Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?

From the point of view of the promoters, concerts are a two-sided marketplace. Two-sided marketplaces are notoriously difficult for small players to compete in. You need to attract good acts so people will buy tickets, but to attract the top acts you need to show that you can sell lots of tickets.

Ticketmaster avoided the two-sided market problem until they reached scale. They were just a website where you buy tickets, an IT appliance for promoters.

But then Ticketmaster started buying out promoters, and that short circuited the entire system. Fans can't buy tickets from a different storefront because their favorite artists are only booking performances with ticketmaster-controlled venues. Top talent can't book high-grossing venues that aren't owned by ticketmaster, because Ticketmaster owns the promoters.

Scalpers are a symptom, the disease is consolidation of competitive markets by corporations. This kind of situation is precisely why antitrust law exists.

Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) gave a good explanation many years ago already:

https://stereogum.com/58831/trent_reznor_blasts_ticketmaster...

Ticketmaster obviously sucks, and their monopolistic business practices deserve a close look by regulators.

But the core of it is that an unregulated ticket market actually supports these prices. Fans keep showing that they're willing to dig deep and outbid each other to attend these events in person. Ticketmaster realizes this, and have set up a business model that extracts accordingly.

I think this is where us Americans get turned around. We tend to believe that it’s fair to charge the full market value for a thing, but we also have a sense that cultural experiences are "meant" to be shared equitably. But until we actually put a value on the latter, we're only ever going to have the former.

One component of the total picture also is that many of these stadiums/arenas are being funded by the public / tax payer often by tax breaks etc. and the politicians / lobbies are using their relationship to monopolize that public good.

IMO every event at an area should go through a public auction / RFP of who is the ticketer for that event (maybe artist gets right of first refusal to pony up the difference for their preferred ticketer?)

They merged with LiveNation and they own half of the venues. The other half of the venues have exclusive deals with TicketMaster, who provides them with software to run venue logistics (TicketMaster for business), creating vendor lock-in.

As others pointed out, it only sucks for the buying side. The actual customers instead get price gouging and taking-the-blame as a service.

Oh yea ticket master owns the venues. The artists can't revolt if they want to put on a big show. Software companies can't compete without dipping their toes into big money real estate property.

Software start ups are all about that 0 cost replication of software. One webserver spawns millions of threads for free. Start ups crack under the pressure of real world costs. Like sure anyone can make a website where users send tweets to each other. But if you have to spend billions of dollars constructing stadiums so Swifties can have an ex-ticket master experience... That's a hard sell to the software guys.

>With all the hate Ticketmaster has gotten [...], I'm surprised Ticketmaster still has a hold of pretty much the entire market. How are they doing this?

This question is a common mystery because you're using the perspective of the fans. E.g. "I hate Tickemaster ridiculous fees because it's price gouging, etc"

But the mystery of Ticketmaster being dominant is solved once you understand it from the perspective of the venues, promoters, and the artists. They are the true customers of Ticketaster. Ticketmaster's various "convenience fees, surcharges, etc" are just creative financial tricks to funnel more money back to venues+promoters+artists but still keep the ticket's face price artificially lower.

The alternative arrangement would be the ticket's face price being much higher to reflect the "true market price" but that means the artists would be the ones perceived as price gouging. Instead, just charge the higher price via convenience fees and let Ticketmaster take the public relations hit. The psychological manipulation of fans is working exactly as designed.

When the fans wish that there was another true competitor to Ticketmaster, what they're saying is they want "a service that charges less money". But that idea conflicts with the venues/promoters/artists that want to charge more money.

Therefore, if you really want to disrupt Ticketmaster, you need to charge even higher fees and more expensive ticket prices so that the greedy venues & artists will get more money from you and thus choose your service over Ticketmaster. I don't think that's the type of competitive disruption fans have in mind.

And the common cited reasons of vertical integration of LiveNation and owning the venues doesn't explain Ticketmaster's advantage. They were already dominant in the 1980s and 1990s before LiveNation acquired venues. Taylor Swift's tour promotor was AEG (not LiveNation) and she played at many stadiums owned by the cities (not owned by LiveNation) and she still chose Ticketmaster to be the selling agent for those locations. One of the reasons is she negotiated 110% of ticket's face price from Ticketmaster. How is extracting that type of money even mathematically even possible?!? The add-on "convenience fees".

Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drip_pricing

I spent several years working for a competitor of Ticketmaster. The industry is really difficult to break into.

First, there's the chicken and egg problem of content (events) and consumers. One big part of the sales process is a venue or promoter understanding how your platform will support their sales and marketing processes. If you already have consumers with an app and push notifications, it's an easy sell.

Another issue is cash flow. Deals often depends on what advance you're willing to pay, and it's not uncommon for very large venues to get signed at a loss just for the content. You need the cash to compete, and the big boys will happily take a hit on the big venues to hold onto them. The actual take per ticket is quite a low margin, and if a venue performs worse than you'd hoped you can easily end up making a lot less than planned.

Then you've got all the usual RFP noise around feature offerings. Plus regulation in different countries (looking at you, Italy).

You need investors to fund your sales process, and your development all at very low margins. You also need all the industry connections to build an enterprise sales pipeline and secure business. All of that is to say it's a difficult industry to get any sort of a foot hold in, let alone grow enough to be a serious contender.

The company I worked at ended up doing several rounds of layoffs followed by a very poor sale with no consideration to staff options. It's limping on as it slowly gets absorbed into the company who bought them who are also in the ticketing and event space.

Same issue with Match.

Competition emerges and Match/Ticketmaster just buys them out.

Just the other day I went to a non Ticketmaster show and I’ll go to another next week.

I go to a lot of hyper small shows, shows where the artist sells their own merch. So many opening acts it feels closer to an open mic.

I’d rather that, the 30 to 100 person shows than KENDRICK LAMAR in a mega venue.

I really hope to find small shows the next time I travel. I’ve no interest in BTS, but I’d love to see an underground Korean rap concert.

The burning man org has kind of famously used a non-Ticketmaster vendor every year, and it’s almost always a shitshow.

Secretparty.io is another ticket vendor that has a great user experience. Easy transfers, handles large spikes in traffic, etc.

Ticketmaster just has a really solid moat, it’s not that alternatives don’t exist.

I frequent a small venue that sells all its tickets through this vendor. They have other venues as well, also using this vendor.

https://www.axs.com/

I always wonder why ticketmaster/live nation isn't making more money? Given they are a monopoly, I'd expect them to be making a ton of profit. But it doesn't really seem to look that way: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/LYV:NYSE

One detail I haven’t seen in other comments.

In the uk at least, live nation / Ticketmaster will sign exclusive deals with artists - limiting them to a summer run of (for eg) five live nation festivals and no performances at any non live nation events.

So even if alternative venues / festivals exist, live nation squeezes them out by being able to sign bigger multi venue/event deals.

Everyone involved benefits from Ticketmaster, and in exchange all Ticketmaster has to do is be the bad guy

There are several? Venues around here use AXS, Seetickets/Eventim, Opendate. I buy more non-TM tickets than TM.

https://pretix.eu is having some success in the EU market. But other sibling posts correctly point out this is… let's just say "overall shit situation".

Watch the Last Week Tonight segment.

Basically, Ticketmaster owns all the concert halls too.

I felt that Amazon had the best chance to step into the ticketing game as they have the platform that can handle the volume spikes (Cyber Monday). But tech infrastructure is only a part of the puzzle.

It seems like it would be very easy to blacklist any artist/venue that works with the competition and make it practically crazy to do.

[this is probably not the answer you want to read]

Because Ticketmaster has been a force in the market for decades (at least since the 1980’s), the simplest market based explanation is that using Ticketmaster is often obviously the economically rational choice.

For example, many people who dislike Ticketmaster choose to buy tickets through Ticketmaster rather than exercise their alternatives. The same is true for performers and venues.

Because that is how markets work.

Any potential competitor has to do some, many. or all the things Ticketmaster does…not the least of which is staying in business…and that’s non-trivial.

Or at least that is what ordinary market economic theory strongly suggests.

I heard they had a real good employee that was the smartest programmer to ever live and built his own OS by divine command.

Why hasn't there been a real competitor to youtube yet? Similar question.

Some markets really are screwed.

Exclusive contracts

> 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 the times here in Germany before the big gun Eventim took over, getting tickets used to be a clusterfuck before as your average 1000 seats venue just can't be expected to build a system that doesn't collapse under (often literally) hundreds of thousands to millions of fans.

The fix would be legislation, but given the amount of money in live events... it just won't happen.

I try to always buy tickets on TickPick when I can (no affiliation). No fees and total prices are often much better than Ticketmaster. But my usecase is almost always buying from resellers. I never up-to-date to buy official tickets.

Bono, Geldof, livenation, cartel.

Distribution.

They're a monopoly.

We already have a thriving marketplace of seating- it's called the airline industry. You can buy a seat on a plane from dozens if not hundreds of sellers online.

Ticketmaster has more vertical integration. They own the ticketing, ticket resale, the clubs, concert production, promotion and talent management. When you own the venue, you can lock out other ticket sellers. Artists are probably looking for a one stop shop for putting a tour together.

As an example, stubhub can sell/resell tickets, but that's about it.

Tho not exactly a direct solution,

Related:

Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225357

Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow's Chokepoint Capitalism dedicates a chapter to the mechanisms through which TM enforces a virtual monopoly over live music.

Corruption.

Rant: Trying to buy tickets for the Knicks game at MSG. Is it really impossible to have a ticketing platform that prevents scalpers from marking up prices to an insane amount?

$10000+ for a ticket that originally costs around 2k should be illegal. Most of these tickets will go unsold I'm sure.