4 ms·

Many of the other commenters have explained how the ownership structure of Ticketmaster gives them near monopoly control because they also own the radio station

Many of the other commenters have explained how the ownership structure of Ticketmaster gives them near monopoly control because they also own the radio stations and the venues and the promoters. (I'm using "they" and "own" very liberally in this paragraph.) The simple fact that there's an ownership link between Ticketmaster and the scalper I mean totally legit resale sites is so wildly corrupt that, well, it's textbook stuff. What I haven't really seen discussed in the comments is that the role and objective of Ticketmaster is poorly understood. They seem like the people who sell tickets, but in reality they are "blast shield for consumer rage" as a service. Their role is to industrialize the conversion of anger into waste heat while leaving the musicians looking like neutral parties. They also do a lot of catch-and-kill; once competitors get too big, they use bully tactics to starve them until they can acquire them cheaply. There's an app called DICE. I like it a lot. I'm rooting for them.

gosub100 4mo ago
> while leaving the musicians looking like neutral parties. Then why wasn't Pearl Jam able to shake them in the mid 90s?
- peteforde 4mo ago
  Several things can be true at the same time. I truly believe that Pearl Jam and many others who have been harshly critical of TM and Live Nation genuinely want to fight back. However, a person much more cynical than me could make the argument that a band can fight Ticketmaster, still get their bag AND look like folk heroes in the process.
marysol5 4mo ago
OASIS did that one when they announced their return tour. "We have no control over the ticket prices" Yeah you do, there's no show without you...
- lomase 4mo ago
  [dead]
- jorisw 4mo ago
  What incentive would Oasis have to help bring down the prices for their own shows anyway?
  - Y_Y 4mo ago
    Presumably the don't want only old rich people and empty seats. Otherwise you could self-scalp all the tickets at the highest price possible, maximisung revenue for a single gig but making it so unfun/bad press that you come off worse.
    - KeplerBoy 4mo ago
      I think a majority of old rich people is pretty much unavoidable at a return tour.
      - fortran77 4mo ago
        Why does Hacker News hate us old people so much? Of course, I usually only see old acts (the B52s / Devo show was great!) and most of the audiences for those are 60+ years old, like me. Next week, I'm seeing Steve Forbert!
  - QuantumNomad_ 4mo ago
    Idk about Oasis specifically, but there have been multiple examples of other bands fighting to keep the concert tickets affordable for their fans. Nirvana did that for example. And even if you explicitly want to charge as much as possible from your fans, why claim that you have no influence over the price?
    - darkwater 4mo ago
      > but there have been multiple examples of other bands fighting to keep the concert tickets affordable for their fans. Nirvana did that for example. Tickets price landscape radically changed in the last 30 years. They incremented between 3x to 5x (or even more) in that lapse of time, depending on the artist and venue, and accrued inflation doesn't explain it (quick search says that in the last 30 years in the Eurozone inflation grew ~85% and in the US ~110%)
- ndepoel 4mo ago
  Which is complete nonsense anyway. Robert Smith from The Cure famously went against TicketMaster before their last world tour several years ago, pointing out the ridiculous prices and demanding that they be lowered to make their shows more accessible. He managed to get TicketMaster to budge and even got them to refund some of the marked up resale prices, costing them millions but generating a lot of goodwill among fans in the process. It's not that artists do not have control, but they do need to put in a good amount of effort to make change happen.
iamben 4mo ago
Go to a lot of smaller shows, been using DICE for a long time - I think they dominate the smaller venues (in the UK at least). They've made tickets as easy as Amazon made ecom. Alerts when for when tickets go on sale, (almost one click!) buy for friends and share, bans if you sell over face value, and (for a lot of places) you can return tickets to the pool to resell if you can't go (so there's often last minute waitlist tickets). It's all super smooth and a genuinely delightful experience. Rooting for them too!
- philipwhiuk 4mo ago
  DICE are owned by Fever as of 2025.
- FireInsight 4mo ago
  DICE is a great experience, but I hate that they have no option to buy tickets without installing and using their app. It should at least be possible from a website, come on...
- RileyJames 4mo ago
  Awesome. Everything you're stating sounds alot like Tixel in Australia. Tho I'm not sure they manage the venue / original ticket sale. More of a scalp free marketplace. Only place I will buy or sell tickets.
- maleldil 4mo ago
  DICE is awesome. I'm bummed when I need to use anything else. I rarely ever need to use Ticketmaster.
tclancy 4mo ago
It wouldn’t be HackerNews without the top comment explaining how the real fault lies with labor and not the rent seekers who showed up afterwards and sucked up all the excess value from consumer and supplier.
FrustratedMonky 4mo ago
" leaving the musicians looking like neutral parties." Isn't this giving Ticketmaster too much credit, for helping artist profit. When part of the problem is the artist also does not get as much from the high ticket price. Since Ticketmaster owns the venues, and the entire supply chain, the artist is also enthralled and must take whatever 'lower payout' that Ticketmaster feels like giving. So, tickets might be high, the artist also gets a fraction. The ticket buyer only has one option, the artist only has one option. Both sides of the equation are losing while the grifter in the middle is taking a mad fat cut. This is such a well documented clear cut case of monopoly, it makes me really sad that nobody is breaking it up. Just generally, that the system is failing.
- peteforde 4mo ago
  If monopoly laws were applied to Live Nation, who would pay the lobbyists? And if the lobbyists weren't paid, who would pay the politicians? Your argument works on paper, but the ground truth is that the base price of tickets is 5x what it was when I was in high school. If you're a big enough artist to fill venues, trust that you've done just fine under this arrangement. Recorded music is literally just a loss leader to sell tickets now. And when you sell tickets, you can sell merch. Did you know that venues usually take a (large) cut of merch sales? The same venues that are owned by the same company that owns Ticketmaster, the venue, the promoter and the radio stations? What monopoly? No monopoly here!
dfxm12 4mo ago
Does dice require that you buy tickets through their app and you're required to present the app as your ticket? That sucks too.
- ghaff 4mo ago
  No idea about the specifics in this case. But, unfortunately, it's an increasingly common trend. Especially when going on vacation I like to have backup paper printouts of tickets but, these days, it's not uncommon to have a "We'll email you or the ticket will be available in this app 48 hours before."
- dbbk 4mo ago
  Yes
wilkommen 4mo ago
Ticketmaster uses their monopoly power to unfairly squeeze the venues and the artists too. They're using their monopoly power to squeeze all sides of the live music marketplace - fans, artists, venues, and promoters. So the bad guys are really Ticketmaster, not the artists.
- ipaddr 4mo ago
  They own the venues. And the artists are to blame because without them ticketmaster would have no product. Pearl Jam took a huge career hit trying to fight them.
  - wilkommen 4mo ago
    Yeah Pearl Jam did take a huge career hit trying to fight them, and that's admirable, but they shouldn't have had to do that. Why should artists carry the burden of having to sacrifice their careers to fight an illegal monopoly? That's the role of government. You may as well say that fans are to blame for going to ticketmaster-promoted concerts and buying tickets on ticketmaster because they were enabling ticketmaster. Both fans and artists are being harmed by the ticketmaster monopoly.
- Spooky23 4mo ago
  They also buy rivals. I worked for a small, out of the way company that added a really good ticketing app for some niche scenarios. They basically bought us for the tech and integrated the rest of the company into various other companies that were spun off. I ended up with stock in several of them.
zer00eyz 4mo ago
> link between Ticketmaster and the scalper Except this was going on back in the 90's. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-27-ca-579-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-27-ca-579-st... Then it was an informal, local, criminal enterprise. Local promoters, would get tickets from management, to drop to local re-sellers (scalpers, and brokers) and make money on the back side (for management). With the death of album sales, concerts became the main revenue driver for making money... Formalizing the old system, centralizing it, turning it into a business was just "cleaning up" the mess that used to be there. Look at the Altimont stabbing, and the Rolling Stones role in that (demanding even MORE money and upfront). Live Nation / TicketMaster is "Bill Graham Presents"... it was his dream and he is a product of that era (go read up on how his partner got stabbed). Is Live Nation awful... sure. But breaking them up wont change the economics or the system (sadly). Artists are just as much a part of the problem as any fan.
lelandfe 4mo ago
DICE has poured gas on the NYC electronic music ticket scene and I loathe them. The most bad thing they enable is increasing ticket prices for each ticket sold. It has ratcheted up show prices across New York dramatically. Complaining about DICE (“all my homies hate DICE”) is a common thing in my friend group.
gamblor956 4mo ago
in reality they are "blast shield for consumer rage" as a service. Their role is to industrialize the conversion of anger into waste heat while leaving the musicians looking like neutral parties. That isn't discussed much because it's not true. Artists get paid a fixed amount for each performance and only get a share of ticket revenue if the # of tickets sold exceeds a contractual threshold. Artists don't get a portion of the fees; those are entirely TM's revenue regardless of the number of tickets sold. Ticketmaster gets crap for its business practices because they are crap business practices.

gosub100 4mo ago

> while leaving the musicians looking like neutral parties. Then why wasn't Pearl Jam able to shake them in the mid 90s?

peteforde 4mo ago
Several things can be true at the same time. I truly believe that Pearl Jam and many others who have been harshly critical of TM and Live Nation genuinely want to fight back. However, a person much more cynical than me could make the argument that a band can fight Ticketmaster, still get their bag AND look like folk heroes in the process.

marysol5 4mo ago

OASIS did that one when they announced their return tour. "We have no control over the ticket prices" Yeah you do, there's no show without you...

lomase 4mo ago
[dead]
jorisw 4mo ago
What incentive would Oasis have to help bring down the prices for their own shows anyway?
- Y_Y 4mo ago
  Presumably the don't want only old rich people and empty seats. Otherwise you could self-scalp all the tickets at the highest price possible, maximisung revenue for a single gig but making it so unfun/bad press that you come off worse.
  - KeplerBoy 4mo ago
    I think a majority of old rich people is pretty much unavoidable at a return tour.
    - fortran77 4mo ago
      Why does Hacker News hate us old people so much? Of course, I usually only see old acts (the B52s / Devo show was great!) and most of the audiences for those are 60+ years old, like me. Next week, I'm seeing Steve Forbert!
- QuantumNomad_ 4mo ago
  Idk about Oasis specifically, but there have been multiple examples of other bands fighting to keep the concert tickets affordable for their fans. Nirvana did that for example. And even if you explicitly want to charge as much as possible from your fans, why claim that you have no influence over the price?
  - darkwater 4mo ago
    > but there have been multiple examples of other bands fighting to keep the concert tickets affordable for their fans. Nirvana did that for example. Tickets price landscape radically changed in the last 30 years. They incremented between 3x to 5x (or even more) in that lapse of time, depending on the artist and venue, and accrued inflation doesn't explain it (quick search says that in the last 30 years in the Eurozone inflation grew ~85% and in the US ~110%)
ndepoel 4mo ago
Which is complete nonsense anyway. Robert Smith from The Cure famously went against TicketMaster before their last world tour several years ago, pointing out the ridiculous prices and demanding that they be lowered to make their shows more accessible. He managed to get TicketMaster to budge and even got them to refund some of the marked up resale prices, costing them millions but generating a lot of goodwill among fans in the process. It's not that artists do not have control, but they do need to put in a good amount of effort to make change happen.

iamben 4mo ago

Go to a lot of smaller shows, been using DICE for a long time - I think they dominate the smaller venues (in the UK at least). They've made tickets as easy as Amazon made ecom. Alerts when for when tickets go on sale, (almost one click!) buy for friends and share, bans if you sell over face value, and (for a lot of places) you can return tickets to the pool to resell if you can't go (so there's often last minute waitlist tickets). It's all super smooth and a genuinely delightful experience. Rooting for them too!

philipwhiuk 4mo ago
DICE are owned by Fever as of 2025.
FireInsight 4mo ago
DICE is a great experience, but I hate that they have no option to buy tickets without installing and using their app. It should at least be possible from a website, come on...
RileyJames 4mo ago
Awesome. Everything you're stating sounds alot like Tixel in Australia. Tho I'm not sure they manage the venue / original ticket sale. More of a scalp free marketplace. Only place I will buy or sell tickets.
maleldil 4mo ago
DICE is awesome. I'm bummed when I need to use anything else. I rarely ever need to use Ticketmaster.

tclancy 4mo ago

It wouldn’t be HackerNews without the top comment explaining how the real fault lies with labor and not the rent seekers who showed up afterwards and sucked up all the excess value from consumer and supplier.

FrustratedMonky 4mo ago

" leaving the musicians looking like neutral parties." Isn't this giving Ticketmaster too much credit, for helping artist profit. When part of the problem is the artist also does not get as much from the high ticket price. Since Ticketmaster owns the venues, and the entire supply chain, the artist is also enthralled and must take whatever 'lower payout' that Ticketmaster feels like giving. So, tickets might be high, the artist also gets a fraction. The ticket buyer only has one option, the artist only has one option. Both sides of the equation are losing while the grifter in the middle is taking a mad fat cut. This is such a well documented clear cut case of monopoly, it makes me really sad that nobody is breaking it up. Just generally, that the system is failing.

peteforde 4mo ago
If monopoly laws were applied to Live Nation, who would pay the lobbyists? And if the lobbyists weren't paid, who would pay the politicians? Your argument works on paper, but the ground truth is that the base price of tickets is 5x what it was when I was in high school. If you're a big enough artist to fill venues, trust that you've done just fine under this arrangement. Recorded music is literally just a loss leader to sell tickets now. And when you sell tickets, you can sell merch. Did you know that venues usually take a (large) cut of merch sales? The same venues that are owned by the same company that owns Ticketmaster, the venue, the promoter and the radio stations? What monopoly? No monopoly here!

dfxm12 4mo ago

Does dice require that you buy tickets through their app and you're required to present the app as your ticket? That sucks too.

ghaff 4mo ago
No idea about the specifics in this case. But, unfortunately, it's an increasingly common trend. Especially when going on vacation I like to have backup paper printouts of tickets but, these days, it's not uncommon to have a "We'll email you or the ticket will be available in this app 48 hours before."
dbbk 4mo ago
Yes

wilkommen 4mo ago

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

ipaddr 4mo ago
They own the venues. And the artists are to blame because without them ticketmaster would have no product. Pearl Jam took a huge career hit trying to fight them.
- wilkommen 4mo ago
  Yeah Pearl Jam did take a huge career hit trying to fight them, and that's admirable, but they shouldn't have had to do that. Why should artists carry the burden of having to sacrifice their careers to fight an illegal monopoly? That's the role of government. You may as well say that fans are to blame for going to ticketmaster-promoted concerts and buying tickets on ticketmaster because they were enabling ticketmaster. Both fans and artists are being harmed by the ticketmaster monopoly.
Spooky23 4mo ago
They also buy rivals. I worked for a small, out of the way company that added a really good ticketing app for some niche scenarios. They basically bought us for the tech and integrated the rest of the company into various other companies that were spun off. I ended up with stock in several of them.

zer00eyz 4mo ago

> link between Ticketmaster and the scalper Except this was going on back in the 90's. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-27-ca-579-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-27-ca-579-st... Then it was an informal, local, criminal enterprise. Local promoters, would get tickets from management, to drop to local re-sellers (scalpers, and brokers) and make money on the back side (for management). With the death of album sales, concerts became the main revenue driver for making money... Formalizing the old system, centralizing it, turning it into a business was just "cleaning up" the mess that used to be there. Look at the Altimont stabbing, and the Rolling Stones role in that (demanding even MORE money and upfront). Live Nation / TicketMaster is "Bill Graham Presents"... it was his dream and he is a product of that era (go read up on how his partner got stabbed). Is Live Nation awful... sure. But breaking them up wont change the economics or the system (sadly). Artists are just as much a part of the problem as any fan.

lelandfe 4mo ago

DICE has poured gas on the NYC electronic music ticket scene and I loathe them. The most bad thing they enable is increasing ticket prices for each ticket sold. It has ratcheted up show prices across New York dramatically. Complaining about DICE (“all my homies hate DICE”) is a common thing in my friend group.

gamblor956 4mo ago

in reality they are "blast shield for consumer rage" as a service. Their role is to industrialize the conversion of anger into waste heat while leaving the musicians looking like neutral parties. That isn't discussed much because it's not true. Artists get paid a fixed amount for each performance and only get a share of ticket revenue if the # of tickets sold exceeds a contractual threshold. Artists don't get a portion of the fees; those are entirely TM's revenue regardless of the number of tickets sold. Ticketmaster gets crap for its business practices because they are crap business practices.