Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/28/justice-department-sues-livenation-over-ticketmaster-monopoly-abuses.html
…
9 Likes
Of course Ticketmaster is a monopoly and should be broken up. That was obvious even back in the mid-90’s when Pearl Jam challenged them. That effort was quashed and they have only grown stronger and more monopolistic through “vertical integration” since. The fact that only when we get to truly outrageous prices for tickets does the DOJ finally move is a good indicator of poor anti-trust enforcement priorities. I’m thinking a bigger swinging dick than TicketMaster finally entered into the conversation to force the enforcement. Or maybe the collective grumbling of 20-somethings in an election year and the desire to entice their vote? Either way, TicketMaster may be broken up, prices may go down a little bit, and then M&A takes over again and we are back to the same place in 25 years.
My real question here is, why do people pay such exorbitant rates for concert tickets? I know you like the band/artist and all, but are concert tickets completely inelastic? If TicketMaster, through their monopoly, discovered that concert ticket prices are inelastic, why does anyone think breaking TM up into smaller companies will result in elasticity of price? Concerts aren’t a commodity like food, utilities or, transportation. There are a lot of alternative entertainment choices. Yet, they still command out-of-control prices and generally seem to sell out the venues.
7 Likes
That one.
8 Likes
6 Likes
When I heard this news my first reaction was “finally!”. I’m sure I’m not alone in wishing the worst for this horrible company.
I heard an interview with the CEO a while back, and at the time he felt so invincible he came off as a proud arsehole openly brimming with contempt for his customers.
11 Likes
While they’re at it, if they could look into the relationship between Livenation and the scalperbot groups that clean out entire concerts in minutes, then resell the tickets at further inflated prices, that would be great too.
Their explanations of why they’re completely helpless to stop it, and then buying politicians to pass laws kicking responsibility over to law enforcement (“who, us?”) stinks like fermenting fish.
17 Likes
Fixed that for you.
8 Likes
I didn’t realise Live Nation owned Ticketmaster (I just thought they were two separate enormo-bastards) but this is great news.
5 Likes
Sounds like politics working as intended… 
If you want results, you have to push back loudly as possible because corporations pour money into politics at rates that we can’t. Being vocal about issues that face people can push politicians to make better decisions, such as finally breaking up a monopoly that is long over due…
8 Likes
I suspect that this is also a reflection of the long fought(and substantially successful) attempt to reframe antitrust law as being more or less entirely a matter of consumer harm, rather than anticompetitive behavior or market power more generally; which makes an antitrust action a harder sell until you’ve got fairly blatant price gouging going on; and the sorts of consolidation and vertical integration required to lay the groundwork for that either treated as insufficient grounds for action or actively praised for their efficiency.
9 Likes
Reagan fucked us all… at least he didn’t end up as a justice…
14 Likes
Justice for Standard Oil!
4 Likes
Speaking only for myself, I haven’t attended a major concert in about 25 years because the prices are so insane. And I really, really don’t want to give a company like Ticketmaster my money. But different people have different priorities and I definitely know some folks who find the concerts to be worth it even at these prices.
6 Likes
What gets me is that when I have gone to a concert, usually work related or a date or similar obligation where someone else bought the tickets, I always see the very best seats, up front with more room per person, little fold out tables, even fully stocked skyboxes, all sitting empty. Someone, possibly many someones, paid out up to six figures for that skybox then didn’t show, paid for those premium, right in the sweet-spot seats and didn’t show. I know is mostly concierge services, scalpers, and similar ‘hoping someone wants a great seat at the last moment’ along with a spattering of corporate sales groups who thought a customer might turn a free concert into their big purchase, but it still seem so wrong, and is likely contributing to the outrageous ticket prices that make me seek out house concerts and small venues.
I don’t know if breaking up the ticket sales monopoly will change this, I suspect not, but at least it seems like a step in the right direction.
3 Likes
This lawsuit really has nothing to do with the high price of tickets. Biden’s DOJ is actually challenging the anti-competitiveness of LN’s vertical integration. High ticket prices, extraneous fees and crappy service are byproducts of this core behavior. So it’s less about the consumer facing Ticketmaster business and more about the shady behind-the-scenes stuff that Live Nation imposes on artists and promoters. Slate has a really good write up here:
But the suit is really about an ecosystem, about how Live Nation’s control of a ticketing giant contributes to its control of venues and event promotion and worsens the whole enterprise. Artists have less freedom to promote their work as they see fit and perform in ideal venues. Promoters miss out on lots of business if they don’t play by Live Nation’s rules. And concert venues are at risk of not getting good acts if they don’t work within a ticketing system that (for one thing) sucks and (for another) may not enable them to maximize their revenue and keep their patrons happy.
9 Likes
Understatement of the year, if not decade.
[RedactedCo] uses Ticketmaster as a turn-key system for selling (but mostly comping) tickets for some of the events they host; TM’s systems are, for lack of a better term, 
. For us to have a workstation use their systems, we have to have a vpn tunnel to their systems using their routers (or worse, a server deployed to act as a reverse proxy to their systems, which are of debatable quality and definitely not current or even last generation gear). And then the workstation has to run their client (which was written by TM), which is nothing more than a screen scraper to a mainframe using a protocol that was written also written by TM. it’s layers on layers of cruft, bad programming, obsolete programming, and probably duct tape and bailing wire in there somewhere as well.
While their old method of having the workstation use a modem and call a number directly to connect with TM’s systems was… also pretty crappy for implementation, at least it was easier to troubleshoot, as the client application had some decent errors codes baked into it for when it wasn’t working properly.
I’m very much glad I’m no longer our admin for our part of that application.
4 Likes
I have little desire to go to concerts (or sporting events, for that matter) at all, let alone at current prices for big name bands/artists. My guess, though, is that concert tickets for the best selling big names are typically underpriced from a market perspective. Otherwise we wouldn’t see so many instant sell-outs and (successful) scalping. In which case, it’s entirely possible Ticketmaster’s fear of anti-trust lawsuits have been the only reason prices aren’t higher, and that breaking them up could see sellers able to sell directly at closer to a market-clearing price.
No argument about what the feds are actually suing them for, or the necessity of doing so, or the legal basis for contending that what Ticketmaster is doing is all sorts of antitrust violation. My suspicion is just that the relative strength of the ‘consumer harm’ theory of antitrust has a lot of influence over which probably-legally-justified antitrust cases are considered viable.
You certainly aren’t going to advance a case against someone who doesn’t tick any of the market power boxes just because they have high prices or a lousy customer experience; but you’ll find yourself on the wrong side of any amount of room for doubt when it comes to interpretation of how much market power is dominant market power, or what’s just shrewd negotiation rather than abuse of market power if you are advancing an antitrust case on behalf of the various market participants who are getting pushed around(much less the entities who aren’t actually market participants for reasons you contend are related to the monopolist pushing them out or erecting barriers to entry) if the outfit you are advancing it against can point to lots of happy customers who think the experience is great and the prices are attractive.
I don’t mean to imply that I like this; to the best of my knowledge the actual antitrust law provides marginal basis for the ‘consumer harm’ theory; and the people who have elaborated it are a mixture of randroids, Chicago boys, and corpo flacks who I deeply distrust on principle; but I don’t have to like it to acknowledge that it has influence.
It’s sort of like the existence of ‘victim impact statements’ as a thing. There’s no obvious legal foundation for doing crimes against people whose family and friends love them very much being worse than doing crimes against unlikable misanthropes with weak social ties; but nobody seems to think that a real tug on the court’s heartstrings hurts a case.
I don’t think you can have it both ways… Ticketmaster really isn’t some innocent victims of nefarious scalpers… they could do something about that if they wished, but scalpers drive prices up which benefits them, so they let them do their thing which fucks over the actual consumer who just wants to go see their favorite band.
6 Likes
Ticketmaster, in its predatory nature, would disagree. As others might not be aware, ultimately the company’s response to complaints about scalping was to become a scalper itself.
10 Likes
