Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?

Question

It feels like every event/venue is selling tickets exclusively through Ticketmaster. Every other ticketing platform seems to only hold resale tickets in their inventory which just transfers the tickets to your Ticketmaster account when bought. With all the hate Ticketmaster has gotten and all the other ticketing platforms out there, I'm surprised Ticketmaster still has a hold of pretty much the entire market. How are they doing this? Why haven't the other platforms been able to compete?

yogibear678142 · Accepted Answer

Oh yea ticket master owns the venues. The artists can't revolt if they want to put on a big show. Software companies can't compete without dipping their toes into big money real estate property.Software start ups are all about that 0 cost replication of software. One webserver spawns millions of threads for free. Start ups crack under the pressure of real world costs. Like sure anyone can make a website where users send tweets to each other. But if you have to spend billions of dollars constructing stadiums so Swifties can have an ex-ticket master experience... That's a hard sell to the software guys.

byoung2 · Answer

They merged with LiveNation and they own half of the venues. The other half of the venues have exclusive deals with TicketMaster, who provides them with software to run venue logistics (TicketMaster for business), creating vendor lock-in.

mschuster91 · Answer

> With all the hate Ticketmaster has gotten and all the other ticketing platforms out there, I'm surprised Ticketmaster still has a hold of pretty much the entire market.
That's the thing. Everyone hates Ticketmaster... but forgets that the venues and even many high profile artists could easily cancel their contracts with Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster takes the blame, rakes in the cash and distributes the cash to venues and artists. Everyone in the industry is complicit.
On top of that, I 'member the times here in Germany before the big gun Eventim took over, getting tickets used to be a clusterfuck before as your average 1000 seats venue just can't be expected to build a system that doesn't collapse under (often literally) hundreds of thousands to millions of fans.
The fix would be legislation, but given the amount of money in live events... it just won't happen.

mdni007 · Answer

Rant: Trying to buy tickets for the Knicks game at MSG. Is it really impossible to have a ticketing platform that prevents scalpers from marking up prices to an insane amount?$10000+ for a ticket that originally costs around 2k should be illegal. Most of these tickets will go unsold I'm sure.

rrrpdx1 · Answer

I always wonder why ticketmaster/live nation isn't making more money? Given they are a monopoly, I'd expect them to be making a ton of profit. But it doesn't really seem to look that way: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/LYV:NYSE

yrcyrc · Answer

Bono, Geldof, livenation, cartel.

ChrisArchitect · Answer

Tho not exactly a direct solution,Related:Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fanshttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225357

Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?

They merged with LiveNation and they own half of the venues. The other half of the venues have exclusive deals with TicketMaster, who provides them with software to run venue logistics (TicketMaster for business), creating vendor lock-in.

Rant: Trying to buy tickets for the Knicks game at MSG. Is it really impossible to have a ticketing platform that prevents scalpers from marking up prices to an insane amount?
$10000+ for a ticket that originally costs around 2k should be illegal. Most of these tickets will go unsold I'm sure.

I always wonder why ticketmaster/live nation isn't making more money? Given they are a monopoly, I'd expect them to be making a ton of profit. But it doesn't really seem to look that way: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/LYV:NYSE

Bono, Geldof, livenation, cartel.

Tho not exactly a direct solution,
Related:
Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225357