Ticketmaster/LiveNation control 70% of the market (in the US and UK; to a lesser extent elsewhere), this is though a mixture of owning or having exclusive contracts with big venues and having exclusive contracts with artists.

Venues make almost nothing from the tickets, for a big artists the artist will take a huge cut of the ticket price (often in the 70-85% region). Venues make all of their money from selling in venue products (food, drink) and a cut from product sales (tshirts, etc.) So it's in the venues interest to get as many people in as possible, venues would love to do dynamic pricing like airlines do.

But they can't, they're restricted by the contracts with the artists. Those contracts are very tightly written so venues cant do auctions to make more money or sell excess tickets at discount. It's also a reason places like ticketmaster have weird pricing, they can't just change the price of the ticket to be inclusive of all their fees.

Ticketmaster/Livenation for some time have wanted to run a discounted ticket site but it means renegotiating tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of artist and venue contracts, it's a non-trivial task. The whole thing is a huge mess.

Most startups in this area have tended to concentrate on the secondary market where you have less of these problems, but even there you need a lot of money to break into the market. It's very advertising driven (ticket sites are one of the biggest users of affiliate sales) and there's a huge amount of credit card fraud in the space so you often need to post a huge bond to even get a merchant account.

"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.

And worse, you can't split a venue up to 2 different sellers. They don't have a communication protocol for which seats are sold, so you end up in a position of double-booking. Also bad.

Basically the only way for this to work is:

a) a system exists where venues publish an event and seating

b) the system does nothing but keep track of sales and seats. They don't care who sold, just tracking that it was sold. Also allow full API access so any service can reserve and claim the seat, the service is now on the hook for that seat.

c) allow venues to indicate which services can sell their tickets

This will commodotize ticketmaster, but at the same time, there will very little value add, so who would compete. It'll be a race to the bottom with barely any money. And the service you build could take a small fee at best otherwise nobody would use you. AND you'd be competing against ticketmaster with almost no money.

And don't forget, the double booking problem... Your service will have to basically integrate with ticketmaster, who will never willingly do this given that you'll commodotize them, and they will not simply sacrifice themselves just to make some sort of positive outcome, and then also be completely beholden to another company.

Its a perfect monopoly field.

Apparently, Ticketmaster's business model is based on taking the negative public relations hit for charging higher prices on behalf of their customers.

If you create a startup called CheaperTickets.com with the noble intention of not charging those hated service fees, you won't get any customers. (Keep in mind it's the venues & the artists that are the real customers of Ticketmaster and not the ticket buyers). The venues want the lucrative cut of the service fees while Ticketmaster gladly takes the heat.

[1]http://www.laweekly.com/music/ticketmaster-and-servants-band...

[2]http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1xlt0i/til_ti...

What's interesting is that they haven't tried to go after big names at first... it's surely more of a long tail kind of thing. They started off only doing small, local venues, but they're doing so well that they're naturally starting to pick up bigger and bigger ones.

I'll be excited to see Ticketmaster go. I don't know of anynone who enjoys dealing with them.

By dangling more money.

In the 1980s, Ticketmaster beat the competitors (e.g. Ticketron) by offering the venues a better financial deal.

Ticketron charged the venues a service fee. Venues pay Ticketron.

Ticketmaster flipped that around and made a clever proposal: instead of charging the venue, we'll charge the concertgoing fans extra service fee(s) and we'll give the venue a percentage of the fees collected. To sweeten the deal, we'll even pay the venue _upfront_ money as part of signing an exclusive deal.

https://thehustle.co/the-sneaky-economics-of-ticketmaster/

That's why most ideas about creating a new ticketing startup to "disrupt Ticketmaster" are naive about how the underlying business deals actually work. E.g. if the well-meaning programmers have idealistic motivations to create a new "fair ticketing" system that doesn't charge outrageous fees, the venues will not sign up with you which means you have no tickets to sell at the "cheaper & fair price".

Why would the venues use your new "fair ticketing" system if it means they get less money?!? That's the financial puzzle a viable Ticketmaster competitor has to solve.

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.

In a sense this situation came about because people want ticket prices to be ‘fair’. They don’t want to pay $500 for some concert even if that should be the market price. So it gets priced at $100 instead and Ticketmaster allows venues to recoup part of that with fees.

Ticketmaster owns the contracts to every major venue.

Great... there's a hell of a lot of smaller venues, festivals, and other events that can be taken whilst Ticketmaster ignores you and you add significant value. By the time you worry about Ticketmaster or they worry about you, you already have momentum from artists, promoters and fans, and due to the bad press Ticketmaster gets through their tout-resell sites you also have political pressure.

Ticketmaster is built in to this plan. Their presence makes the grassroots stuff even more compelling as you don't have to boil the ocean, you figure out how to make it work on a small venue level, city level, and go for scale in the bottom layers.

Worst comes to worst, they're forced to consider purchasing you as you take all of the oxygen out of the system that feeds artists and promoters into them.

I'm pretty intimately familiar with the whole industry. I once owned a small (~2k person) club / live music / multiuse venue in San Francisco as well as built a ticketing SaSS for USCF (us cycling federation) sanctioned events.

From the club days, I got subtly screwed by Clear Channel on an event once and it really left a bad taste in my mouth. From the cycling ticket stuff, I got to deal with another type of promoter and that was horrible in a lot of ways too. Both businesses eventually failed from external factors.

I don't envy your sales team at all.

The customers for Ticketmaster are venues. That's the only party that Ticketmaster cares to please. Of course Ticketmaster wields their monopoly power such that venues have little choice but to go with them. But even if they did not do that, Ticketmaster serves the interests of the venues very very well.

If you want to defeat Ticketmaster with a market solution, you can't do it by creating a Ticketmaster competitor. No matter how good it is, venues can't be swayed. You will have no customers. The only market solution is to own venues. As a venue owner you could refuse to renew with Ticketmaster and use any other system you wanted.

Of course, if you do that, good luck booking anyone to perform in your venue. It better be a big famous one that they can't ignore.

I think you have no idea how deep the hole goes here.

I can only speak of my local experience, but it was so hard getting off the ground. Convincing artists and promoters to use an unknown site, convincing users that they should place fair bids (no, you don't want to pay $9999 for a ticket...)

The number of venues that had exclusive deals with Ticketmaster or Ticketek to be the sole seller of tickets for the venue also made selling tickets in larger venues impossible.

I ended up winding down the platform after running it only for a few months. Maybe if I had more capital, and some better connections inside the entertainment community, things could have been different.

EDIT: and the downvotes here is probably evidence that they succeeded

"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 reason ticketmaster can get away with bad tech solutions is there's no alternative. No alternative means no incentive to improve. And though consumer prices may be lower, venues and artists get squeezed, without really seeing an additional benefit and since there is no alternative Ticketmaster can call the shots.

On a related note, it's extraordinarily shameful that the culture of anti trust has centered exclusively on higher prices since the 80s. I'm glad to see enforcers in DC slowly abandoning this misguided reason and we'll hopefully get back to something resembling the trust-busting of the 30s and 40s