> No, fans have no choice. Entertainers allow it by using Ticketmaster.
Disclaimer: Ex-Ticketmaster employee.
This doesn't quite hit it. Entertainers encourage it as they get paid to do so.
Ticketmaster is basically paid to be a bad guy. If you hate Ticketmaster, then all is working to plan.
Because what you're not doing is hating the actual decision maker on those fees -- the artist, the promoter, & the venue. Ticketmaster splits those fees. Ticketmaster wants to get paid of course, but the deal can be structure those fees any which way.
Want a low (or no) fees with Ticketmaster? If that's what the artist, promoter & venue want, that's what will happen.
Want a low ticket price for advertising & high fees to increase your profit? Ticketmaster can do that too.
At the end of the day, the artist & promoter own the tickets, not Ticketmaster.
By and large, it is the venues and promoters that set large fees. The reason they like TM is because TM will take the blame for charging those fees when in reality, they're kicked back.
Of course, the problem is that in many cases now, Live Nation owns the venues and acts as the promoters, so those kickbacks started going, ultimately, to the company charging them.
> Economically, it doesn't seem to make sense for artists and venues to be giving so much money to a partner who is delivering so little value.
Artists and venues receive a part of the fees that TicketMaster charges. TicketMaster's essentially being paid by artists and venues to be the bad guy.
> Ticketmaster has a number of competitors (StubHub, Eventbrite, AXS, Seatgeek).
Those are reseller platforms (StubHub, Seatgeek) and independent entities (Eventbrite & AXS) that aren't associated with the venues/rooms they're playing in.
So your examples either:
1) Resell tickets from Ticketmaster + the list you mentioned + all other providers, or
2) They don't have the ability to flex on people because they don't own & operate the rooms across the entire planet, and in turn can't hit them with exclusivity clauses in their contracts the second they step foot into one of XXXXX rooms they'd like to play.
> Nevertheless, artists do seem to always gravitate to companies like Ticketmaster, even when neither they nor their venue have any affiliation.
Are you sure those non-affiliated venues don't have 10+ year exclusive ticketing contract that came with a fat lump sum when the ink dried in order to modernize & sustain their business?
I'd also question which rooms are slanging TM tickets without being owned by the overarching entity? I don't think I've ever seen that and I'd appreciate you presenting some examples of this.
> What we should ask is what problems a naive artist would face selling their tickets like any other commodity:
So anyone outside the TM system is naive? Wow... 0k... proceed...
> - They overprice it: No one shows up, people are angry at the artist, the artist is in debt to the venue for overbooking.
Please explain to me how the artist is in debt to the venue? There isn't a promoter in between the two? The artist is signing loan agreements and going into debt to the venue? Tell me you have zero clue what you're talking about without telling me you don't know a single thing about this industry...
> - They underprice it: The tickets are hoovered up by scalpers who capture most of the ticket's true value, fans are disappointed they can't attend because finding a ticket is much harder.
Again, no idea what you're talking about.
1) TM is GASSED UP when scalpers hoover up. They have multiple reselling platforms for exactly this scenario, including one that's TM branded. They _love_ this.
2) In reality, the promoter/venue is totally fine with this. They build offers against the proposed ticket price & sellable capacity, and a sell out is a sell out. Sure, hindsight is 20/20 and they'll reference historicals and adjust accordingly when the agent hits them up for the next play, but nobody is mad at a sell out.
> and package the event wholesale for the venue and artist. Both parties are can be guaranteed of some portion of the event before tickets even go on sale and the risk for them both is diminished.
They own & operate the venues. The artists are paid cash up front to sign the exclusive tour contract. They're not working for _anyone_ other than Ticketmaster... you're tripping my guy...
> Obviously I'm not trying to say Ticketmaster is all sunshine and lollipops
Ayyyyy no worries anyone with any exposure to this industry and half of a brain has already determined you have no idea what you're talking about, you're wrong & confused & way out of pocket, and we already know TM isn't sunshine & lollipops... back into your text editor you go (please)...
> Nevertheless, artists do seem to always gravitate to companies like Ticketmaster, even when neither they nor their venue have any affiliation.
Artists will want play at more than one venue, surely, and I should imagine that TM's stance is "If you want to play at any of our venues, you sign with us". Might be possible for a small indie band to completely avoid any TM venues but for any moderately popular band, it's probably not possible.
> venues are absolutely entitled to a cut on any ticket resales
No I don't. Moreover, "in perpetuity" is a red herring.
> you assume people reselling tickets is a problem
No I don't. I perceive it as a problem venues are willing to pay to solve.
> It's telling that you assume that it's the venues that have to get in on the cut
Again, no I don't. Anyone on the supply side of this can negotiate this in. The tickets can originate from the artists, and then the organizers, and then the venues. Artists and venues can openly negotiate on this.
I've said before that you're imagining things I'm not, and halfway through your response, that's all you've done. I'm not going to bother to read or reply to the rest.
> Unfortunately you'll find that a lot of the consumer-hostile behavior is driven by the venues/promoters, who are the actual customers of the ticketing system. The huge fees are shared, offering the ability to advertise a fake cheap price. Ticketmaster takes the bad press as a serivce.
This is the first I'm hearing of this, interesting! Does that mean there's no room for honest ticketing with minimal overhead fees?
> fans ALLOW it by paying ridiculous fucking prices to attend events
No, fans have no choice. Entertainers allow it by using Ticketmaster.
> We're long past the days of needing an entity like Ticketmaster to be in the middle of ticket transactions
The greatest fear an event planner has is that they'll plan the event and no one will show up. Ticketmaster aggressively markets the events they're selling tickets for, which is why event planners continue to use them.
Sure, you could use a homegrown solution or a smaller company, but Ticketmaster unethically adds all purchasers to a bunch of mailing lists and makes it really difficult to unsubscribe, and then they can claim "X million mailing list subscribers" to the event marketers.
> Why can't they meet the demand by renting a larger venue?
For a variety of reasons. If Sting reunites with The Police and goes on tour- sure, rent a football stadium. Some bands prefer smaller, more intimate venues. Some may have a hard time competing for the limited spaces at larger venues. Some may choose to avoid that level of fame. Who knows? It's none of my business.
Bands are always free to chase as much fame as they want, and to make their own policies about pricing or resale or whatever. I just think it's a little dystopian to say they're required to zealously follow some sort of capitalist ideal.
> Banning ticket resale is also expensive at scale.
Checking tickets at the door doesn't get much more expensive if you also require showing an ID with a name that matches the name on the ticket. You can even use the barcodes on most IDs, no fiddly reading required! Remember, you're trying to keep out the people who capitalize on scale, so if somebody sneaks in with a resold ticket and a corresponding fake ID, who cares? A 99% solution is fine.
> It makes the market for the tickets more efficient, but that isn't what the artists are optimizing for.
As soon as you are selling tickets, you no longer have full control over that. If you want to optimize your audience, you need to make allowances, and that may mean a lottery of will-call tickets or something. You don't get to make money on those tickets by selling publicly and also have the the ability to fully craft who goes. That goes out the window once you decide you want to sell publicly, and IMO that's the way it should be. That's how markets work.
> If you want to know who is responsible for a bad thing just answer one question: Who has the power to fix it? For example performers/venues could use a non-ticketmaster intermediary
Is this actually true? I thought Pearl Jam(?) tried this many moons ago when Ticketmaster was far less powerful and eventually caved in because it was so stupidly difficult to coordinate all the idiots infesting the music event business.
>This fixed supply makes pricing tickets a delicate process: charge too much, and you won't sell out; charge too little, and demand goes off the charts. Scalpers are good at spotting when the balance isn't right, which is often; when popular artists sell tickets for accessible prices, demand will almost always outstrip supply.
Some of this logic doesn't pan out at a certain level though - I read an interview with Q-Prime, big-time managers in the music business - who had a different take:
>It’s been said that the only artist who has really been able to beat this is the Rolling Stones, and that's because they charge so much for tickets that the market won't really bear higher prices.
CB: The other thing you can do -- and Peter and I talk about this a lot -- is, in general, successful artists, and this has been true for many years, don't want to see any empty seats. So if you want to price your tickets high enough, like the Stones, you're gonna end up with empty seats or the possibility of empty seats. If you price your tickets lower than the market will bear, you won't have any empty seats. So it really comes from the artist deciding, “I don't mind if I don't sell the last thousand or 2,000 tickets, it's still a great day. Everybody who wants a ticket will get a ticket.”
PM: Some of our artists go for big indoor productions, right? And they sit there with their business manager and they go, “We're spending this many millions on a stage show but we're not even getting half out of that.” And you have to tell them, fine, let's go to $125 a ticket instead of $75 -- and guess what? You'll make more money but you won't, as Cliff says, fill all the seats. So make a decision: Either go out with just a stage and we'll make plenty of money at $60-75, or go out with all this staging and you're gonna have to charge more money.
> There's a false equivalence between the fans who want to see the gig the most and the fans who are willing to spend the most.
This is how scarce resources are allocated. There is no fairer way to decide who wants something the most than to ask who is willing to give up the most to acquire it.
> If an event organiser/ticketer wants to use dynamic pricing, that's up to them.
Absolutely. And if a third party wants to buy tickets at the offered price, that's up to them.
> One might argue (and many artists have ) that the artists would get paid more if there were a market for their tour rather than one company owning the vast majority of large venues.
I think that's where the "reputation laundering" angle comes into play. With its unique position, Ticketmaster gives artists plausible deniability. "Nothing we can do about it", "evils of capitalism", "a monopolist captured the market, government doing nothing", etc. - say artists, for whom the image they project is a core part of their market value. With a properly functioning competitive market, those same artists would have to either get much less, or answer some inconvenient question about ticket pricing.
> it's about artists not wanting the negative attention and feeling that high ticket prices attract, and offloading some of the price to a third party (by having them collect additional fees) to manage this.
I'll try to rephrase. This would only work if the artist selling the ticket by themselves could only sell it lower than Ticketmaster. That is, Ticketmaster can extract MORE money out its customers because they hate Ticketmaster.
That is the idea I contest: people pay more on satisfaction, not on dissatisfaction. Yes, the artist save themselves some hassle, but they dont reduce it, they increase it. I would believe Ticketmaster has some leverage we are not considering.
A thought experiment: lets say artists now sell their tickets on platform independent and simultaneous to Ticketmaster, at the same total price. Would people buy on Ticketmaster because they prefer to hate it than to hate the artist?
Because the promoters, talent, and talent management are all in on it, TM just agrees to take the heat for its cut.
That is not to say that separating TM from the venues will not help concert goers, but maybe not as much as you might think.
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