What’s interesting here: 14 years ago, the US Justice Department green lit the merger under the assumption live nation and Ticketmaster would place nice
> On January 25, 2010, the U.S. Justice Department approved the merger pending certain conditions.
Heh, I may get overly excited to tell people that we're building a Ticketmaster/Live Nation competitor... The sentiment that one is sorely needed is so common, and yet so few people know we're doing it (the StubHub comparison is more typical)
If they don’t my wife and I are just going to stop going to shows that use TicketMaster/Live Nation. Any more a third of the ticket price is fees. Not worth it.
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.
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.
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.
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