The problem is that, despite economists’ claims about the way competition works, the fact is that free market principles often lead to a complete absence of competition. If you allow a bunch of companies to compete, there sometimes comes a point where one company wins that competition to such an extent that it gains an effective monopoly, like TicketMaster has now.
This poses something of a problem for supporters of the free market, because one of the cherished myths about the free market is that it will basically always offer consumers better information and better choices than a regulated market. According to the free market argument, if one company gains market dominance, it won’t be too long until other companies find and exploit inefficiencies in order to restore competition. Thing is, though, that doesn’t always happen, because in some areas of the economy the barriers to entry are high enough that other companies don’t step in to compete.
One thing i wonder, though, is what ticket prices would look like in a world without TicketMaster. If every venue had to sell its own tickets, then every venue would also need to pay for the infrastructure required to sell those tickets. In this day and age, that means a system for online selling. For a 2,000-person music venue with no assigned seating, that might not be too difficult, but for a 2,000-seat theater or a 10,000-seat concert venue or a 70,000-seat football stadium, you need a fairly sophisticated web interface, one that keeps track of which seats are sold and which are available, that allows buyers to make choices about where to sit, and that is sophisticated enough to do things like offer the best available seats to someone viewing the site.
All of this stuff is currently taken care of by TicketMaster, and if each venue had to do it separately, you can be sure that the cost of implementing their own internet sales system would be passed on to the consumer through rising ticket costs. Web programmers don’t come cheap. At the moment, we see those costs in the form of “convenience” fees and such at TicketMaster, but if the fees were hidden in the cost of the ticket itself they wouldn’t be any less real.
I’m making a sort of devil’s advocate argument here, because i hate TicketBastard as much as anyone, but if we accept that the infrastructure required to sell tickets costs money, then does it matter whether we customers pay for that in the cost of the ticket, or in visible fees and charges? It’s a bit like airlines charging for checked baggage. It used to be hidden in the ticket cost; now it’s been disaggregated and constitutes a separate charge.