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Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?
200
points
180
comments
3
notable voices
The 5-second version
- Scalping is a symptom of underpriced tickets, not the core problem with Ticketmaster's monopoly.
- Season ticket holders and connected insiders, not professional scalpers, often drive extreme resale prices for premium seats.
- Regulation can cap resale prices, as Ontario demonstrated with its face-value resale law.
- Ticket brokers handle ~80% of U.S. ticket sales, absorbing inventory risk while TM benefits from the secondary market.
- Anti-scalping measures risk strengthening Ticketmaster's monopoly rather than creating genuine competition.
Top voices
Verbatim comments from the thread's most notable / highest-karma participants.
Yes. A lot of people have this sense that you should be able to attend the World Cup, a Taylor Swift concert, or the Indianapolis 500 without taking out a second mortgage. But there are only so many seats. You can have a lottery which is actually fairly common for many, especially government, permits but doesn't actually increase the number of slots. Whether luck or money is the better way to allocate a scarce resource presumably depends on your personal philosophy and the goals of the organizat…Read on HN ↗
Precisely this. Ticketmaster's entire business model is based around taking the blame. Artists don't want to set a face value for their tickets that represent a realistic market-clearing price, for fear of being seen as greedy; this leaves a lot of money on the table for scalpers. TM scrape as much of that value back for artists and venues, who get a cut of all the fees and charges and "authorized secondary resale". Selling tickets is the easy part; the secret sauce is selling tickets for as muc…Read on HN ↗
> With all the hate Ticketmaster has gotten and all the other ticketing platforms out there, I'm surprised Ticketmaster still has a hold of pretty much the entire market. That's the thing. Everyone hates Ticketmaster... but forgets that the venues and even many high profile artists could easily cancel their contracts with Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster takes the blame, rakes in the cash and distributes the cash to venues and artists. Everyone in the industry is complicit. On top of that, I 'member…Read on HN ↗
This sort of thing is a strong argument (IMO) that these stadiums, arenas, theaters should be owned by the municipality they reside in. Fine, we can call it a public good which is why they have nice tax incentives. But why stop there? If its truly a public good then why shouldn't the public simply own it? Why isn't the city operating these venues and using the ticket prices to offset tax burdens? It might be harder to do this with a sports arena as there's a bunch of issues around the monop…Read on HN ↗