It is mostly that venues should be able to choose from multiple ticket vendors. There is an additional very important monopoly also happening. Live Nation, the owner of Ticketmaster, also operates most of these venues. Live Nation also has a very large share of concert promotion.
So an artist can use Live Nation as a promoter, and then have access to Live Nation venues. Or they can use somebody else who can’t access Live Nation venues. Live Nation controls about 170 venues in the US. So that one 20k seat arena in Saratoga is controlled by Live Nation. Want to sell 20k tickets in Saratoga, you have to use Live Nation. Want to use Live Nation, then you have to use Ticketmaster. Multiply that by all of the top markets in the US.
The monopoly and control were achieved by buying and consolidating competitors.
I would think that multiple retailers for a single show is likely to cause problems.
Multiple retailers for a single arena (with one retailer per event) is dead simple. There are no insurmountable technical issues with selling 40,000 tickets for an event, arenas have been doing that since baseball stadiums were invented. You have a seat map, identify the pricing by section, and sell the tickets. Fandango does this for thousands of movie theaters, with dozens of shows a day and charges $2 a ticket, and you can get tickets on the movie website, or at the theater box office.
And, my personal take on resales is that I couldn’t possibly be less concerned if resales were completely impossible. The existence of a vibrant resale market is arguably worse for fans than Ticketmaster’s monopoly. The tiny percentage of actual fans who need to resell is dwarfed by fans who can’t get tickets because professional resellers (aided and abetted by TM) hoovered them all up. Offer a refund with a 15% restocking fee, and arenas can re-sell those tickets at the list price to fans who couldn’t get tix the first time around.
There aren’t any technical issues with selling the tickets - but someone (promoter/artist/venue) is choosing the ticket platform. If Live Nation is the promoter and owns the venue , how would it even be possible to keep Ticketmaster from being the only platform used by that tour and that venue?
My take is that it depends on what constitutes a “resale” - I have no problem if there weren’t any Stubhub-like platforms where I could offer my tickets for resale but if “resales are completely impossible” means I’m going to have a problem transferring tickets to someone else under any circumstances ( because I can’t attend, because I bought the tickets as a gift, because I bought tickets for me and three friends) I’m probably not going to buy tickets.
Yeah this. So many venues are owned by them now unless it’s a room at the back of a pub, its probably owned by ticketmaster. My local venue is as is the equivalent venue where I used to live in SF.
I buy a lot of event tickets and by far most venues, large and small, use Ticketmaster. AXS is their biggest competitor, but it’s much smaller. The only venue around here that I go to often which uses AXS is the Warfield in San Francisco.
Thirty years ago, Pearl Jam tried to fight Ticketmaster, a scuffle that ended in a near-total victory for Ticketmaster. It’s hard to imagine artists or their managers aware of this history would want to repeat those tactics that so publicly failed now, when Ticketmaster has an even tighter grip on the market.
Pearl Jam was outraged when, after it played a pair of charity benefit shows in Chicago, it discovered that ticket vendor Ticketmaster had added a service charge to the tickets. Pearl Jam was committed to keeping their concert ticket prices down but Fred Rosen of Ticketmaster refused to waive the service charge. Because Ticketmaster controlled most major venues, the band was forced to create from scratch its own outdoor stadiums in rural areas in order to perform. Pearl Jam’s efforts to organize a tour without the ticket giant collapsed, which Pearl Jam said was evidence of Ticketmaster’s monopoly. An analysis of journalist Chuck Philips’ investigative series[43][44][45][46][47][48] in a well known legal monograph[49] concluded that it was hard to imagine a legitimate reason for Ticketmaster’s exclusive contracts with venues and contracts to cover such a lengthy period of time. The authors wrote “The pervasiveness of Ticketmaster’s exclusive agreements, coupled with their excessive duration and the manner in which they are procured, supported a finding that Ticketmaster had engaged in anticompetitive conduct under section 2 of the Sherman Act.”
The United States Department of Justice was investigating the company’s practices at the time and asked the band to create a memorandum of its experiences with the company. Band members Gossard and Ament testified at a subcommittee investigation on June 30, 1994 in Washington, D.C.[50] Pearl Jam alleged that Ticketmaster used anti-competitive and monopolistic practices to gouge fans. After Pearl Jam’s testimony before Congress, Congressman Dingell (D-Mich.) wrote a bill requiring full disclosure to prevent Ticketmaster from burying escalating service fees. Pearl Jam’s manager said he was gratified that Congress recognized the problem as a national issue.[51] The band eventually canceled its 1994 summer tour in protest.[52] After the Justice Department dropped the case, Pearl Jam continued to boycott Ticketmaster, refusing to play venues that had contracts with the company.[53] The band tried to work around Ticketmaster’s exclusive contracts by hosting charities and benefits at major venues because the exclusive contracts often contained a clause allowing charity event promoters to sell their own tickets.[54] Music critic Jim DeRogatis noted that, along with the Ticketmaster debacle, “the band has refused to release singles or make videos; it has demanded that its albums be released on vinyl; and it wants to be more like its 1960s heroes, The Who, releasing two or three albums a year.” He also stated that sources said that most of the band’s third album Vitalogy was completed by early 1994, but that either a forced delay by Epic or the battle with Ticketmaster was to blame for the delay.[41]
I was listening to an NPR story on the Ticketmaster monopoly. They pointed out that Ticketmaster and Live Nation merged during the Obama administration. There were monopoly concerns raised at the time, but the administration was more concerned about repairing the economy. If you recall, they’d entered a recession just before Obama took office and that was the biggest issue at the time.
There was an argument that it needed to be allowed in order to keep the music industry from collapsing, so it was allowed to happen with some conditions. We’re seeing the consequences of that decision now.
Here’s a contemporary article of the time, and I’ll quote a bit that supports what I remember from that program.
Proponents of the merger, including its chief architect, Ticketmaster Chief Executive Irving Azoff, say the deal will help revive the music industry by creating a more efficient process to deliver music to fans. Opponents contend that it grants too much control to a single entity and will result in higher ticket prices.
Live events have been the only relatively healthy segment of the ailing music business in recent years. In 2009, North American concert revenue was a record $4.4 billion, according to Pollstar, a 10% increase over the previous year.
Ticketmaster and Live Nation executives have argued that the merger would benefit consumers. “It will give us greater flexibility in how we promote, market and sell tickets to events,” Ticketmaster’s Azoff said in February at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing looking into the deal. “It will give us a pathway to alternative pricing and fee structures.”
There are only really 2 possibilities to explain that judgement:
1 - The folks doing the approval were the absolute stupidest brain-dead lobotomized ass-clowns on the planet and had not bought concert tickets, or knew anyone who bought concert tickets, in the past 20 years
2 - There were payoffs.
Nobody who has bought concert tickets, or looked at the fact that concert revenue continually set higher and higher records each year, even during a recession, could come to the conclusion that there was not abuse of monopoly power there.