The answer is capitalism, I know.
But it wasn’t always like this. Why the hell are they allowed to absolutely monopolize all shows and venues? How are there not laws on this?
Is stopping going to any shows the only way to fix this? If so, that wont happen. People are gonna go see their favorite bands (and ticketmonster knows it)
I wish this one was as easy as getting rid of all my streaming services - but they really fucked us over for live shows.
I can answer that…for money.
Republicans
Ticketmaster is a perfect example of how much politicians are full of shit, all of them.
You know those Congressional Dog & Pony Shows, where they drag out the CEOs of some industry, holler at them all day, and then go back to their office and do absolutely nothing about what they just hollered about?
They did that with Ticketmaster in 1994, again in 2009, and again in 2023. Every 15 years or so, they get outraged in public, and do nothing. I’m sure it has nothing to do with Ticketmaster making enormous campaign contributions to everyone in office.
This is what happens when the shareholders screw the working class https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g1u0ascpLY
Perfect.
just like TAX return filing systems, h&r block and INTUIT are pratically a duopoly.
I really hate how much of a deal they make out of congressional hearings like it isn’t the lamest form of PR where nothing happens.
If it was a serious issue they cared about, senators wouldn’t be walking in for their 15 minute turn and then just immediately leave after they’re done reading off of their script.
They never show a wide shot because the chamber is empty.
Hot seat my ass, I wouldn’t be surprised if it came built in with a back massager to compensate whoever has to sit for several hours for the whole show.
Lack or regulation in their industry. Regulation, while it can be burdensome in some cases, prevents bullshit like this from existing. Republicans want less regulation so businesses are allowed to generally be as horrible as they want and have pushed everything towards less regulation and more monopolistic control, knowing that while some people will boycott individually, mass boycott is unlikely without a massively bad immediate fuck up (target just did this). Boil the masses slowly and they won’t notice in time to do anything about it. Kinda like US politics over the last few decades leading to the fuckery we endure now even outside of shit businesses.
Ticketmonster has just always been outrageous. I was a teenager in the 80s and it was ridiculous back then too. The prices were lower but the percentages were just as ridiculous, I think. For example, my first concert was Men At Work in 1983. The tickets were $12.50 but my final price at Ticketmonster, which used to be a physical business inside Sears, was over $16, which is around a 30% markup!!
They are extremely litigious. I work in software security and they are notorious for basically having an ocean of lawyers.
they sound like 3 insulin companies that had a stranglehold on the types of insulin for type 1 diabetics. they were aggressively pursuing any attempt to make thier own version until recently, they backed off.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
yikes. you can chill mate.
This perspective is what a reasonable person arrives to after learning why things have not meaningfully improved in their lifetime.
uh, hard disagree with the “reasonable”. the small echo chamber isn’t the whole world.
I’m talking about observable reality…
If a reasonable person figures out that no peaceful avenue for change has been left, they will accept that we have to do something else.
It has nothing to do with Lemmy
echo chambers exist outside the internet
Nothing will meaningfully improve, until the rich fear for their lives!
ok. you go that way, ill go home!
Greet your boss in the shoe inlay factory for me.
oh no i dont work, im on social assistance.
Educate yourself about how we managed to get your ass on social assistance first. Hint: it was very peacefully, extremely peacefully, and also read about sarcasm
actually it was peacefully here in my country because we don’t have 2nd amendment rights
My condolances then.
oh none needed, im glad i dont work anymore
Nope, they’re spot on.
A LOT of people need to feel unsafe leaving their homes.
jesus, this is sad to see. hope you get help mate.
You’re part of the problem.
Only one thing ever stopped Nazis.
good thing they arent in power anymore
yeah they are lol do you live under a rock? the world is ran by pedophiles and racists
didn’t know my prime minister is a pedo or racist.
Oh okay, you’re playing the clueless MAGA game. Cute. My four year old does something similar now and then, but more convincingly.
Thanks for reminding me that we have to deal with you people up here too.
I’m not MAGA lol
How does that boot taste down there?
down where? i live on the surface of the earth, not sure if you mean theres a city underground or somthing. also i don’t like to taste boots, too earthy, more of a food person.
I’m boycotting Ticketmaster. I’m just not going to go to shows that force me to use them, even if they’re my favourite bands. I will buy my music on Bandcamp Fridays to support the bands instead.
TBH it’s difficult to use even if you wanted to, sometimes their site won’t even load unless I allow third party cookies, location data, mic and camera access, download their app, and stick their special dongle up my ass.
But the purchasers of tickets aren’t the people who pick the ticketing service. If we want tickets to be available from other services we need to actually get shows organized that sell tickets through them, not just not pay Ticketmaster.
What bands do you know? Do they want to come to your town?
I’m not sure what other ticket services we have. I would absolutely look at what shows those services offer if I know what services to look through.
Ticketweb is also owned by Ticketmaster.
The best way I see it is to buy directly from venues if its available by looking at their websites – and to consider buying tickets in-person if they allow it.
Ticketmaster owns a lot of venues
If enough people stop using Ticketmaster then it will become the profitable option for bands and venues to not deal with Ticketmaster even at risk of not being allowed to by Ticketmaster.
That seems much easier to pull off while also building a replacement infrastructure for ticketing and performances. The hypothetical more profitable option of not dealing with Ticketmaster needs to be manually built out: firms and practices don’t just manifest themselves as spontaneous crystallization of pure potential profitability.
Ticketmaster will not allow a replacement structure. Better to just boycott it and have venues sell tickets like Theatres do.
Imagine if two thirds of movies could only be seen at AMC theatres for years after release?
How do they propose to prevent it? They can’t stop me from starting a band, they can’t stop you from having me play at your house. Exclusivity agreements don’t work on the fundamentally disagreeable.
It’s already implemented: venues and bands that work with ticketmaster sign contracts of exclusivity. Any venue that doesn’t work only with ticketmaster can’t work with ticketmaster at all, which is not good for business when Ticketmaster is the de facto monopoly.
You can make a band and you can own a venue and you can choose not to use Ticketmaster, and you should I absolutely support that, but if you want to create an online ticket sales empire you would first have to prove you’re more capable of driving sales than Ticketmaster.
That’s why we need to show up with a bunch of Ticketmaster boycotters. Every successful social movement needs a carrot and a stick.
We won’t boycott them.
All it would take is a good boycott.
Why is <fill in company> so shitty? Why is <fill in bank> so shitty? Why is <fill in politician> so shitty? Because we fucking suck balls at any type of informed decision-making and it’s fucking snowballed to this current shit show.
Yeah I stopped going to shows a long time ago because of this
Unregulated capitalism. Specifically, unenforced monopoly laws, which the U.S. has been terrible at.
That is true, capitalism deserves its share of the blame but this ain’t it. Capitalism isn’t even done properly in this regard - tyranny is what this is, and for a capitalist society they sure are doing a terrible job at capitalism.
I don’t see how tyranny is to blame. The problem is that Ticket Master has been allowed to create a monopoly on ticket sales and is selling to retailers even though it itself is a retailer, which is an anti-consumer practice. A tyrannical government isn’t the problem here; it’s simply a company getting away with shit current laws clearly forbid. Hence, capitalistic actions being unrestrained by effective, government-enforced laws. That’s capitalism allowed to run rampant, which is a very common problem in American society. The problem isn’t capitalism per se, but capitalism unrestrained by existing laws that are designed to keep it in check.
Because people keep paying them.
Right here.
Talk is cheap. And people are stupid.
Stop going to events with Ticketmaster.
If Pearl Jam couldn’t fix it in the 90s and Taylor swift couldn’t fix it in the 2020s that tells you just how much money is behind them.
It’s not something a single artist can fix. You’d need some kind of mass movement of artists organizing and auctioning their labor as a collective unit, rather than a bunch of freelancers and independent labels competing with one another for space in an increasingly monpolized marketplace.
If only there was a branch of the government dedicated to ensuring the free market stays competitive and free of trusts…
Regulatory capture is a motherfucker
Lots of governments don’t actually care.
I wonder if the EU will ever do anything, but I doubt it.
I know. I was sure the EU would stop the DuPont-Pioneer/Dow merger, or the Bayer/Monsanto merger, but alas, these two companies now control seed production for over 60% of the world.
Big artists are contractually getting a cut of those crazy high resell prices and fees.
Every big artist could do verified fan presales like the second round of Eras tour shows, but the reality is that popular artists would be leaving money on the table.
To be fair, only the richest artists can self produce a US nation wide tour. It’s often not up to the artists themselves.
Big artists are contractually getting a cut of those crazy high resell prices and fees.
Unless their managers are exceptionally savvy, they’re not. They get a base rate on ticket sold. Then the broker can operate as seller and re-seller of the allotment of tickets. So Ticketmaster sells tickets to Ticketmaster, guaranteeing Beyonce a sold-out performance. And then Ticketmaster resells the tickets at auction rates to the general public.
Every big artist could do verified fan presales like the second round of Eras tour shows
Swift had the leverage to cut exceptional deals by promising to expand the size and scope of her performances in exchange for a better rate of return. That’s because her audience is large enough and the venues are small enough that there’s functionally no upper limit on ticket sales beyond her ability to do sequential performances.
For very obvious reasons, most artists don’t get this kind of treatment.
To be fair, only the richest artists can self produce a US nation wide tour.
It isn’t a matter of artist wealth so much as the point of market saturation. If you roll into a town with 50,000 fans and the biggest venue only seats 500 people, you can keep throwing sold-out shows, week after week. This is effectively how successful baseball (up to 162 games/year) and basketball (82 games/year) franchises operate.
But if you can’t guarantee a sold-out crowd, you’re effectively paying the venue for the privilege of performing. As more small venues shut down and bigger venues consolidate, artists find fewer places to profitably perform their craft. Its been a rule in the industry for a while that you make money on tour by selling merch (t-shirts, albums, signed drum sticks, whatever) rather than tickets. Ticketmaster complicates this math by effectively promising to buy out the venue (by selling tickets to itself) at a markdown, then auctioning off the tickets at a markup. That shrinks the audience, which shrinks the pool of people buying the merch.
Its a vicious cycle that’s been collapsing the live music industry for over a decade.
To be fair, only the richest artists can self produce a US nation wide tour. It’s often not up to the artists themselves.
And even then, they’d be super limited on where they can play. Any major venues that uses ticketmaster also signs an exclusivity agreement to do so (I guess maybe that might possibly go away depending on how a trial goes in March, but don’t hold your breath), so good luck holding a big show when no arena is going to risk their contract for a single show.
And the grateful dead, selling tickets via mail order from their own office to the end.
Jerry said he hated that income decided who could or couldn’t come hear music.
Can’t have a freak show without the freaks.
T Swizzle is, funny enough, a big chunk of why things have escalated so much. Like her or hate her, she puts on a motha fugging SHOW with incredibly high production values and comparatively limited dates. That drastically increases the baseline price and makes the scalping market start selling their coke filled labubus to get even more seats.
Which, in turn, makes her contemporaries feel the need to put on a comparable show even though they are nowhere near talented or popular enough to make it work. Otherwise you start having very real discussions about why Famous Astronaut Katie Perry is nowhere near as expensive as the Swizzle Stick.
And ticketmaster mostly is just there to help facilitate that scalping and to add obnoxious (and expensive) infrastructure to prevent every single ticket from being sold to the scalpers who stand in line when the booth opens (80s and 90s kids will remember that).
You can very much see this in the pro wrestling space. In a venue that (company full of racist sex traffickers) WWE is a regular at? Basically everyone but AEW is priced out of even having a show and AEW suffers from needing to not be a laughing stock next to WWE on the ticket prices which results in overpriced tickets and blacked out sections of the arena during panning shots. A venue that WWE doesn’t go to very often? You have a lot more genuine indie shows and you can get ringside tickets to an AEW event for under 200 bucks.
And ticketmaster fucking sucks but mostly they are just there to be vultures on whatever demand is already there. They can’t really do much if you have regularly priced tickets going to “actual fans”.
If Taylor Swift tickets start at $200, and then get scalped up to $2000, then that’s just the scarcity market. The problem really is that someone can and will pay that much for a ticket.
