www.ticketnews.com: A new campaign launched this week is calling on federal regulators to break up Ticketmaster and Live Nation, which merged in 2010, arguing that the combined company abuses its market power. The #breakupticketmaster campaign asks the Department of Justice to use its power to reverse the merger’s approval. Such action would force the massive promotional giant and the massive ticketing vendor to operate independently once more, would restore some level of competition to an industry that many argue is being destroyed by the monopolistic giant at its center.
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Monopolies are perhaps one of the biggest market concerns in a capitalist society, a system that is built upon the idea of competition and the constant push and pull of supply and demand. I don't at all want to go on some sort of rant here, but I constantly see huge mergers in the news and all of the concern that surrounds them. Logically speaking, you would not, as a consumer, want only one company to control a product exclusively. Sure, it might make things more convenient in the short term, but in the long term, it would allow that company to take advantage of their consumers with rising prices, and with few alternatives, those consumers would have little choice but to deal with it. This especially affects industries like ours and the broader entertainment industry as a whole. There are so many smaller players in this line of work, and harmful corporate tendencies can only work to strong-arm them out of opportunity and profits.
It is well known that ticketmaster drives up prices for live entertainment tickets well beyond what the production originally would sell them for. While this article is talking more directly about concerts and other live music events as well as ticketmaster's merger with Live Nation, this also applies very well to the theater industry, especially Broadway. Ticketmaster controls ticket sales for a large portion of broadway shows. They have a huge monopoly over the industry and this comes at a great expense to patrons. As anyone who has used their services to buy tickets must be aware, they have very large fees on top of the original ticket price. This makes Broadway, normally very expensive and hard to access, even more inaccessible to many people who want to attend shows. Even though many shows are performing with many empty seats, ticketmaster refuses to lower ticket prices. I hope that this campaign is successful and also makes it so that Ticketmaster will have to lower prices for Broadway and other live theater as well.
The quote about ticketmaster providing bad service for exorbitant prices is an excellent one that really sums up their problem. This seems like a pretty clear case of market manipulation and the fact that the DOJ had already slapped their hands without any significant penalty means that they should already be being looked at under a microscope. I didn’t even know that ticketmaster and live nation were one company and they have been for twelve years. The article doesn’t speak about the origin of this campaign, but I suspect it was at least partially fueled by a recent John Oliver segment on ticketmaster, which explained many of the things that are talked about here in the article about price gouging and retaliation against venues and performers who refuse to use them. Their tickets combined with their fees make seeing a show unreasonably expensive and a tiny fraction actually go to the performer. I might not feel so bad for a super rich performer, but the majority of concerts in this country aren’t Bruce Springsteen or Billy Joel.
I was just commenting on an article about the federal trade commission cracking down on drip pricing and now this – this sort of monopolization goes hand and hand with drip pricing, and honestly – encourages it. The one thing that is missing to complete this perfect trifecta of “have fun spending +400% of what you should be paying for tickets” is scalpers and resale – which in and of itself is a completely different issue, but just as screwed up for the end users who are just trying to buy tickets to watch their favorite artists perform. The partnership that Ticketmaster and Live Nation have is truly just disgusting. A monopoly in business is disgusting. Firstly, it is completely unfair to any and all other businesses trying to accomplish the same thing, especially at a small scale. It is also completely unfair to the end users, as they end up having to pay way more than they normally would, because where else would they be able to get tickets, and finally, it is unfair to the artists and venues – I am sure there are many artists and venues who want their performances to be accessible to all of their fans, but the massively inflated prices output by ticketmaster make this nearly impossible for some.
Alright first of all, Ticketmaster is like the worse and they have ruined concerts and the live entertainment industry, but I don’t know about this one. I think people may be giving live nation as a concert promoter too much credit. Like if there’s a big-name artist like Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, or Bad Bunny, they don’t know their concerts promoted. That is going to sell out the minute those tickets go on sale. And with these large stadium venues, they’re going to go to a large company Ticketmaster. I think Ticketmaster has terrible policies. The fact that tickets immediately sell out because bots buy them all and then resell for ridiculous prices is a serious issue. I think smaller venues not being able to sell tickets directly to the consumer or through other ticket companies is a huge abuse of power. I think live nation owning venues like house of blues because than they force artists to use Ticketmaster if they want to play at their venues. Dismantle Ticketmaster but don’t act concert promotion is where we went wrong.
I had no idea that Ticket Master and Live Nation merged. Just from my general understanding and a general participator in music event a few times a year, that doesn’t seem great. I always find it interesting that when a group or even groups of people rally together to inform the public or our leaders that someone or a company is acting unfairly, that that company has the gall to say that they disagree with them and that the “market is as competitive as ever”. It’s almost laughable. Because if that were true, they probably wouldn’t have thousands of people lobbying against them. I am sure that there are a lot of issues, big and small, that the average person may not be able to understand but also the fact there was a documented infraction means that things are not going fairly. I doubt that the government will actually step in on this matter but it will be interesting to hear what they have to say.
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