The monopoly is really the artists, who then delegate to the venues. Like, Bruce Springsteen ticket prices are high because only he is Bruce Springsteen and nobody else is. The real monopoly is on being Bruce Springsteen. Prices are high because of supply and demand for that artist; Bruce Springsteen can only put on so many shows for so many seats and there is far more demand than that, no matter who is selling the tickets.
Live Nation-Ticketmaster only gets the monopoly power delegated from the artists and venues. If you break that up into competing ticket providers, that doesn't do anything to the underlying prices, tickets will still be resold on secondary markets until the prices reach supply-demand equilibrium.
Busting LN-TM hypothetically doesn't even do anything to the fees. The market is set by what customers will pay, and it doesn't matter to them what the breakdown is between going to the middlemen or going to the artist. At most, busting LN-TM does create competition for lower fees, so that the artist gets more of the revenue. But it's not clear at all that that's a matter for courts to forcibly impose.
(I see the downvotes. The Internet hivemind will always think it's entitled to ignore the laws of supply and demand, even on HN. Ticket prices are high because demand exceeds supply and customers choose to pay it, not because of a monopolistic reseller entity.)
I can't believe that when a company owns the venues and the tickets, mandates buying tickets from themselves then adds a huge markup to every ticket someone would actually blame the entertainers for having name recognition.
The issue here isn't that top artists can't sell their tickets at a high price. It's that venues have exclusivity deals w/ ticketmaster/livenation and ticketmaster/livenation ultimately charge outrageous fees to consumers no matter what. Then often their own reselling arm is involved in the scalping behavior.
The artists aren't reaping these fees. Ticketmaster/livenation is capturing the entirety of the profit and artists don't really have a choice in using a different ticketing vendor in most cases (since it's common for every major venue in a city to have strong-armed exclusivity contracts w/ ticketmaster/livenation).
By and large, it is the venues and promoters that set large fees. The reason they like TM is because TM will take the blame for charging those fees when in reality, they're kicked back.
Of course, the problem is that in many cases now, Live Nation owns the venues and acts as the promoters, so those kickbacks started going, ultimately, to the company charging them.
> The market is set by what customers will pay [...] The Internet hivemind will always think it's entitled to ignore the laws of supply and demand
And this is why "the market" isn't perfect, and flat-out sucks for some things. It doesn't have to be this way. Springsteen should be able to say "I want to charge $40 per ticket so my loyal fans, no matter what their financial situation, can see me perform", without having to deal with the scum of the earth buying up those tickets and reselling them for $300 each. (Whether or not he would want to do this is another question.)
The funny thing is that this setup is perfectly possible now that we have all this digital infrastructure. Back when tickets were just a piece of paper that people bought anonymously from a box office, it was damn near impossible to stop people from scalping them. Today we can tie a ticket to a person's real name, and check IDs at the venue. We can prohibit ticket transfers, or at least require that they be done via the same marketplace where they were purchased, so they can only be resold for the amount they were originally paid for.
Supply and demand are only laws when you allow a market to set prices, instead of letting a the seller price how they want, and sell directly to only their final end customers.
If this were the case, you'd have a hundred million people wanting to pay that to see Springsteen but only a hundred thousand seats exist. How do you decide which of them gets the seats?
None of these are perfect, especially if demand greatly exceeds supply, but there's plenty of flexibility in how an artist could sell tickets to their fans, if it weren't for monopolies like TM/LN. The "Market" would still be in play here, as an artist could decide to cater to specific people (i.e. the rich) via bids, or be more accessible but elusive via ticket lotteries.
Live Nation-Ticketmaster only gets the monopoly power delegated from the artists and venues. If you break that up into competing ticket providers, that doesn't do anything to the underlying prices, tickets will still be resold on secondary markets until the prices reach supply-demand equilibrium.
Busting LN-TM hypothetically doesn't even do anything to the fees. The market is set by what customers will pay, and it doesn't matter to them what the breakdown is between going to the middlemen or going to the artist. At most, busting LN-TM does create competition for lower fees, so that the artist gets more of the revenue. But it's not clear at all that that's a matter for courts to forcibly impose.
(I see the downvotes. The Internet hivemind will always think it's entitled to ignore the laws of supply and demand, even on HN. Ticket prices are high because demand exceeds supply and customers choose to pay it, not because of a monopolistic reseller entity.)