We bought $700 tickets to see a show we really wanted to see, but ended up being unable to make it.
We tried selling it on Ticketmaster, where you can in theory set your own price, or accept their "best offer". Our best offer was somewhere in the neighborhood of $150, and given that it was the night of the show, we accepted it.
We paid $54 per ticket in "processing fees" when purchasing, and paid $50 in more "processing fees" when selling. I'm sure the eventual buyers of our tickets probably had to pony up something like that as well.
If I had a magic button that made everyone above a certain level working there destitute and homeless, I'd probably break my finger pushing it.
Their whole business is based on bullying, dark patterns and ripoff, they either go out of business and become homeless or turn out to be the next president of the united states.
Solution that might be anti user friendly. Tickets are bought and assigned to a persons name at time of purchase. They can only be refunded at cost and resold at cost to buyers. Release of tickets refunded shall be reposted for resell at a random time after attempting a refund.
This will however allow people to pay for bots that will purchase tickets on their behalf. But I believe a verification system can prevent that from happening if one would like. But the incentives aren’t there to do so.
i experienced the opposite of this, bought tickets for a band i didn't really want to see, and ended up selling it on ticketmaster for a profit shortly before the concert
i felt like i accidentally made money on some esoteric stock market
Hard to care what happens to a company like TicketMaster. As you build your company, ask yourself how they ended up like this.
Do you think the founders had this outcome in mind when they started (everyone hating them and seeing them as an evil money grab)? They probably started with a different ethos.
A good reminder that what we do can change - we need to instill our values into the basics of everything we build, otherwise we'll just be building the next TicketMaster, Oracle, or Meta.
As far as I know, we get one go. Let's build things that matter and make the world a better place. Greed will even ruin concerts otherwise.
> Do you think the founders had this outcome in mind when they started?
Maybe not this _exact_ outcome but largely yes I suspect they did. Capitalists rent seeking all the way through their history and if you put money first in any business venture you will always feel pressure to enshitify. See 1994 Pearl Jam vs TM and monopolistic behavior 30 years ago.
2 months ago and the experience was great. Ordering tickets through ticket master was easy and everything went smoothly using the ticket to enter the venue was also smooth.
Took my daughter to see something recently. Show was good, venue was fine. Buying the tickets was fast and easy, they were just expensive af scalped tickets.
>A good reminder that what we do can change - we need to instill our values into the basics of everything we build, otherwise we'll just be building the next TicketMaster, Oracle, or Meta.
Both Ellison and Zuckerberg still control their respective companies. The problem is not that they didn't instill their values.
In the case of ticketmaster, they just plain sold out.
>Ticketmaster's fate was changed in 1982, when Chicago investor Jay Pritzker purchased it. Pritzker, the wealthy owner of the Hyatt Hotel chain, paid $4 million for the entire company.
I go to a few concerts a year and enjoy them, but the only Ticketmaster concert I’ve ever been to was last year. I paid $115 each (with fees!) for good floor seats to see Weezer, Dinosaur Jr, and the Flaming Lips in 2024. The multi hundred or multi thousand dollar event tickets are insane, I’d never pay that much for a concert.
I am lucky to have local independent music venues (First Avenue in Mpls, they own a few local venues) with sub $100 ticket prices that have acts I want to see, which isn’t the case for everyone. Taylor Swift fans (for example) are squeezed as hard as possible for every penny, I think it’s absolutely disgusting.
Not in any way to defend Ticketmaster's unscrupulousness, but my undergraduate university used TM for the student football tickets and we had none of the unfairness, which leads me to agree with the sentiments that TM is actually following the will of the artists / event managers. At school, we could sell our tickets to other students gray-market, and just "transfer" them for "free" in the TM app without issue. They even started out with static QR codes, but decided to enable the "live" updating QR codes due to embarrassments with duplicate ticketers denied entry. So not only is TM to blame, they are the henchmen.
In the music festival world, there is a TM subsidiary, In the same venue you can see fees differ by dozens of percent based on who the Artist, the ones known for being good people are much lower even if the base ticket price is identical
Well, I look forward to getting another 45 dollars of credit to spend only at ticketmaster in five years through a class action1. Hard not to be cynical about it when the fines when caught are tiny.
In Vancouver, Canada, the PNE (Pacific National Exhibition), owned by the City of Vancouver, got fed up with Ticketmaster and created its own ticket-vending outfit called Ticketleader.
This PDF document from 2010 (don't let the 2018 in the URL fool you) still mentions TicketMaster. It is an announcement in connection with the 100 year anniversary (1910 - 2010):
There is no business that I hate more than TicketMaster.
In 2016, the OKC Thunder were making a playoff run. They just advanced to the finals and tickets were set to "go on sale to the public" at 10am on a certain day. I signed up for an account, got logged in, etc. and kept refreshing the page around 10am that day, card in hand to buy. The second that time elapsed, all tickets were sold out. Yet somehow thousands of tickets were available for "resale" instantly at $100+ more per ticket PLUS a transfer fee. My jaw was on the floor. Absolute and complete bullshit. I knew the gig then. It was obvious they just let all tickets get bought up by resellers/scalpers/bots without a care in the world for the actual fans. They actually make even more money allowing it to be this way due to the extra transfer fees on top of the original sale. I watched the finals on TV instead since I didn't have the money for that earlier in my career. Burn this company to the ground with the heat of a thousand suns.
Ticket brokers control 85%+ of the market. The problem is that they’re completely insulated from any scrutiny by the platforms (Stubhub and Vividseats actively work with larger ticket brokers as well). Punishing Ticketmaster doesn’t really change that dynamic.
If Ticketmaster wants this to go away all they have to do is stop selling tickets for artist that have something mean about the current president. Look out Taylor Swift!
I love going to concerts and love going to sport events. Ticketmaster is awful, but most of the ticketing platforms are. I always talked with fellow friends how we would love to start a new startup for this, for selling tickets, a fair one, etc. But of course people in the industry wouldn't want it. Really a shame, because it would be one of those cases where I'd be working on somethign that excites me so I would give it all.
Selling tickets is a really tough really low margin business with a ton of gatekeepers and risk.
First up you need to convince promoters to give you the tickets. Not artists. When an artist signs a deal with a promoter the promoter owns the tickets and can pretty much do what they want.
Problem is, a lot of good promoters in the US particularly are owned by Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster.
That’s fine though - just work with promoters who aren’t owned by Live Nation! Only problem is the venues those promoters are hiring are owned by Live Nation.
Also, a bunch of artist management companies are owned by Live Nation too.
So if you want to sell tickets for shows in non-Live Nation affiliated venues for non-Live Nation affiliated artists that’s fine.
But those are going to be small shows with relatively unknown artists. The risk increases in inverse proportion to the size of the show and profile of the artist. The promoter you’re dealing with is going to want cash up front, so as the ticketing company you’re going to have to loan them the money. If they run or the show flops or whatever else you are left holding the can.
And because you’re tiny and dealing with unknown shows you’re never going to get allocation for big name shows, so you’re not going to be able to build a valuable list of consumers that you can cross sell shows to.
And for the shows you’re selling you’re going to be left with remnant inventory and so you need someone with good lists who can shift that for you. So you’ll probably end up giving Ticketmaster 30-40% of your allocation from the promoters you are working with.
eTix is good. The quoted price for a show was $20. I wound up paying $21.65 after fees. The fees were obvious at checkout. I didn't have to sign up for anything or download an app, either (which I don't like about Dice, but they are similarly good otherwise).
The problem is mostly vertical integration & abusing a monopoly over venues of a certain size. I understand I live in a place where there are more independent venues than other places and I'm glad I happen to be into the acts that play them...
This startup already exists and is called Ticket Tailor. Although they have their faults, I think it will be very difficult for you to compete with them in that niche.
Masters tickets are arguably one of the hardest to get for any event but they do a very good job of making it a fair process, all in house: https://tickets.masters.com/en_US/ticketsFAQ
Or take the approach of several European countries: tickets cannot be resold for more than face value.
Ticketmaster still double-dips on running a resale platform and charging a "processing fee" for reselling a ticket, but it means the original ticket purchased for €100 + €10 "fees" is resold for €100 + €10 "resale fees" and not more than that.
The answer is easy. Don't buy crazy expensive tickets.
I think this is a knock on effect of wealth inequality. People on here are talking about buying $700 tickets. My first thought is that the price sounds insane, but my second thought is to recognize that some folks have way more disposable income than I do. So $700 might be just another night out for someone else...
Ticketmaster + venues are incentivized to maximize primary ticket sales.
Ticket brokers are generally willing to take on the risk of buying up tickets to events on the primary market and constrain supply to turn a profit on the secondary market.
This works because TM and secondary platforms can claim ignorance and control the narrative: “we do our best to prevent bots”/“fans should be free to resell their tickets”
The only way around it is for the government to regulate prices, like they do in the UK (i.e. you can’t resell tickets for more than face value)
That means that TM/venues likely aren’t guaranteed as much profit, and ticket brokering businesses disappear, but both of those things are ultimately net negatives for consumers anyway.
The issue that spawned scalping and Ticketmaster is that musicians want to sell tickets under their market value. There's no analogous issue with airline pricing.
There is no reason that event tickets couldn't be sold similarly to airline seats.
Charge extra for each armrest. Charge extra for priority entry to the venue. Charge to bring in a purse. Charge to sit next to your family. Charge for adequate leg room. Earn points that become worth less and less as they accumulate.
I don't understand why people can't make the logically necessary step to conclude that capitalism promotes cartels because there are profits to be made in cartels.
Capitalism always results in monopolies and cartels. This was known 100 years ago and it is still true now, just not as publicized. I wonder why...
> This was known 100 years ago and it is still true now, just not as publicized. I wonder why
Economics education in America sucks. (Along with civic, legal and other education. Not for cynical reasons, but because we treat schools as job centres and day care.)
The housing debate reflects a base inability to grasp supply and demand. The antitrust debate, market failures.
Economics takes a modicum of effort to grasp. In the TikTok world, it’s easier to justify laziness by spouting nonsense about economics assuming everyone is rational or whatnot. (This confers a massive advantage to those who know what they're talking about. And perhaps this is part of what's driving the elite disparity in American today. Renters will happily protest for their landlords against new developments.)
This not to say that Ticketmaster is not scummy (and the article elucidates some of their scumminess). But this seems like partly a consequence of "ticket stabilization". As is commonly cited on HN, rent "stabilization" distorts the market and leads to all kinds of problems, like lack of available apartments and people living where they do not want to live because it's financially infeasible/unattractive to move to where they want to be. Clearly ticket prices are too cheap, or the scalpers could not make any money. As one would expect, selling under market value creates arbitrage traders.
It's totally Ticketmaster scumminess if transfer fees are ridiculous (see pavel_lishin's post). Likewise if Ticketmaster has difference standards for Big Scalp versus retail scalping. But the existence of scalpers (arbitrage traders) is inevitable if a) tickets are underpriced and b) tickets are transferable. You'd have apartment scalpers for rent-stabilized apartments if leases were transferable (which they are not).
When demand (concert-goers) greatly outstrips supply (seats), you have three options: long queues (the historical socialist approach) or lotteries (the egalitarian approach), high prices (the market economy approach), or corruption (the current approach). There is no realistic solution that makes everyone happy, but you can choose the kind of unhappiness you get. There is a strong case to be made that the artists do not want to be seen as greedy merchants, so they underprice their tickets and offload the anger onto Ticketmaster (see kevinsync's post).
I for one find it much, much more fair to have the queue or the lottery systems. If it can be paired with anti-scalper measures such as truly non-transferable tickets or banning resales at a profit, even better.
But of course the problem runs deeper when we consider what you and others have been saying: it’s just too convenient for artists to reap the profits of the current system and have Ticketmaster as their scapegoat.
How many times is Ticketmaster going to be slapped on the wrist before something is actually done? They are clearly corrupt and colluding with scalpers and every 4 years or so the FTC says "hey now don't do that" and Ticketmaster goes back to their old schtick. It's immensely frustrating because they are also a monopoly and no one can feasibly compete with them because they also control the event venues. I guess this is end-stage capitalism though..
pavel_lishin|5 months ago
We tried selling it on Ticketmaster, where you can in theory set your own price, or accept their "best offer". Our best offer was somewhere in the neighborhood of $150, and given that it was the night of the show, we accepted it.
We paid $54 per ticket in "processing fees" when purchasing, and paid $50 in more "processing fees" when selling. I'm sure the eventual buyers of our tickets probably had to pony up something like that as well.
If I had a magic button that made everyone above a certain level working there destitute and homeless, I'd probably break my finger pushing it.
yard2010|5 months ago
prmoustache|5 months ago
KumaBear|5 months ago
This will however allow people to pay for bots that will purchase tickets on their behalf. But I believe a verification system can prevent that from happening if one would like. But the incentives aren’t there to do so.
thousand_nights|5 months ago
i felt like i accidentally made money on some esoteric stock market
eleumik|5 months ago
[deleted]
leakycap|5 months ago
Do you think the founders had this outcome in mind when they started (everyone hating them and seeing them as an evil money grab)? They probably started with a different ethos.
A good reminder that what we do can change - we need to instill our values into the basics of everything we build, otherwise we'll just be building the next TicketMaster, Oracle, or Meta.
As far as I know, we get one go. Let's build things that matter and make the world a better place. Greed will even ruin concerts otherwise.
pavel_lishin|5 months ago
leetrout|5 months ago
Maybe not this _exact_ outcome but largely yes I suspect they did. Capitalists rent seeking all the way through their history and if you put money first in any business venture you will always feel pressure to enshitify. See 1994 Pearl Jam vs TM and monopolistic behavior 30 years ago.
charcircuit|5 months ago
fkyoureadthedoc|5 months ago
mrits|5 months ago
snthd|5 months ago
Both Ellison and Zuckerberg still control their respective companies. The problem is not that they didn't instill their values.
In the case of ticketmaster, they just plain sold out.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences-and-law/economi...
>Ticketmaster's fate was changed in 1982, when Chicago investor Jay Pritzker purchased it. Pritzker, the wealthy owner of the Hyatt Hotel chain, paid $4 million for the entire company.
quickthrowman|5 months ago
I am lucky to have local independent music venues (First Avenue in Mpls, they own a few local venues) with sub $100 ticket prices that have acts I want to see, which isn’t the case for everyone. Taylor Swift fans (for example) are squeezed as hard as possible for every penny, I think it’s absolutely disgusting.
TheJoeMan|5 months ago
saaaaaam|5 months ago
galaxy_gas|5 months ago
In the music festival world, there is a TM subsidiary, In the same venue you can see fees differ by dozens of percent based on who the Artist, the ones known for being good people are much lower even if the base ticket price is identical
AbstractH24|5 months ago
TM basically exists to be the thing that collects all the hate so people don't blame artists, venues, or teams.
zeagle|5 months ago
1 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/ticketmaster-class-...
kazinator|5 months ago
https://ticketleader.ca
This might have been around 2011?
This PDF document from 2010 (don't let the 2018 in the URL fool you) still mentions TicketMaster. It is an announcement in connection with the 100 year anniversary (1910 - 2010):
https://www.pne.ca/files/uploads/2018/01/entertainment.pdf
Rick Beato thinks that AutoTune and whatnot killed music.
Maybe it was just Ticketmaster.
Ticketmaster is the obvious reason why fewer people go to live shows in North America, whether rock and roll or not.
amanaplanacanal|5 months ago
jimt1234|5 months ago
vlucas|5 months ago
In 2016, the OKC Thunder were making a playoff run. They just advanced to the finals and tickets were set to "go on sale to the public" at 10am on a certain day. I signed up for an account, got logged in, etc. and kept refreshing the page around 10am that day, card in hand to buy. The second that time elapsed, all tickets were sold out. Yet somehow thousands of tickets were available for "resale" instantly at $100+ more per ticket PLUS a transfer fee. My jaw was on the floor. Absolute and complete bullshit. I knew the gig then. It was obvious they just let all tickets get bought up by resellers/scalpers/bots without a care in the world for the actual fans. They actually make even more money allowing it to be this way due to the extra transfer fees on top of the original sale. I watched the finals on TV instead since I didn't have the money for that earlier in my career. Burn this company to the ground with the heat of a thousand suns.
solumos|5 months ago
wnevets|5 months ago
101008|5 months ago
saaaaaam|5 months ago
First up you need to convince promoters to give you the tickets. Not artists. When an artist signs a deal with a promoter the promoter owns the tickets and can pretty much do what they want.
Problem is, a lot of good promoters in the US particularly are owned by Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster.
That’s fine though - just work with promoters who aren’t owned by Live Nation! Only problem is the venues those promoters are hiring are owned by Live Nation.
Also, a bunch of artist management companies are owned by Live Nation too.
So if you want to sell tickets for shows in non-Live Nation affiliated venues for non-Live Nation affiliated artists that’s fine.
But those are going to be small shows with relatively unknown artists. The risk increases in inverse proportion to the size of the show and profile of the artist. The promoter you’re dealing with is going to want cash up front, so as the ticketing company you’re going to have to loan them the money. If they run or the show flops or whatever else you are left holding the can.
And because you’re tiny and dealing with unknown shows you’re never going to get allocation for big name shows, so you’re not going to be able to build a valuable list of consumers that you can cross sell shows to.
And for the shows you’re selling you’re going to be left with remnant inventory and so you need someone with good lists who can shift that for you. So you’ll probably end up giving Ticketmaster 30-40% of your allocation from the promoters you are working with.
dfxm12|5 months ago
eTix is good. The quoted price for a show was $20. I wound up paying $21.65 after fees. The fees were obvious at checkout. I didn't have to sign up for anything or download an app, either (which I don't like about Dice, but they are similarly good otherwise).
The problem is mostly vertical integration & abusing a monopoly over venues of a certain size. I understand I live in a place where there are more independent venues than other places and I'm glad I happen to be into the acts that play them...
Zigurd|5 months ago
yonatan8070|5 months ago
But what do I know, I'm better with computers than people.
carlosjobim|5 months ago
kyleblarson|5 months ago
ChrisArchitect|5 months ago
prmoustache|5 months ago
Symbiote|5 months ago
Ticketmaster still double-dips on running a resale platform and charging a "processing fee" for reselling a ticket, but it means the original ticket purchased for €100 + €10 "fees" is resold for €100 + €10 "resale fees" and not more than that.
dfxm12|5 months ago
I think this is a knock on effect of wealth inequality. People on here are talking about buying $700 tickets. My first thought is that the price sounds insane, but my second thought is to recognize that some folks have way more disposable income than I do. So $700 might be just another night out for someone else...
WalterBright|5 months ago
EGreg|5 months ago
criddell|5 months ago
Zigurd|5 months ago
solumos|5 months ago
Ticket brokers are generally willing to take on the risk of buying up tickets to events on the primary market and constrain supply to turn a profit on the secondary market.
This works because TM and secondary platforms can claim ignorance and control the narrative: “we do our best to prevent bots”/“fans should be free to resell their tickets”
The only way around it is for the government to regulate prices, like they do in the UK (i.e. you can’t resell tickets for more than face value)
That means that TM/venues likely aren’t guaranteed as much profit, and ticket brokering businesses disappear, but both of those things are ultimately net negatives for consumers anyway.
saaaaaam|5 months ago
spullara|5 months ago
2OEH8eoCRo0|5 months ago
OscarCunningham|5 months ago
reaperducer|5 months ago
Charge extra for each armrest. Charge extra for priority entry to the venue. Charge to bring in a purse. Charge to sit next to your family. Charge for adequate leg room. Earn points that become worth less and less as they accumulate.
rtkwe|5 months ago
Atlas667|5 months ago
Capitalism always results in monopolies and cartels. This was known 100 years ago and it is still true now, just not as publicized. I wonder why...
JumpCrisscross|5 months ago
Economics education in America sucks. (Along with civic, legal and other education. Not for cynical reasons, but because we treat schools as job centres and day care.)
The housing debate reflects a base inability to grasp supply and demand. The antitrust debate, market failures.
Economics takes a modicum of effort to grasp. In the TikTok world, it’s easier to justify laziness by spouting nonsense about economics assuming everyone is rational or whatnot. (This confers a massive advantage to those who know what they're talking about. And perhaps this is part of what's driving the elite disparity in American today. Renters will happily protest for their landlords against new developments.)
prewett|5 months ago
It's totally Ticketmaster scumminess if transfer fees are ridiculous (see pavel_lishin's post). Likewise if Ticketmaster has difference standards for Big Scalp versus retail scalping. But the existence of scalpers (arbitrage traders) is inevitable if a) tickets are underpriced and b) tickets are transferable. You'd have apartment scalpers for rent-stabilized apartments if leases were transferable (which they are not).
When demand (concert-goers) greatly outstrips supply (seats), you have three options: long queues (the historical socialist approach) or lotteries (the egalitarian approach), high prices (the market economy approach), or corruption (the current approach). There is no realistic solution that makes everyone happy, but you can choose the kind of unhappiness you get. There is a strong case to be made that the artists do not want to be seen as greedy merchants, so they underprice their tickets and offload the anger onto Ticketmaster (see kevinsync's post).
thimabi|5 months ago
But of course the problem runs deeper when we consider what you and others have been saying: it’s just too convenient for artists to reap the profits of the current system and have Ticketmaster as their scapegoat.
mrstone|5 months ago
saaaaaam|5 months ago
temptemptemp111|5 months ago
[deleted]
sellmesoap|5 months ago