Sadly there's very little space for startups to fix this. Live Nation/Ticket Master have a monopoly. I'm not sure how on earth they were allowed to merge. It's like merging all of the record labels with Apple/iTunes.
Yes, you can buy tickets on other sites but there's very little space for innovation and they hold the key, if they don't want you to do something innovative they can stop you and if you do succeed you're still funding your competitor.
The problem is that it's very hard to penetrate Ticketmaster's market because of the sneaky way they maintain their monopoly. They offer large up-front payments (a.k.a. bribes) to venues in exchange the exclusive rights to sell tickets to events at those venues over the Internet. Ticketmaster than passes those costs on to the consumer. It is not unlike the way in which credit card companies maintain their monopoly by offering "deals" (miles, cash back, whatever, it all amounts to the same thing: bribes) to consumers to use their cards and then extract the costs of those bribes from the merchants who end up passing the costs back to the consumers. Credit card rules until recently have forbidden merchants from passing those costs on selectivey to credit card users, so the net result is essentially that credit cards users are subsidized by non-users, which provides a strong incentive for people to use credit cards, which maintains the monopoly. It's an underhanded strategy IMHO. But it's also quite effective.
In my country, ticketing is per-venue. So if I want to go see an act at venue A, I go to their website and book from there. Acts' websites have lists of venues and dates, and direct people to the venues' websites to book. Most venues - at least the ones hosting things I attend - are independent of one another.
This doesn't seem like a natural monopoly to me - a new startup can sign up venues one at a time. Is the situation different in America?
That was the situation, but they all signed with TicketMaster because TicketMaster had the best point of sale software for tickets. Technically ticketing is still per-venue and they are independent, they just all use TicketMaster.
This isn't always 100% true, as some venues have similar owners, but that's a bit beside the point.
I think you're slightly mistaken there. The merger that created this monopoly was TicketMaster and TicketsNow. TicketsNow was one of the largest names in the secondary market (what most people will commonly refer to as brokers and scalpers), where TicketMaster and LiveNation were both primary ticketing suppliers. The National Association of Ticket Brokers have been lobbying against this as a vertical monopoly, and have shown significant evidence that TicketMaster, when under contract to sell tickets at a certain price, will sell first to TicketsNow and then sell them at the market value on TicketsNow. They've lost a lot of money in law suits as a result and will continue to do so.
TicketMaster and LiveNation did merge in 2010, but that would be more like Apple and Google merging than Apple and iTunes.
I'm not talking about Apple and iTunes merging but Live Nation (That owns the rights to the musicians and puts on the shows) and Ticket Master, who sells the tickets).
I was under the impression that TicketsNow had very little market share. Aren't (EBay owned) StubHub, EBay and Craigslist the major players in the secondary market (excluding scalpers at the event)?
I have college basketball season tickets and my online account is integrated with TicketsNow (one click to electronically list my tickets to any game). I've tried using it as a seller and have had no interest in my tickets. The same tickets usually sell within a few days on StubHub.
As a buyer, I have checked TicketsNow on occasion and rarely find any tickets available for the event. One time I did find a great deal: 5th row center court tickets to a sold out game at face value. I think I got them because no other buyers had looked on the site.
It depends on if you're a consumer or a broker. If you're a consumer, sure, StubHub and CL will probably do the best for you, but that's because you're not a broker.
I'll definitely make some brokers angry by explaining this, but there are a few ticketing networks, the largest being TicketNetwork (TN).
TN is a SaaS play that costs somewhere in the $2500/year range, and goes up or down depending on which services you need. If I'm a broker I can simply get on TicketNetwork and list my tickets. We'll say I bought a ticket for $50 and I want to sell it for $100. I put it on the network at $100. TicketNetwork automatically updates it so that it's selling on your site for $100. Since it's on the network every other ticket broker has access to it, and they resell it for different amounts (standard is your price + 20%). So another ticket broker in my city would try to sell the ticket for $120 - they pay me $100, and I dropship it directly to the customer with a white-label packing slip.
There are about 800 brokers on the network at any given time and about $1 Billion in inventory. Some won't sell, most will. The affiliate payout in the ticket industry is among the highest, since it's super high margins. As a broker it's great, because as soon as you throw a ticket on the network you have 800 people trying to sell your ticket. But not just anyone can be on the Network - you have to pay a pretty penny for that opportunity, that keeps people like you out.
Where TicketsNow makes most of its money is in the selling. They have excellent marketing, great affiliates, and they are selling an absurd amount of tickets. They let you post your tickets on TicketsNow, but that's not where the real money is made, the real money is in selling other brokers' tickets that are much higher margins.
I'm in the US but I recently bought tickets via Ticketmaster to a show in Canada. I was going to order parking too, but they wanted to charge $30 to ship the parking passes. One sheet of paper to ship 200 miles, cost $30? And no option to print it out. Feels like it should be illegal.
I run a ticket startup (SeatGeek) and thus have some familiarity with the industry. In response to to the proposed solutions:
"Someone Needs To Create A New Ticketing Platform"
Creating it is one thing. Getting venues to agree to use it is much, much harder. Venues usually sign long-term (5-10 year) contracts with Ticketmaster to make them their exclusive ticket platform. These contracts usually include a large upfront payment from Ticktmaster to the venue. Given that LiveNation is the by far the biggest promoter in the US, it would be an enormous risk for a venue to forsake Ticketmaster and go with an alternative.
"Venues/Artists Need To Ditch The Big Guys"
See the above. Pearl Jam rather famously tried this in the mid-1990's, with disastrous results (http://goo.gl/xJItB). Not playing in Ticketmaster venues forced them into the netherlands of American live music venues.
"All-Inclusive Pricing Model"
To Ticketmaster's credit, they're getting a lot better at this, but they still have a way to go. It's worth noting that the majority of the fees that the author complains about are not kept by Ticketmaster; they are kicked back to the event promoter. The promoter does this so that they can advertise low face values (appearing fan-friendly) while maintaining margins.
"Offer More Music/Merchandise + Ticket Packages"
This is a bit of a non-sequitur. The author writes the entire article from the perspective of making ticket buying better, and then throws this in "for the content creators." It will indeed make more money for artists, assuming it doesn't hurt conversion rate (which it does) but strong-arming consumers into buying more stuff when they purchase tickets doesn't seem fan-friendly to me.
"Forget Everything I Just Wrote, We Should All Learn From Louis C.K."
Totally impractical. Louis C.K. could pull this off because he performs at comedy clubs. If you're Coldplay...not an option (see above).
There's no question that ticketing needs reformation. But this is an industry (like payment processing) where considering change from a detached, naive perspective is fruitless. It's important to understand the intricacies before avenues for upheaval can be found.
This is a great explanation (greetings from a former founder of Stubtopia - I met some SeatGeek guys at TicketNetwork tradeshows, but can't be sure if it was you).
By my estimation the next big chance for a software company to go after ticketmaster would be in 2015 - a lot of major venues expire, but it would be extremely difficult. You'd have to have an entire ticketing platform already built, which to build one as robust as ticketmaster would be extremely expensive, but then there's no guarantee venues will sign with you.
Venues generally have no incentive to work with anyone other than TicketMaster, especially since the LiveNation merger. Basically all you have to do if you're a venue is plug into the TicketMaster platform and everything else is taken care of - from the ticketing to the promoting and the entire point of sale mess online.
Reality is as a consumer you will keep taking it in the shorts for some time - TicketMaster is a 1000 pound gorilla that will be very difficult to knock off. I've talked with dozens of would-be TicketMaster competitors over the years, and they all end up going after different markets where they can get more bang for their buck. But even in smaller/different markets you have the likes of Paceolan.
Ticketing is hard. It's like a lot of business solutions where a custom logic language is essentially baked in to describe price points, discounts, and more.
For example, Tixato (my current favorite free ticketing platform) tries to use "price groups". For each event, you set up a series of price groups that make a base price and discounts based on it. You can then assign specific price groups to each night. So for a $15 show with a $5 or maybe a 20% student discount, you just write it as such. But what if you want to offer a 2-for-1? Make a 50% price point, right? But what stops people from buying just one ticket at that point? Now you need to handle that case. And they just get crazier and crazier.
Plus, ticketing takes a heavy load. The I Heart Radio festival this year sold out in 8 minutes. The room has a capacity of 16,800. The festival is two days long. Let's assume only 28,000 were put on sale (the rest were for giveaways, house seats, artists, and artist comps), that's still 3,500 transactions per minute of $423 each (plus fees). You don't want that to screw up.
In this particular case, auto-scaling would be too slow, so you'd have to do something more clever. And ticketing obviously has strong consistency issues, so that removes another set of optimizations.
And of course, you'd still have to do all the load testing to make sure your chosen back end really performed correctly, which is a large fraction of the scaling work.
Fab. That's helpful. And getting all of that detail right strikes me as the kind of thing that is best approached through incremental growth, so that you can polish cases in collaboration with clients. Which, as you said, this market is not well suited for.
"The promoter does this so that they can advertise low face values (appearing fan-friendly) while maintaining margins."
I don't understand how this is legal. I'm pretty sure my local grocery store wouldn't be allowed to advertise tomatoes at $1/pound but then tack on fees so I end up paying $2/pound.
They have a way of getting around this protest: if you travel to the venue box office and buy tickets in person, you'll get tickets at face value. So it's possible to get tickets at face, but it's no secret that a substantial majority of buyers prefer to endure the "convenience charge" associated with buying online.
That's interesting, but brings up two more points:
First, which price do they state up front when you buy online? If it's the base price, then it's still wrong. My grocery store wouldn't be able to get away with advertising $1/pound at the location where I shop, charging me $2/pound, and saying that they do offer $1/pound as long as I travel to one of their other stores that offers it.
Second, why do people complain about TicketMaster so much if it's this easy to bypass? Is there some kind of hidden catch, or do all of these people hate these hidden fees enough to blog about them but not enough to go buy the tickets in person?
In many ( most) cases it's impractical for people to buy tickets at the venue. Even leaving out situations where tickets sell out quickly the costs associated with going to a downtown box office tend to exceed the fees annoying as they are--and even in person there tend to be various facility fees and the like.
It can't be fees for buying in person, since I'm being told that buying in person with no fees is how they can get away with advertising a the base price. As for the inconvenience of buying in person, that really doesn't seem to add up, but I suppose people really could prefer to spend an extra $60 over going to the venue in person to buy.
There's at least some competition. I'm in Raleigh, and to get to, say, Chicago, I've got multiple airline options (some direct, some 1 or 2 stops, etc). If I want to see The Who in Greensboro, there's only one game in town.
In some ways, the airline industry is one of the most purely competitive industries we see. Most airline customers care about price above all other things. A $5 difference in price can make the difference between a person choosing airline A or airline B. While a company like TicketMaster will tack on convenience fees any time they think they can make an extra buck, the airlines are actively trying to avoid applying extra fees to their typical customer, because that typical customer will jump ship to another airline in an instant if they think they can get a better deal there.
In short, TicketMaster is charging "convenience fees" purely because they can, while airlines charge you for buying a ticket from a real person because competition makes them charge for what actually costs them money.
I currently run a online ticketing startup (Voost) for another side industry, athletic events (think bike/running/triathlete races), but I've also owned a fairly large night club in San Francisco. I've had the fortune of seeing a few sides of this industry now.
You have a great explanation. I think the key point is getting venues to agree to switch to something else because Ticketmaster/ClearChannel truly owns the market. Heck, they own most of the venues too. One time, I ended up losing a ton of money on a Bone Thugs & Harmony show because a ClearChannel radio station advertised 'accidentally' that we were sold out and tickets wouldn't be available at the door. Nobody showed up. The games they can play are amazingly creative.
This time around for Voost, we are trying to buck the trend with ticket sales. We force the promoters to always absorb the ticket fees themselves. The athletes love it because it is one simple price and we've done our best to keep our fees at a minimum. We'll see how it works out in the long run for us, but so far it's been good.
Sure, you can make the tickets $1 and charge a $50 fee (which gets kicked back), but eventually people are going to catch on and start complaining.
For venue ticketing, I honestly can't fathom someone in a startup really upsetting the industry without playing the same games as ticket master.
> a ClearChannel radio station advertised 'accidentally' that we were sold out and tickets wouldn't be available at the door. Nobody showed up.
Didn't you sue them? I hear all the time that US is a country dominates by its lawyers, and that you can sue you physician if he didn't forecast your cancer ten years in advance. Here you seem to have a legitimate case, and would win some money they would find a less disgusting way to fight next time. Or maybe, or surely I'm wrong and laws don't protect people and businesses in US the same way they do in Europe.
I mostly depends on how much resources you can provide to your legal team verses what your opponent can. The vast majority of the time, it boils down to who has more money. The exceptions are usually due to public agencies or organizations with a “dog in the fight” that would benefit in the long term if the underdog wins.
ClearChannel/Ticketmaster is huge and it would probably take the backing of a corporation the size of Time Warner or Apple to challenge them. Issues like this aren’t usually “sexy” enough for PR focused firms like the ACLU or FSF or whatever would be apropos here to get involved with, at least initially.
No, of course I didn't sue them and they knew I wasn't going to sue. It isn't like there is even a phone number or person that you can call to complain. And really, what would I sue for exactly? How could I prove they did that on purpose?
I'm also not JWZ (even though my club was on the same street as his). I didn't have endless gobs of Netscape money to sink into dealing with stuff like that... and that is a big reason why my business died. This is just one story of many issues we faced.
Lesson learned: never open a night club despite how good your intentions are.
If their mistake did cause harm to your business, they should pay for it. Having more or less money than the other part should have zero correlation with the result of a justice judgement, because having more or less money do not change the facts that have happened and should be judged.
At least that's how we conceive justice in France (eg "dommages et intérêts"), but after reading the US-DE comparison [1] I understand I am probably wrong.
> There's no question that ticketing needs reformation. But this is an industry (like payment processing) where considering change from a detached, naive perspective is fruitless. It's important to understand the intricacies before avenues for upheaval can be found.
Are the problems with ticketing things that the big companies (eg: ticketmaster) don't want to change because of revenue concerns -- but will eventually be forced to as new companies arrive -- or things that are so ingrained in the industry that they can't be changed without significant work from everyone involved?
(irrelevant side note, I realised I'm wearing a seatgeek t-shirt as I type this)
"Given that LiveNation is the by far the biggest promoter in the US, it would be an enormous risk for a venue to forsake Ticketmaster and go with an alternative."
This is far from inconceivable. The issue is a combination of technical & financial.
First, can a ticketing system support a massive onsale? Ticketmaster has proven they can, time & time again. A lot of geeks thinks it's not a hard problem.
LiveNation apparently thought that too & went their separate way. They threw $100M at the problem & continually crashed for major onsale events. Eventually they threw in the towel & merged with TM.
So if you're a promoter, why take the risk?
As for financial, that brings us to the next point.
"Venues/Artists Need To Ditch The Big Guys"
You missed the biggest reason this won't happen: Venues & artists are the ones responsible for the fees. Those fees are largely dictated by venues, promoters, artists & the rest in the supply chain.
Honestly, when I hear this, it's a bit like someone telling Tony Soprano he needs to ditch his hitmen because they're violent.
The dirty secret is that many of these "fees" are actually from the venues and performers. TicketMaster and others are actually taking the heat as the bad guys on behalf of the venues and performers. We hate on TicketMaster and we can put the blame all on them (and the artists and venues sometimes even guide us to do so).
But if it's so bad then why do they keep using TicketMaster? Surely I'm not buying a ticket to a performance only because I can find it on the TicketMaster web page or box office right? They don't really offer anything substantial over the buying experience I can get anywhere else so the monopoly argument is silly (although they do have a good patent portfolio it's not anything can't innovate around).
It's simply because they will take the heat for them when the artists and venues want to tack on extra fees. That is not say TicketMaster's fees are not high but most of the "extra fees" are extras from the venues and performers.
The same goes with Fandango. You think that extra $1 for buying a ticket online Fandangos fee?? Nope. It's the fee for the movie theatre wants.
I've worked in this ticketing industry in a previous startup so I understand the game well. It's not really crazy the stuff that gets pulled.
So you're saying that maybe a law could be passed to identify these kickbacks. Think of an ingredients list on food packaging, where all portions of the fee are accounted for up front.
Well the fees are actually not really "kickbacks" but really just normal fees with standard crazy markups that are vague on who actually gets the money. They aren't required to list out who makes what money on things. They are just not allowed to lie and commit fraud and they do make sure to stay inside those bounds.
"General processing fee" is really just a processing fee as it sounds (but it doesn't say who gets the money, why does that mater? they are not committing fraud by claiming something it isn't).
They have a right to tack on any fees they want and you have the right not to buy it. They could put a fee on there at checkout for making a purchase on a full moon. Whatever, it doesn't mater. Now if they are charging you for fees after you make the purchase of a product or service, you do have some consumer protections but not when they are tacking them on up front.
You are buying a ticket and how the money is used isn't really something that isn't provided. Your only real right as a consumer is to buy or not buy. If you want more info about how money is spent and they won't provide it you have the right to not buy it but you can't force private businesses to be publicly audited.
>Well the fees are actually not really "kickbacks" but really just normal fees
They aren't normal though. Air fares exempted, I can't think of many goods and service that have so many extra fees tacked on to the advertised price.
It's also not "normal" to charge a customer more when they are in fact costing you less (ie. print at home tickets). This may be legal and permitted but it sure as heck isn't "normal" or ethical business practice.
>Your only real right as a consumer is to buy or not buy.
I think most here would agreed it should be your right as a consumer to know the real price upfront. Not much to ask.
Ticketing is weird in that the supply chain exists post wholesale. I have worked on both the live and recorded side of the business. I know most of what could be tucked into a "service fee" from recorded.
The problem has so many facets it's hard to count. Where to start?
a) charging by subscription instead of by transaction. This is nice. This is a great idea for patron happiness. Unfortunately the patron isn't the customer at a ticketing agent. The customer is the presenter/promoter or venue. As a patron, I don't NOT buy Japandroids tickets because TicketMaster is the ticketing agent. This plan causes the ticketing agency to almost assuredly lose money or customers (price too low they lose money, price too high they lose smaller venues).
b) The "big guys" are also probably that artist's promoter, or they own the venue. LN/TM promote most big names and own a good portion of the venues. It's vertical.
c) No band wants their promoter or agent to deal with merch. Merch is where a lot of the money comes in at the venue, and they want as much control of that as possible. Most venues already require a certain percentage of merch sales be given back in settlement. The only way to make this work would be for the label or artist to sell the merch package ahead of time with a voucher for tickets to be used at the agent.
It doesn't help that ticketing a very large likely to sell out show is HARD. It doesn't help that convenience charges are accepted in the industry and quite frankly, if you're a venue that runs a hard box office with an online agent, you love that they charge a convenience fee.
The only real solution without major disruption by a major act leaving the LN/TM world is for TM to show final price, and have all the settlement be secret. I honestly would prefer to see the fees as they break down, so I know how much is going to the box office settlement.
I think the place for a great disruptive startup would be at the promoter level. It's not something that you can just throw a lot of tech at, but at this point LN seems a lot more disruptable than TM.
Thanks for the great insight guys! Are the promoters/venues adding these fees because their Ticketmaster contract forces them to do it? Or are they doing it because the industry allows them to do so. What's their opinion towards it?
There is lots of useful and interesting detail about how the ticketing industry works in this thread, and I certainly sympathize with the post's complaint. But I'd like to briefly (and mildly) chastise the idea for a more abstract reason, if you'll indulge me.
The post advocates starting a company in order to build and sell a new software application. If this resembles every other business app I've ever written or used, the developer will quickly run into a complex set of rules and requirements that is almost impossible to fully anticipate or characterize a priori.
The motivation for doing so is admittedly egregious fees charged by an incumbent vendor. Imagine one is successful in building the app, despite all of the unforeseeable obstacles. All the incumbent would have to do is lower its prices, either accepting slightly lower margins to maintain the fee pass-thru to its partners or eliminating such fees as the hypothetical startup would do.
In other words, the proposal is to dedicate years of effort to a problem in order to compete on price by 10-25%. This is generally a losing proposition. If one can achieve a 90% lower price for the same or slightly better functionality that an incumbent will find difficult to match (the famed 10x price/performance improvement), then one may have something sufficient to build a business around, depending on how difficult/capital intensive it is to create the product--ignoring all of the other barriers to adoption that exist in this or another industry.
But faced with a narrow price-performance improvement, incumbents can either lower prices or, if it's a functional improvement, invest a similar or lesser amount of capital (they already have employees, a brand name, a salesforce, etc. that a startup would have to build from scratch) to match to the feature set.
Don't get me wrong: I don't want to talk anyone out of the desire to start a company, to improve a process or an application, or to return excess profits to the consumer in the form of lower prices. But part of being a successful entrepreneur is picking the right battles and bringing an unfair advantage to bear against tough competition, something I and many others still struggle to achieve. In this case, I don't see the unfair advantage or the 10x improvement, and I think we should challenge each other to be hard-nosed realists about where we focus our collective entrepreneurial talents.
Excellent analysis. But I think you've missed an important point. Unfortunately, the real customers in this market aren't the people buying the tickets, because they aren't the ones deciding whether or not Ticketmaster gets the gig. Ticket-buyers are the veal.
If you want to displace Ticketmaster, you need to find something that's 10x better for the venue, not the buyer. Or you need to find a way to disrupt the venue/artist relationship sufficiently that the venue's choices don't matter.
23.8% of the cost of your Big Mac is also charges and fees.
The fact is, people don't like transparency when it comes to pricing. You'd rather not know how much the wholesale price is when paying retail.
I believe artists & venues force TicketMaster to show you the wholesale price. TicketMaster would likely prefer you didn't know their profit margin, like almost every other company you buy things from.
> I still don't really understand why US places don't include sales tax like we include VAT.
A lot of people seem to be under the impression (false as far as I can tell, in every jurisdiction that I know of) that businesses are legally required to list only the price excluding tax. I have had many, many people give me this explanation when I've complained about this. (They often follow it up with a disparaging comment about the nanny-state government.)
I suppose it's possible that that's true someplace, although I think it's unlikely as 1st Amendment provisions should at least make it possible to list both. But true or not, it's at least a widely held belief.
It's not the transparency that annoyed him, it's the slow reveal. If the site announced upfront that the total price is $60, and provided a footnote with a breakdown of where the money goes, that would be fine.
General rule, don't tell customers "oh by the way the price will be twenty percent higher than we said it would be." If you're going to piss people off, do it for more money than that.
Exactly. When I go buy my Big Mac, at least I know it's going to be that final price + state sales tax. The intention of my post was not the price, but how the price was conveyed.
Does Ticketmaster know what percentage of people click "Buy Tickets" and leave during their three steps of fees:
As a consumer, I am deciding if the total price is worth seeing the content I want to consume. In Ticketmaster's current checkout process, they give me three opportunities to change my mind.
It's not the transparency that annoyed him, it's the slow reveal. If the site announced upfront that the total price is $60, and provided a footnote with a breakdown of where the money goes, that would be fine.
General rule, don't tell customers "oh by the way the price will be twenty percent higher than we said it would be." If you're going to piss people off, do it for more money than that.
I for one don't begrudge these fees at all. What's the alternative? Go down to the venue (driving, parking) and stand in line at the box office? My time is worth something.... I think these fees are more than fair. It's not really about what it costs TicketMaster to do this stuff, it's about what it's worth to the buyer.
It's not so much the fees, but the way the pricing information is presented that piss people off. If you went to the ticketing site, got told that tickets where $60 each, bought 4 tickets and got charged $240 I doubt most people would complain. But if you're told tickets are $45 each and then all of a sudden get charged $240 for 4 tickets that's when people get annoyed.
Brown Paper Tickets is excellent up-and-coming ticketing company that I've used multiple times for alternative events in the pacific northwest. I'd love to see more companies take on the ticketmaster empire. https://www.brownpapertickets.com
I'm in the PNW as well, but not too fond of Brown Paper Tickets.
One company that I believed in was Bookr - they took away the ticketing fees (well actually they bundled it into a final price... so it was 'hidden'). They were working with local venues to give customers a clear price for the tickets they paid for.
Ticketmaster and Comcast alternate as the #1 and #2 most hated companies in consumer surveys year after year. But it doesn't seem to matter, their monopolies have been stable for many years. I thought maybe the acquisition by Live Nation would help with Ticketmaster abuses but there haven't been many changes. Unless the government steps in it looks like this will be the state of affairs for a long time.
You probably guessed this but: promoters often have deals whereby they get a cut of the ticketing agency fees, say in exchange for exclusivity. So really the distinction presented to the consumer between fees and the face price of the ticket is all a bit bogus.
And that's before you look into the sort of practices around tickets being released by the agency to a secondary ticket vendor (perhaps one which they own...) and sold on at great markup with a cut going back to the agency and perhaps even back to the promoter.
I suspect the problem is that while the author is happy to pay $60 all-inclusive with no questions asked, a lot of live music fans are young-ish and on the kind of budget where it isn't an easy decision to spend $60 on a night's entertainment. You might persuade them to pay, but harder if you put them off with a big upfront ticket price than if you spring it on them in hidden extras. I'm sure ticketmaster have done their research and wouldn't be doing it this way if it didn't increase their revenue, and that promoters wouldn't be using them if these tactics didn't improve theirs.
Also part of the problem is that there's this social pressure in the music industry around fans and ticket pricing and around artists 'selling out'. In the open market, tickets for big shows are usually worth a lot more than the face price, but promoters (or at least, artists) are reluctant to be seen to capture all that value because of the negative PR involved.
A lot of people have wanted to see Ticketmaster taken down a peg for a long time. It's probably easier to do if you limit yourself to small-to-mid-size gigs, independent artists etc, and there are already some great non-abusive ticketing agencies in this space for example http://www.wegottickets.com ...
Maybe the way to change the model is to start with small bands/shows/venues. Get the model working well for them, and gradually work they way up.
Spotify and Pandora know what obscure bands are popular near every small venue. Booking managers should have access to this data to decide what bands to book. Once they've booked a show, they should be able to promote the shows back to the exact Pandora or Spotify users that like the bands, perhaps using realtime bidding on an ad exchange (since users are rarely watching the Pandora or Spotify pages).
I listen a hundred plus bands via streaming. I dont even know their names, much less when they play nearby. A system like this could increase the number of small shows, and make it possible for more musicians to make a living as musicains.
Start with the little guys first, eventually you can work your way up to dethrone Ticketmaster.
"Blah blah blah, and then I bought the tickets because the price was worth it to me."
Well OK then. That means they are pricing things correctly.
Should, someday, these stories ever change to "Blah blah blah, and then I cancelled the order and did something else with my time that day because the cost was not acceptable to me", then perhaps something would change if enough people actually did this. But as long as there are sold out shows, prices, and even fees, should be increased, not decreased. Sold out shows means you are not charging enough.
The U.S. passed a law saying that displayed airline tickets on sites (expedia.com, etc.) have to include all fees.
That was a great thing, because suddenly you could accurately compare between sites that included and didn't include the fees up-front.
Seems to me that ticket purchases would be another great area to pass a law saying advertised prices must reflect all fees. It won't stop them from charging them, but at least they'll "feel" built-in, rather than feeling like a bait-and-switch.
Heck, no companies should be allowed to display prices that don't include minimum mandatory fees. (Except for sales tax, since people expect that.) It's kind of ridiculous they can get away with it in the first place.
Yes, you can buy tickets on other sites but there's very little space for innovation and they hold the key, if they don't want you to do something innovative they can stop you and if you do succeed you're still funding your competitor.
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