windows, which is something that already happens in the live event business. There's all kinds of dark aspects to the live event business, but it's generally completely different from the perception of the general public.
benburton 6mo ago
This proposed economic model creates a dystopian situation: whoever has the most capital has the right of first refusal to consume art. Current primary and secondary ticketing markets are not ideal, but this proposition disenfranchises whole market segments from consuming art as experience based on economic factors. That's bad for art, it's bad for artists, and it's bad for consumers.
potro 6mo ago
> Ticketmaster has no real incentive to try to prevent resellers from buying up all the tickets on first sale Why should it have such incentive? And even more so, why it should be a concern for the court that it should have it?

by jp57 6mo ago

sgron 6mo ago

Ticketmaster actually experimented with this https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mic.20180230 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mic.20180230

jp57 6mo ago
Our basic findings suggest that the auctions “worked”: price discovery substantially improved; artist revenues roughly doubled versus the fixed-price counterfactual; and, perhaps most importantly, the auctions eliminated or at least substantially reduced potential resale profits for speculators.... And yet, over the decade that has passed since the time of the data, rather than coming into more widespread use, primary-market auctions for event tickets instead disappeared.... We conclude by speculating as to why the auctions failed to take off. As discussed in the introduction.... They don't seem to mention the most obvious reason: the same companies profit from both the primary and secondary market. Why would TicketMaster want to reduce the number of resales when it collects fees on them?
- cbsmith 6mo ago
  > They don't seem to mention the most obvious reason: the same companies profit from both the primary and secondary market. That's not true. Ticketmaster has a monopoly (or near-monopoly) on the primary market. On the secondary market they have a fraction of the market; the dominant players are StubHub, SeatGeek, and Vivid. Furthermore, most of the revenue from primary ticket sales goes to the venue and the artist/promoter, and they are usually completely disintermediated from the resale market.

srmatto 6mo ago

It should also be said that they could do anything at all to prevent these professional scalpers from scooping up all the tickets at once, including even merely closing those APIs entirely but they continue to do nothing about it. The verified re-sale thing as you have correctly pointed out just allowed them to pretend like something was being done about scalping while it actually just let them make more money on the resale fees.

CodingJeebus 6mo ago
It's long been speculated that they clandestinely participate in the resale market. If the goal of a business is to maximize profit and they control the market and technology around it, they have everything they need to push prices to the absolute limit that a customer is willing to pay. Based on what came out during the course of the trial, it would not surprise me at all if they are double-selling tickets.
- doctorpangloss 6mo ago
  it's all an aesthetic experience, no? for the live entertainment business, it is aesthetically important to fans of Bruce Springsteen that his tickets have a number on them that appears on a website that feels good, and that number happens to be "price of ticket," even if hardly anyone is actually paying that number - they are usually paying more. personally, i don't think any of this legal shit matters. the sherman antitrust act is 1 paragraph long, so it is flexible in terms of how you want this stuff to work, from a, "I would like the world to work as though it were governed by a priesthood" point of view. so it's reductive to talk about, what does the law say? very little of interest. how should it work? live nation should be able to do whatever the hell it wants. it would make more money for everyone, at the cost of nothing. it would be good for the music industry to make more money. apple should not have lost the antitrust case over books either. nobody forces you to go to concerts! if you have a problem with ticket prices, make tiktoks complaining about it targeted at the artists. stop listening to their music. but IMO, the live performance cultural phenomenon, it doesn't benefit from this kind of regulation.
- sally_glance 6mo ago

ryandrake 6mo ago

I'm always annoyed by this kind of news. The problem has existed for a long time, and finally, FINALLY, a court weighs in on some very narrow sliver of the problem, meanwhile things keep getting worse. It always feels like the scene in Lord Of The Rings where they're waiting for the Ents to deliberate on the big war that's going on, and then after an agonizing amount of time they announce that they just said Good Morning and decided their guests weren't Orcs. Like jeez can justice move any slower?

AngryData 6mo ago
It can move slower, just throw more money/lawyers at the problem.

autoexec 6mo ago

Why not just ban the transfer of tickets and allow refunds? You buy a ticket, you show your ID at the door. Early refunded tickets get resold online and late refunds are sold at the venue. All seats, including the best seats, go to actual fans instead of scalpers just hoping to make a profit while providing zero value. First choice in seats goes to the most passionate and attentive fans.

echelon 6mo ago
> Why not just ban the transfer of tickets and allow refunds? You buy a ticket, you show your ID at the door. Because everyone on the seller side - including artists - make money on this. If parties other than fans / buyers cared, it would be a solved problem.
- ceejayoz 6mo ago
  I've seen quite a few artists opposed to it. Quick example: https://www.instagram.com/p/DWWlQS-Dhj7/ https://www.instagram.com/p/DWWlQS-Dhj7/
  - lmm 6mo ago
    Artists will claim to be opposed because fans like it when they do so.
    - ceejayoz 6mo ago
      Artists have canceled swathes of tickets for this reason. https://variety.com/2024/music/news/chappell-roan-cancels-scalper-tickets-tennessee-concert-1236130117/ https://variety.com/2024/music/news/chappell-roan-cancels-sc... I've seen quite a few cases of this. Not everyone's money-only.
      - freejazz 6mo ago
        And they are free to make the tickets non-transferrable. The Cure did that. Last Phish MSG run the tickets were non-transferrable and I had to use CashorTrade to trade my tickets.

esseph 6mo ago

> A perhaps bigger issue is the vertical integration (if that's the right term) of first-party ticket sales and resale in one company. Similar problem with "healthcare" insurance companies in the US. We need a global crackdown on the breadth of markets a company can be involved in - somehow.

scarecrowbob 6mo ago

Having produced, performed in, and engineered a number of shows and festivals, this is a terrible idea for a pricing strategy. Consider portajohns for an outdoor festival- incentivizing folks to wait until the last possible minute makes it impossible to determine what the needs are there, so how do you plan for how many shitters you need to bring and maintain for, say, a 3-day festival? Consider that "festivals discount early sales" might be a kind of Chesterton's Fence, and you might question why they do that...

jp57 6mo ago
Not everything sells out right away, though. I've bought concert tickets on the day of the show more than once. Somehow they still managed to have all the concessions staffed. But regardless, the formula for decreasing the price could be adjusted. For example, it could be an exponential decay toward the reserve price, with the decay rate set so that most of the decline in price is early. Or, for shows that are entirely general admission, like festivals, you could use the alternative form of dutch auction: when tickets go on sale, everyone bids what they're willing to pay for some number of tickets. Then the bidding closes (with ample time for planning), and the bids are cleared in descending order of price, and everyone pays the amount of the lowest clearing bid. This method would find a price closer to the true market price of a ticket and discourage speculators.
- scarecrowbob 6mo ago
  The issue is that most events don't even sell out. This is a terrible idea.

carlosjobim 6mo ago

> Ticketmaster has no real incentive to try to prevent resellers from buying up all the tickets on first sale The incentive would be to jack up the prices themselves and take any profit which would have gone to scammers. Supply and demand.

traderj0e 6mo ago

The reselling seems fine to me as long as other resellers can compete. It's a classic market.

GuB-42 6mo ago

AFAIK Ticketmaster doesn't decide, they are a service provider with a variety of options for their customers (the performers). The customer picks an option (no resale, limited or not resale price, etc...) and Ticketmaster does it, taking a commission in the process. Maybe the commission changes depending on the formula, but really, they don't care about the details, they are getting the money no matter what. The problem is not the situation about resale and all that, I would say that part is the customer fault, not Ticketmaster, they are the ones who picked a formula. The problem is that by being in a monopoly position, they can charge high fees, making the tickets more expensive. And by more expensive, I mean something like 30% more expensive, not 300% more expensive. I don't think Ticketmaster offers a dutch auction, but I guess that if you are big enough and if that's what you want and if you can pay, they can deliver.

toofy 6mo ago

I disagree whole heartedly. The organizations should absolutely have the choice to price tickets to their events however much they choose. And they should have recourse for people who choose to ignore their wishes. Its their product. Why would you want to take that choice away from them? An example, I spent some time working for an organization who felt strongly that retirees living on a fixed income should always be able to afford tickets to their events. They would bring in big name musicians to perform and charge a fair price specifically so those people could afford it. Why would you want to take that choice away from that organization and force them to price out the elder community members they were trying to serve? Its the organizations event, they should always have the choice to charge whatever they want.

guelo 6mo ago

What I'd like to see is the banning of real time dynamic pricing of any kind in all industries.

Nursie 6mo ago

Here in Western Australia, resale prices are capped at face-value plus 10%. IIRC the reseller platforms can still charge a fee on top, but IMHO it seems to have had the desired effect on ticket sales. Unless it's something really, really popular, you don't have to be waiting the morning they go on sale. In fact you can usually pick up tickets for events a few weeks after they go on sale, or even longer. If they run out, there's often a small amount of resale tickets available for a bit more cash but not multiples. Having come from the UK where you'd damn well better be online in the first 30 seconds or you're out of luck, and reseller sites fill up with tickets at high multiples of face value within minutes, it's a breath of fresh air. (I understand the UK is introducing similar resale price-caps soon) Of course it may partly be that Perth people just don't go out that much. Either way it's really nice.

ikr678 6mo ago
Most Australian states have anti-scalping laws, but more importantly the main third party reseller site (Tixel) is cheap, safe, reliable and easy to use. Ticketmaster AU have their own reselling marketplace, but it's also capped at 10%. Scalping is a solved problem, if states want it to be

aidenn0 6mo ago

Starting in the late '70s, and by the '90s it was entrenched with economists that could affect policy that vertical integration is good for consumers. In theory, this shouldn't matter, since there were laws against it, but in reality this created a large precedent of judicial decisions saying that there's no problem with vertical integration.

cbsmith 6mo ago

> A perhaps bigger issue is the vertical integration (if that's the right term) of first-party ticket sales and resale in one company. The monopoly findings were about vertical integration, but the resale issue wasn't. I think, if you do some research, you discover that the vertical integration issues they were concerned about are actually a bigger part of the problem. > Ticketmaster has no real incentive to try to prevent resellers from buying up all the tickets on first sale, because it gets to charge fees on all the resales through its platform. The incentives for to prevent abuse of the primary ticket sale is that the venues, who actually decide how tickets are sold, don't like it. If Ticketmaster doesn't make them happy, they go elsewhere and lose out on the primary market. Perhaps ironically, they are often less concerned about abuse if they still have control over the ticket resale as well, which they often do when the resale happens on Ticketmaster. In practice though, most of the resale doesn't happen on Ticketmaster; this gives both the venues and Ticketmaster plenty of incentive to combat abuse. > I'd like to see tickets sold by dutch auction. Pretty much everyone who first enters the ticketing industry thinks auctions are a better way to sell tickets until they learn how the industry works. Interestingly, Ticketmaster offers auction-based ticket sales. You wouldn't know this, because venues don't want to use it. You might think a dutch auction for tickets would be great, but people who experience the reality often don't. Dutch auctions work when you're selling a commodity where each item is effectively the same as the other. Often people value each seat for an event differently. Dutch auctions, by their very nature, require the a fixed time window for the auction, which makes them difficult to fit the outcome you're describing... that would more be handled by some form of yield management where venues release blocks of tickets for sale at specific time windows, which is something that already happens in the live event business. There's all kinds of dark aspects to the live event business, but it's generally completely different from the perception of the general public.

benburton 6mo ago

This proposed economic model creates a dystopian situation: whoever has the most capital has the right of first refusal to consume art. Current primary and secondary ticketing markets are not ideal, but this proposition disenfranchises whole market segments from consuming art as experience based on economic factors. That's bad for art, it's bad for artists, and it's bad for consumers.

potro 6mo ago

> Ticketmaster has no real incentive to try to prevent resellers from buying up all the tickets on first sale Why should it have such incentive? And even more so, why it should be a concern for the court that it should have it?