We bought $700 tickets to see a show we really wanted to see, but ended up being unable to make it.
We tried selling it on Ticketmaster, where you can in theory set your own price, or accept their "best offer". Our best offer was somewhere in the neighborhood of $150, and given that it was the night of the show, we accepted it.
We paid $54 per ticket in "processing fees" when purchasing, and paid $50 in more "processing fees" when selling. I'm sure the eventual buyers of our tickets probably had to pony up something like that as well.
If I had a magic button that made everyone above a certain level working there destitute and homeless, I'd probably break my finger pushing it.
Their whole business is based on bullying, dark patterns and ripoff, they either go out of business and become homeless or turn out to be the next president of the united states.
> Their whole business is based on bullying, dark patterns and ripoff
No. It’s based on monopoly. There are a limited number of venues that can host a modern superstar, generally no more than one per geography, and Ticketmaster made it a point to represent all of them. Which means any modern superstar and their fans must work through Ticketmaster. Which, in turn, enables this nonsense.
The cause is monopoly. Not “bullying, dark patterns and ripoff;” those are effects.
Michael Rapino, the CEO of Live Nation regularly boasted about how for sports events people take pride in paying thousands of dollars for tickets near the front, and how he wishes it was the same for music.
Live Nation had been engaging in a venue refit programme to make a higher percentage of venue seating - 40% or so - ‘premium’ seating where they can charge far higher rates.
As someone in this thread pointed out the biggest problem with tickets is that (at the top end) musicians certainly but sports teams also sell tickets far below market rates.
It’s a catch 22: if you are a sports team and only sell $1000 tickets you might sell out the show but you alienate your core base who buy lots of other stuff like shirts and caps and beer. If you’re only selling to VIPs you slowly kill what makes your team valuable.
For music it’s harder: for superstar artists you could almost certainly sell out a stadium at crazy prices. But the fans are going to feel gouged and are going to be very vocal and for a lot of musicians that is a red line. There’s been a lot of controversy recently over airline style ‘dynamic’ demand-driven pricing for concerts, and a lot of big name artists have come out against it.
Again, it kills the golden goose. Better to have fans who will pay $100 a ticket every time you tour for the next 20 years whether you are fashionable or not than sell out three years for $1000 a ticket to people who won’t want to buy if you’re not the hot thing.
I was stunned by the prices of shows these days. The closest venue used to be $200 for up close, EXPENSIVE seats. Now they're $350 for open lawn. This is only 5 years apart, and the only difference is they use Ticketmaster instead of selling themselves.
For major arena shows, face price floor seats can easily run $500+, going up to $1000+ for the first rows. Even lower level bowl seats can run you that much for front row.
And that's if you managed to get scalpers to them during the original sale. Resale can commonly range as high as 200% - 500% of face price.
For example, for Nine Inch Nails' recent arena tour, face price for pit tickets (GA floor) were around $150-$200, depending on the city. But they were nearly impossible to get, so most fans ended up having getting them on resale, where prices of $300 - $400 dollars were common. You can wait for tickets to drop the day of the show but that doesn't always happen. I know someone who ended up paying $800 for a pit ticket on the day of the show after they shot up to over $1200 at one point.
Solution that might be anti user friendly. Tickets are bought and assigned to a persons name at time of purchase. They can only be refunded at cost and resold at cost to buyers. Release of tickets refunded shall be reposted for resell at a random time after attempting a refund.
This will however allow people to pay for bots that will purchase tickets on their behalf. But I believe a verification system can prevent that from happening if one would like. But the incentives aren’t there to do so.
The problem for seated events is variations on, four people buy tickets together, seats ABCD, and the people in seats B and D drop out. They have friends who would buy the empty seats, but instead end up with a stranger in between them.
Or two people buy seats together, one can’t make it, and now the other person is stuck sitting with a stranger. And they have a friend who also wants to go who is also sitting alone.
The venue might still sell out but it’s a worse experience for everyone. Even groups who all get in together get annoyed by people trying to swap seats or cram in the aisles to be with their friends. Venue staff are stuck dealing with crowd control issues.
Accept reservations (maybe with a token deposit or a card authorization to discourage making too many claims) for a week. Then at the end, draw winners for each block of seats; if they don't claim them in 48 hours, draw from remaining reservations. Repeat a fixed number of times and then scrum-sale anything that didn't go through.
There's no more risk of "the website crashed for everyone but scalpers" if you have a full week to place your request.
i experienced the opposite of this, bought tickets for a band i didn't really want to see, and ended up selling it on ticketmaster for a profit shortly before the concert
i felt like i accidentally made money on some esoteric stock market
Hard to care what happens to a company like TicketMaster. As you build your company, ask yourself how they ended up like this.
Do you think the founders had this outcome in mind when they started (everyone hating them and seeing them as an evil money grab)? They probably started with a different ethos.
A good reminder that what we do can change - we need to instill our values into the basics of everything we build, otherwise we'll just be building the next TicketMaster, Oracle, or Meta.
As far as I know, we get one go. Let's build things that matter and make the world a better place. Greed will even ruin concerts otherwise.
It's hard to sympathize with the experience between scalping, which is bad, but also now there's all sorts of priority queues for people with various levels of pay-to-play which are pretty distasteful. AMEX presale, cell carrier presale, etc. all feels terrible. And the show is fun but my local arena renovated within the last decade and now feels like an airport terminal with all the tiered lounges, ripoff concessions even for an arena (I saw a $48 espresso martini), etc.
Similar to how I hear that Disney has basically made going to its resorts and scheduling Fastpass basically a second job.
> Do you think the founders had this outcome in mind when they started?
Maybe not this _exact_ outcome but largely yes I suspect they did. Capitalists rent seeking all the way through their history and if you put money first in any business venture you will always feel pressure to enshitify. See 1994 Pearl Jam vs TM and monopolistic behavior 30 years ago.
> Maybe not this _exact_ outcome but largely yes I suspect they did.
Sorry, this simply isn't the case. Before TM, the best available ticket was whatever the vendor you were dealing with had in their inventory. TicketMaster was started by 3 people who wanted to make the process of getting the "best available" ticket easier than going to all the disconnected ticket-sellers and finding out who had the best ticket.
The company changed models in the 1980s when a new owner took over who was solely focused on revenue.
> See 1994 Pearl Jam vs TM and monopolistic behavior 30 years ago.
Your takeaway seems different than mine. I see a company who could have changed or been regulated 30 years ago. Now they'll slowly die or be replaced quickly by something better like an AI ticketing system. Finding someone who likes TicketMaster today is impossible. When TM launched, everyone loved it. What a loss.
As many of us here have a role in how our companies are built and what they become, it is worth asking how TM lost its way and how we can avoid bringing the same level of gross, enshittified capitalism into the world with what we build.
2 months ago and the experience was great. Ordering tickets through ticket master was easy and everything went smoothly using the ticket to enter the venue was also smooth.
Took my daughter to see something recently. Show was good, venue was fine. Buying the tickets was fast and easy, they were just expensive af scalped tickets.
>A good reminder that what we do can change - we need to instill our values into the basics of everything we build, otherwise we'll just be building the next TicketMaster, Oracle, or Meta.
Both Ellison and Zuckerberg still control their respective companies. The problem is not that they didn't instill their values.
In the case of ticketmaster, they just plain sold out.
>Ticketmaster's fate was changed in 1982, when Chicago investor Jay Pritzker purchased it. Pritzker, the wealthy owner of the Hyatt Hotel chain, paid $4 million for the entire company.
I go to a few concerts a year and enjoy them, but the only Ticketmaster concert I’ve ever been to was last year. I paid $115 each (with fees!) for good floor seats to see Weezer, Dinosaur Jr, and the Flaming Lips in 2024. The multi hundred or multi thousand dollar event tickets are insane, I’d never pay that much for a concert.
I am lucky to have local independent music venues (First Avenue in Mpls, they own a few local venues) with sub $100 ticket prices that have acts I want to see, which isn’t the case for everyone. Taylor Swift fans (for example) are squeezed as hard as possible for every penny, I think it’s absolutely disgusting.
Here in Oslo Norway, Ticketmaster is almost everywhere. Yet the local venues, Ticketmaster ones included, have tons of shows in the $30-50 range. That's for venues with a capacity for 500-1500 people.
We have larger venues for larger artists, almost always international ones, and there ticket prices are often starting at around $80-100 and quickly go way up if you want a good location.
However personally I found I enjoy the sub-$40 concerts the most. Mainly because the smaller venue lets you get close, sound is usually much better and quite often I find a lot more passion on stage at these venues, which turns into more memorable experiences. And if the concert ends up not being my thing or just not that great, then I've just wasted the price of a few beers so no big deal.
One thing that keeps Ticketmaster in its reins here in Norway is our legislation, which limits the kind of processing fee shenanigans and similar they can do. Also scalpers became much less of a problem after they introduced a law that you can't charge more than the original price when reselling tickets.
I stopped being willing to give money to Ticketmaster years ago, which automatically means that there are entire venues and artists that are off limits to me. That meant I spent more time and money on smaller, independent venues and artists.
And honestly? It really improved my concert-going experience.
OT but I saw this show in Vancouver and was shocked at how few people knew the Flaming Lips and how many young kids were into Weezer. I went with my son who I thought had weird musical taste and wanted to see Weezer, but a ton of his friends when to the concert as well for the same reason.
The price was worth it to see the giant pink robots though!
I regularly go to smaller local venues to see shows. It usually costs ~$40, but even there the tickets are sold by Ticketweb, which of course is owned by Ticketmaster. It's cheaper, but it's impossible to get away from the evil empire.
Not in any way to defend Ticketmaster's unscrupulousness, but my undergraduate university used TM for the student football tickets and we had none of the unfairness, which leads me to agree with the sentiments that TM is actually following the will of the artists / event managers. At school, we could sell our tickets to other students gray-market, and just "transfer" them for "free" in the TM app without issue. They even started out with static QR codes, but decided to enable the "live" updating QR codes due to embarrassments with duplicate ticketers denied entry. So not only is TM to blame, they are the henchmen.
In the music festival world, there is a TM subsidiary, In the same venue you can see fees differ by dozens of percent based on who the Artist, the ones known for being good people are much lower even if the base ticket price is identical
So TM is just the stooge doing terrible things that the artist wants to do, but would prefer someone else take the heat for it? All while the artist engages fans as their parasocial friend, who would never do them wrong?
That's cynical enough for me to want to believe it.
Well, I look forward to getting another 45 dollars of credit to spend only at ticketmaster in five years through a class action1. Hard not to be cynical about it when the fines when caught are tiny.
In Vancouver, Canada, the PNE (Pacific National Exhibition), owned by the City of Vancouver, got fed up with Ticketmaster and created its own ticket-vending outfit called Ticketleader.
This PDF document from 2010 (don't let the 2018 in the URL fool you) still mentions TicketMaster. It is an announcement in connection with the 100 year anniversary (1910 - 2010):
There is no business that I hate more than TicketMaster.
In 2016, the OKC Thunder were making a playoff run. They just advanced to the finals and tickets were set to "go on sale to the public" at 10am on a certain day. I signed up for an account, got logged in, etc. and kept refreshing the page around 10am that day, card in hand to buy. The second that time elapsed, all tickets were sold out. Yet somehow thousands of tickets were available for "resale" instantly at $100+ more per ticket PLUS a transfer fee. My jaw was on the floor. Absolute and complete bullshit. I knew the gig then. It was obvious they just let all tickets get bought up by resellers/scalpers/bots without a care in the world for the actual fans. They actually make even more money allowing it to be this way due to the extra transfer fees on top of the original sale. I watched the finals on TV instead since I didn't have the money for that earlier in my career. Burn this company to the ground with the heat of a thousand suns.
Ticket brokers control 85%+ of the market. The problem is that they’re completely insulated from any scrutiny by the platforms (Stubhub and Vividseats actively work with larger ticket brokers as well). Punishing Ticketmaster doesn’t really change that dynamic.
If Ticketmaster wants this to go away all they have to do is stop selling tickets for artist that have something mean about the current president. Look out Taylor Swift!
Readit News
We tried selling it on Ticketmaster, where you can in theory set your own price, or accept their "best offer". Our best offer was somewhere in the neighborhood of $150, and given that it was the night of the show, we accepted it.
We paid $54 per ticket in "processing fees" when purchasing, and paid $50 in more "processing fees" when selling. I'm sure the eventual buyers of our tickets probably had to pony up something like that as well.
If I had a magic button that made everyone above a certain level working there destitute and homeless, I'd probably break my finger pushing it.
Much like the corporations that use private homes as gambling chips.
Much like many organizations playing on the ongoing slump of Western values.
No. It’s based on monopoly. There are a limited number of venues that can host a modern superstar, generally no more than one per geography, and Ticketmaster made it a point to represent all of them. Which means any modern superstar and their fans must work through Ticketmaster. Which, in turn, enables this nonsense.
The cause is monopoly. Not “bullying, dark patterns and ripoff;” those are effects.
From the site guidelines:
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Live Nation had been engaging in a venue refit programme to make a higher percentage of venue seating - 40% or so - ‘premium’ seating where they can charge far higher rates.
As someone in this thread pointed out the biggest problem with tickets is that (at the top end) musicians certainly but sports teams also sell tickets far below market rates.
It’s a catch 22: if you are a sports team and only sell $1000 tickets you might sell out the show but you alienate your core base who buy lots of other stuff like shirts and caps and beer. If you’re only selling to VIPs you slowly kill what makes your team valuable.
For music it’s harder: for superstar artists you could almost certainly sell out a stadium at crazy prices. But the fans are going to feel gouged and are going to be very vocal and for a lot of musicians that is a red line. There’s been a lot of controversy recently over airline style ‘dynamic’ demand-driven pricing for concerts, and a lot of big name artists have come out against it.
Again, it kills the golden goose. Better to have fans who will pay $100 a ticket every time you tour for the next 20 years whether you are fashionable or not than sell out three years for $1000 a ticket to people who won’t want to buy if you’re not the hot thing.
For major arena shows, face price floor seats can easily run $500+, going up to $1000+ for the first rows. Even lower level bowl seats can run you that much for front row.
And that's if you managed to get scalpers to them during the original sale. Resale can commonly range as high as 200% - 500% of face price.
For example, for Nine Inch Nails' recent arena tour, face price for pit tickets (GA floor) were around $150-$200, depending on the city. But they were nearly impossible to get, so most fans ended up having getting them on resale, where prices of $300 - $400 dollars were common. You can wait for tickets to drop the day of the show but that doesn't always happen. I know someone who ended up paying $800 for a pit ticket on the day of the show after they shot up to over $1200 at one point.
It is frankly completely out of control.
This will however allow people to pay for bots that will purchase tickets on their behalf. But I believe a verification system can prevent that from happening if one would like. But the incentives aren’t there to do so.
Or two people buy seats together, one can’t make it, and now the other person is stuck sitting with a stranger. And they have a friend who also wants to go who is also sitting alone.
The venue might still sell out but it’s a worse experience for everyone. Even groups who all get in together get annoyed by people trying to swap seats or cram in the aisles to be with their friends. Venue staff are stuck dealing with crowd control issues.
Deleted Comment
Accept reservations (maybe with a token deposit or a card authorization to discourage making too many claims) for a week. Then at the end, draw winners for each block of seats; if they don't claim them in 48 hours, draw from remaining reservations. Repeat a fixed number of times and then scrum-sale anything that didn't go through.
There's no more risk of "the website crashed for everyone but scalpers" if you have a full week to place your request.
i felt like i accidentally made money on some esoteric stock market
Dead Comment
Do you think the founders had this outcome in mind when they started (everyone hating them and seeing them as an evil money grab)? They probably started with a different ethos.
A good reminder that what we do can change - we need to instill our values into the basics of everything we build, otherwise we'll just be building the next TicketMaster, Oracle, or Meta.
As far as I know, we get one go. Let's build things that matter and make the world a better place. Greed will even ruin concerts otherwise.
Similar to how I hear that Disney has basically made going to its resorts and scheduling Fastpass basically a second job.
Maybe not this _exact_ outcome but largely yes I suspect they did. Capitalists rent seeking all the way through their history and if you put money first in any business venture you will always feel pressure to enshitify. See 1994 Pearl Jam vs TM and monopolistic behavior 30 years ago.
Sorry, this simply isn't the case. Before TM, the best available ticket was whatever the vendor you were dealing with had in their inventory. TicketMaster was started by 3 people who wanted to make the process of getting the "best available" ticket easier than going to all the disconnected ticket-sellers and finding out who had the best ticket.
The company changed models in the 1980s when a new owner took over who was solely focused on revenue.
> See 1994 Pearl Jam vs TM and monopolistic behavior 30 years ago.
Your takeaway seems different than mine. I see a company who could have changed or been regulated 30 years ago. Now they'll slowly die or be replaced quickly by something better like an AI ticketing system. Finding someone who likes TicketMaster today is impossible. When TM launched, everyone loved it. What a loss.
As many of us here have a role in how our companies are built and what they become, it is worth asking how TM lost its way and how we can avoid bringing the same level of gross, enshittified capitalism into the world with what we build.
Deleted Comment
Both Ellison and Zuckerberg still control their respective companies. The problem is not that they didn't instill their values.
In the case of ticketmaster, they just plain sold out.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences-and-law/economi...
>Ticketmaster's fate was changed in 1982, when Chicago investor Jay Pritzker purchased it. Pritzker, the wealthy owner of the Hyatt Hotel chain, paid $4 million for the entire company.
I am lucky to have local independent music venues (First Avenue in Mpls, they own a few local venues) with sub $100 ticket prices that have acts I want to see, which isn’t the case for everyone. Taylor Swift fans (for example) are squeezed as hard as possible for every penny, I think it’s absolutely disgusting.
We have larger venues for larger artists, almost always international ones, and there ticket prices are often starting at around $80-100 and quickly go way up if you want a good location.
However personally I found I enjoy the sub-$40 concerts the most. Mainly because the smaller venue lets you get close, sound is usually much better and quite often I find a lot more passion on stage at these venues, which turns into more memorable experiences. And if the concert ends up not being my thing or just not that great, then I've just wasted the price of a few beers so no big deal.
One thing that keeps Ticketmaster in its reins here in Norway is our legislation, which limits the kind of processing fee shenanigans and similar they can do. Also scalpers became much less of a problem after they introduced a law that you can't charge more than the original price when reselling tickets.
And honestly? It really improved my concert-going experience.
The price was worth it to see the giant pink robots though!
Deleted Comment
In the music festival world, there is a TM subsidiary, In the same venue you can see fees differ by dozens of percent based on who the Artist, the ones known for being good people are much lower even if the base ticket price is identical
That's cynical enough for me to want to believe it.
TM basically exists to be the thing that collects all the hate so people don't blame artists, venues, or teams.
1 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/ticketmaster-class-...
https://ticketleader.ca
This might have been around 2011?
This PDF document from 2010 (don't let the 2018 in the URL fool you) still mentions TicketMaster. It is an announcement in connection with the 100 year anniversary (1910 - 2010):
https://www.pne.ca/files/uploads/2018/01/entertainment.pdf
Rick Beato thinks that AutoTune and whatnot killed music.
Maybe it was just Ticketmaster.
Ticketmaster is the obvious reason why fewer people go to live shows in North America, whether rock and roll or not.
In 2016, the OKC Thunder were making a playoff run. They just advanced to the finals and tickets were set to "go on sale to the public" at 10am on a certain day. I signed up for an account, got logged in, etc. and kept refreshing the page around 10am that day, card in hand to buy. The second that time elapsed, all tickets were sold out. Yet somehow thousands of tickets were available for "resale" instantly at $100+ more per ticket PLUS a transfer fee. My jaw was on the floor. Absolute and complete bullshit. I knew the gig then. It was obvious they just let all tickets get bought up by resellers/scalpers/bots without a care in the world for the actual fans. They actually make even more money allowing it to be this way due to the extra transfer fees on top of the original sale. I watched the finals on TV instead since I didn't have the money for that earlier in my career. Burn this company to the ground with the heat of a thousand suns.