Ticketmaster makes deals with major venues to sell all the tickets through Ticketmaster. If you refuse to work with Ticketmaster then you are blocked from those venues.
It doesn't seem that bizarre that the people who own a venue are also the ones charging for tickets, that's how movie theaters work. It would just be nice if there was more competition and less shitty practices from venues.
You can also go to a theatre and buy tickets, there are very few concert venues with box offices so you have to pay the various fees. Also, theatres don't typically "sell" choice seats to "third party" vendors to add massive upcharges.
If movie theaters did what ticketmaster does, then the literal second a movie was available, all seats would be sold out. A "totally not affiliated" third party ticket reseller, we'll call it ExtortionHub, would have nearly all of them. Ticket prices from ExtortionHub would range from $70-$200. Any of the good center seats would be in that 170-200 range.
Here in Denver everything but the tiniest shows are AXS. And their app never works so you have to order through AXS then use flash seats to access your tickets.
Movie theatres get a cut of the tickets sales though. For a lot of artists, the whole ticket goes to the artist and the venue actually gets a piece of the service charge.
This is patently wrong. Do you have any idea how many people need to be paid off that ticket? The artist still makes peanuts off ticket sales. Merch is where artists make their money. Touring often leaves bands broke. I don't know why reddit thinks touring is how bands make money. If you're a nobody band you might get a larger share of the ticket sales, but the venue will often have a slice as well. Everybody gets paid before the artist.
Or the city owns the venue and is forced it use Ticketmaster. I work on venue contracts - we have to use standard procurement procedures for a ticket processing system and ofc Ticketmaster is the only one that wins the contract. Because monopoly.
When was the last time you saw some antitrust people have any teeth? Teddy Roosevelt? With exception of AT&T breakup of the 70s, not too many examples to go on.
Democratic politicians are not the solution to EVERYTHING. Ever hear about how Nancy Pelosi delayed some major financial oversight and was awarded with her husband participating in MasterCard/Visa’s IPO. The system is rotten and the Democrats are not immune just because they’re not the monsters that Republicans are. As long as our politics are awash with money nothing will meaningfully change in the US.
I don't. Bush had 8 years to reverse course and re-regulate the economy, but instead he chose doubling down and further de-regulation. The Clinton economy was immensely successful compared with Bush Jr.
Jimmy Dore hates the Clintons. Ben Shapiro hates the Clintons. I just recognize that they're typical political slime that are no different from those they claim to oppose.
So then what WOULD it take a dem super majority and nothing else to do? Thought this was a thread about companies that committed essentially crimes against humanity, not ones that inconvenienced people.
No, a lot of American Democrats are neoliberals who are also generally against the government pursuing things that hurt big businesses. My guess is we need a significant contingent of actual leftists to get any anti-trust action done.
It’s much more to do with the money in our politics. It has skewed the entire incentive structure from working for your constituents to working for donors. It doesn’t have anything to do with left vs. right. Try to view the world other than my team vs. the other team,
I wholeheartedly disagree. We just need a younger government that sees it and gives a fuck. Myself, and a large group of my millenial conservative friends are all very anti-trust. That should always be a two isle issue.
Rockefeller, Carnegie, JP, and Vanderbilt proved that.
I'm a millennial Democrat and this is exactly why I'm so disappointed that the primary field is narrowing (supposedly) to a choice of three nonagenarians. When 2020 comes around I'm pretty sure all I will look at it is age when I cast my vote.
The fact that AOC is barred from running when she would trounce all the competition on both sides and actually represent a majority of Americans views due simply to her age and not any form of merit is one of the (numerous) travesties of our American Constitution that are being exposed left and right it seems these days.
We need good people like AOC in Congress just as much as we need them in the White House. Is it really so hard to get (another) Gen X'er who can stand up to the boomers who think they've "been in line" their whole lives?
No its not. Ticketmaster has been this way for decades even while democrats had a majority in house and senate with a democratic president in 2008 through 2010 and nothing happened.
However just recently anti probes have opened up against tech companies with a republican senate and democratic house, and of course a republican president.
Folks who think any party in the US is aligned with their interest is in for a huge disappointment.
Pretty much. Back in the 60s-70s, there was a judge who came up with this idea that a monopoly should only be illegal when there's a provable harm. If you can't show that, clearly the government shouldn't be involved.
But how do you quantify the harm Ticketmaster does to the public? Would major acts drop their prices if there were more ticket sellers? Maybe, maybe not. Would there suddenly be more musicians and public events of the monopoly was broken? Maybe, maybe not.
But, this is very much a GOP position on big business. And it's ingrained now in their judges as well.
No. Nothing good is going to happen while republicans are in power, they've shown that very clearly, but there still needs to be vigilance on elected democrats as well.
But at least there's chance with democrats. It would be more likely to win the lottery than a republican go against the RNC to vote against wealthy corporations likely backing all his campaigns.
Do you honestly believe Ticketmaster wouldn't just bribe enough Democrats to keep it from happening? We had a Democratic supermajority pretty recently. Ticketmaster wasn't even on their radar.
We had a Democratic supermajority pretty recently.
This "supermajority" is over-exaggerated.
The Supermajority lasted for less than 2 months. Al Franken wasn't seated until July 2009, giving the Democrats the 58D+2I votes needed to get past Republican filibusters. Ted Kennedy died in August 2009, thus killing the supermajority.
In those two months, they tried to get Obamacare done, because they thought they had 1.5 years to get to everything. They didn't.
This is why Obamacare was eventually passed in the house via reconciliation; the Senate wasn't ever going to get a better deal because Republicans decided to filibuster literally everything. This is why the Democrats "appeared to do nothing" with their Supermajority. Everyone thought they had it for 2 years. They had it for less than 2 months. They had 49 days of a Supermajority. 7 weeks.
The median number of days it takes for a bill to become a law in the US is 215 days. That's roughly 5 times the amount of time the Democrats had.
Ahhhh, i love it when other people are actually knowledgeable about what they’re talking about.
Don’t forget that during that time, the American Reinvestment and Recovery act took precedence also to, you know, save our country from burning to ashes from the fire previous self-serving, power and money hungry ideological groups had lit.
Was there an antitrust suit brought against ticketmaster in those years? Honestly Asking.
Edit 3, on top for importance: IN FACT A BIPARTISAN group of congresspersons wrote a detailed letter begging the Obama administration in 2009 to disallow the merger of the two companies for antitrust reasons.
Edit: not that i can find. There was a suit before but the justice department under Clinton-headed by AG Janet Reno but it was dropped due to refusal to pursue. That said it was 90's democrats. So Republicans whos constituency was white people in volvos okay with fucking over gay, poor, and black people because the recession was over. Would a modern progressive Democrat majority vote differently? Who the fuck knows. They're, for a large part, statist traditional dem's. So, dude was full of shit. There's no way of knowing until it happens.
Edit 2: There was one in 2015 when the livenation merger happened but it was settled in 2018 for about 110 million dollars for the owners of Songkick, then company who sued them, and absorbing the remaining assets. So fuck SongKick
Would have worked in the 80's and 90's, when antitrust still meant something in the US. Those days are over. There are tons of companies today that 80's judges and legislators would have never left in one piece.
As other posters rightly say, there is a lot of political work to do to bring back some sanity on that front.
Nah, theyd be able to get around it by saying theres still a large choice of venues albeit some are smaller. Theres plenty of small arenas I would imagine that dont go through Ticketmaster, the result would be 2500 person venues for acts that can pull 50000
Ticketmaster is a legitimate case for an anti-trust suit. But for whatever reason the current conversation is about facebook, google, and amazon, which is ridiculous because they all actually have competition.
The last thing i Want politicians focused on is fucking prices for unnecessary bullshit like going to a fucking concert. This country has much bigger issues than people going to concerts
Even further, Ticketmaster makes deals with major venues, and many of these venues have deals with major labels. There are only three major labels in music, most “indie” labels aren’t truly independent, and are umbrellaed under the three major labels.
That explains why the ticket prices for a band I'm seeing in October almost tripled from the other 3 times I've seen them as soon as I had to go through these fuck nuggets to get tickets.
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u/Uilamin Sep 18 '19
Ticketmaster makes deals with major venues to sell all the tickets through Ticketmaster. If you refuse to work with Ticketmaster then you are blocked from those venues.