Congress really going after Ticketmaster
- Thread starter Sean Miller Fan
- Start date
I think the difference would be if the hotel had, say a deal with a restaurant, and required you to eat at the restaurant if you booked a room, and then the restaurant being required only to sell food to guests from the hotel. Then the $20 meal at the restaurant would have a $10 service fee and the $200 room would have a $60 service fee. Then if you couldn't make it, and couldn't cancel your reservation, the hotel would then get another $60 in service fees when you sold your room to someone else. Then the owners of the hotel would lobby the government to be the only hotel available. Something like that.
124, mostly large summer concert venues (like Star Lake) and small obscure venues like Roxian Theater in McKees Rocks who would probably book you if asked nicely. So, a small percentage of all US concert venues.
BTW, Ticketmaster sold these Taylor Swift tickets FAR below market value. People got a heck of a bargain. No wonder the website was flooded. She has 2 dates at Acrisure and the cheapest uppers are $550 and cheapest lowers are $750 on the secondary sites. I wished I bought 10 tickets to sell.
Last edited:
Not sure where you are looking, but it’s well over 300 and compromises over 70% of all live event venues in the US. Literally 7 of the 10 here in Phoenix (they bought 5 during the pandemic, btw).
Having said that, not all monopolies are illegal. They didn’t force those venues to sell to them. It’s not illegal to build new venues that people like going to. Expanding vertically is not illegal. Does it suck that artists are pretty much forced to play Live Nation venues if they want a big national tour? Definitely yes. Is LN doing something illegal? Possibly, though not really anything illegal as it relates to anti-trust or their consent decree.
And guess who gets the service fee twice when you buy the ticket and when you sell it again on their resale platform?
Just stop. This isn't an instance of government overreach. This is exactly what needs to happen to Ticketmaster.
They have gone too far and overstepped in several areas. Time to bring them down.
There's a million resale sites. Fans arent required to use TM's.
Listen, for the venues that Live Nation owns, you could make a case they are being anticompetitive. You'd lose but you could make a case. However, this all started due to them pricing Taylor Swift tickets too low for her stadium tour. LN owns none of those stadiums. The promoter/marketer of an event and also being the ticket seller isn't anticompetitive. There are other businesses who operate similarly.
As proven in the NIL thread, if Congress is going to engage in frivolous matters, the country would better be served by clamping down on college sports NIL pay for play. In those cases, many, many college athletes are going to be screwed over in some manner; it forces universities to enter into secretive deceptive business agreements with unsavory characters and sham companies. And in the end a few players here and there get shekels while most do not. Worst it still leaves schools at Pitt’s level and below in the dust at the expense of a few behemoth programs. It took a system already rife with sleaze and managed to make it exponentially more so.
Concert ticket buyers know and accept full well that they are going to have hassles buying tickets and that the more desirable acts will cost more. This is a case of whiny soccer moms who can’t face letting little Cindy down so they became ‘victimized’. A case for a therapist, maybe. Not Congress.
It's not a matter of concerts in high demand costing more. Nobody is arguing that issue. It's a matter of Ticketmaster and Live Nation rigging the system and limiting the free market to work in their favor. Capitalism is suppose to let companies compete with the better products and services often being most successful, and the market competition will generate fair prices for consumers.
Ok, go through antitrust and make it stick. But I’d argue this is frivolous. Big money customers and bigger money acts are whining. Maybe they have legal reason to whine. Fine. But there are bigger issues.
And while there are many still more important, even NIL shams are bigger than Ticketmaster, because many students with NO money enticed to make dubious life choices with the false promise of big windfalls are getting and will increasingly be getting scammed, and without any regulation,relatively few mega powerful universities are “monopolizing” a huge widespread industry and causing schools that don’t want to engage in sleaze but still hope to compete (and fund their Woke sports), to make a Faustian choice.
Ya think? These kids are being paid salaries by university boosters but don't get the same benefits that an employee would get. Legally, they are probably already employees.
Yes and while not the greatest outrage in the world, the whole shady sleazy setup is more worthy of oversight than this. I know the Ticketmaster case will get more soccer moms tearfully happy with their senators for holding TV hearings on it, but it’s a case of big discretionary money customers and bigger money privileged celebrities making preposterous claims of victimization. I also know southern bubbas would be up in arms to see College football reform and that holds it back too. I know political realities. But if we’re just idly comparing, it’s actually more a question of what bad choice is worse.
It's actually a serious issue with Ticketmaster, and that isn't to minimize other serious issues that you mentioned. Watch the video I posted on page one if this thread.
And it's not a matter of privileged artists being victimized. Imagine if privileged Ford couldn't sell their vehicles in Pittsburgh unless they used a specific dealer, and then were forced to use sales software where the markup was an additional 30%.
Now say the dealer wants to use different software to make the cost cheaper for their customers, but the current sales software company said "if you do that then you can't sell Chevy and Toyota's, since we have and exclusive deal with them".
Then say Ford and Toyota wants to use some other dealerships using different sales software, but the sales software company said "if you do that then you can sell your cars at our network of dealers which dominate the industry."
Crap like that, which Ticketmaster has been doing for decades now. It hurts the consumer most and makes prices more expensive, while enriching themselves.
Lets say you are a popular artist and you want to play Pgh but dont want to sign with LN. They own Star Lake and wont book you. You have Heinz, PNC Park, PPG, the Pete, etc. And if you say "The Pete is too small." Sure. But just charge more for tickets. And if enough artists dont sign with Live Nation then LN will have no choice but to open their venues up to non-L N artists. These tears being shed for concert fans are absolutely insane. If they want to pay fair market value for tickets, they can very easily do so....on the secondary market the day before the event. Do that and you'll pay exactly what that seat is worth.
If you don't want to sign with LN/Ticketmaster, guess who isn't going to have their show at PPG, or the Pete, or Heinz, or PNC?
Are you insinuating that if Taylor Swift doesn't sign up with Live Nation, there are no venues for her to play in the US?
Taylor Swift calls Acrisure and says she wants to play there. They tell her no?
Ticketmaster a division of Live Nation controls the ticket sales and promotional responsibilities of concerts for the stadium, so they would tell her no. Live Nation has the same set-up at stadiums around the country, along with owning concert venues.
Acrisure Stadium is under no obligation to use TM. Even one of their main tenants, Pitt, doesnt use TM. If Taylor Swift called up Acrisure and said she wants 2 dates and will sell 140K tickets but the tickets will be sold on her website or another primary ticketing source, they aren't telling her no. Same with that country singer who people riot for every July, and any other big-time artist.
That's great. Why can't Taylor Swift sign up to play at Acrisure and Acrisure use TM to sell? TM tells Acrisure, "sorry but we cant let her play there because she isnt with Live Nation?" No.
it's really amazing how we give people a role of public trust and then they go work for the very people they were to protect us from. seems as if there should laws against such things.
She could do a “four wall” rental of the 200 stadiums she’s performing in and do whatever she wants. Rent and hire all the needed lighting, sound, production, staff, security, pick whatever ticketing platform she wanted, hire all the needed box office people, etc. in 100+ cities around the world.
As you can imagine, it’s much easier to sign up with LM/TM and just show up and perform.
Building a better mousetrap that makes it a no-brainer and charging whatever you want are unfortunately not anti-trust violations. Does it suck? Is it shitty? Are the fees outrageous? 1000 yes.
You are incorrectly assuming that Acrisure can ONLY book Live Nation artists. That's not true and frankly, ridiculous since they arent a LN venue
If an artist doesn't want to use Ticketmaster at Acrisure, then they can't play there. Nor can they play at PPG, the Pete, or the Amphitheater. Taylor Swift is essentially shut out of using a different Ticket provider, which might have better fees and that doesn't have technical problems allowing scalpers to gobble up tickets that are resold on the same platform so Ticketmaster can earn double fees.
The one and only reason that is the case is because the company that Pitt use WAS a Ticketmaster subsidiary that they were forced to sell during the merger. And the consent decree, which you have no problem with them ignoring for some reason, explicitly says that for ten years they were not allowed to freeze that company out. The only reason that is still in force today is because after Live Nation was found to be violating their consent decree the original order was extended another five years.
When/if that decree ever expires you are almost certainly going to find that Pitt's ticketing system changes.
Following up on this. You are Taylor Swift and want to book Pittsburgh for your summer tour. You don't want to use Ticketmaster, since their site crashed during your previous onsale. Where are you going to perform?
Milan Puskar Stadium?
The way this changes is if performers want it changed, and avoid cities without non-TM venues.
But the performers are being paid well so they mostly don't care.
Performers have mostly been powerless until now, with Taylor Swift feeling that her fans got screwed. Some have tried, but Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam were no match for the power of Ticketmaster.
Performers are not powerless, just spineless.
Springsteen could put out a press release saying he has decided not to tour anymore because he doesn't want to deal with Ticketmaster. Then not tour. But the performers don't care much about anything but money.
You are wrong. If they are with Live Nation, they have to use TM. If Taylor Swift drops LN, she can play Acrisure and sell tickets on smfnetwork.com if she wants.
"Thanks to a web of exclusivity contracts with artists and venues, consumers usually have to go through Ticketmaster to see the artists they want to see. Artists face limits too, as many arenas and stadiums have Ticketmaster exclusivity deals wherein playing at a venue means using Ticketmaster as their vendor."
How disappointed Taylor Swift fans explain Ticketmaster’s monopoly
It must be exhausting, always rooting for the antitrust laws.
www.vox.com
So Acrisure doesn't have an exclusive contract through Ticketmaster for concert tickets? I wasn't able to find a concert that wasn't through ticketmaster.
Similar threads
