The horizontal control of venues is only one issue. A perhaps bigger issue is the vertical integration (if that's the right term) of first-party ticket sales and resale in one company. Ticketmaster has no real incentive to try to prevent resellers from buying up all the tickets on first sale, because it gets to charge fees on all the resales through its platform. The more times a ticket is resold, the better.
I don't believe a court would ever mandate this, but I'd like to see tickets sold by dutch auction: All tickets start off for sale at some very high price, like $10000, and the price declines by some amount every day until it reaches a reserve price on the day of the concert. Buyers can purchase as many tickets as they want, but professional resellers would have to guess the price that would let them clear their inventory at a profit. Under a system like this the best seats would go earliest (at the highest prices) while the nosebleed seats might still be available on day of the show, or not depending on demand.
Why not just ban the transfer of tickets and allow refunds? You buy a ticket, you show your ID at the door. Early refunded tickets get resold online and late refunds are sold at the venue. All seats, including the best seats, go to actual fans instead of scalpers just hoping to make a profit while providing zero value. First choice in seats goes to the most passionate and attentive fans.
Alternatively only allow transfers within a very short period of the event. Anyone with a legitimate reason (giving to a friend etc) can work it out even on the day of the event. But scalpers have to take on a big risk buying up the good seats early, because they have a short window of time within which to secure a sale (buyers won't risk pre-paying, sellers can't risk prospective buyers backing out at the last minute).
Another tactic I've seen when there isn't assigned seating - just different tiers of seating - is to hold back some small portion of tickets to release shortly before the event, devaluing the scalpers' listings.
Online streaming tickets can also help, especially if the fans have enough of an anti-scalper stance. They'd choose one of the endless live streaming tickets over buying from scalpers just to go in-person.
I can only assume that the people flippantly proposing that the solution should be to restrict consumer freedoms don't attend these types of events themselves. Why should we immediately jump to limiting freedoms when we can increase the risk of scalping enough to be beyond the tolerance of most scalpers.
How is a buyer supposed to trust that the scalper won't just run away with the money? And conversely, how is the scalper supposed to trust that buyers aren't just feigning interest and will back out at the last minute?
Even escrow systems don't necessarily bypass this because ultimately the buyer is likely spending on more than just the concert ticket. They're probably taking time off work, maybe traveling in from another city or country. So even if they might get their ticket money back if the seller backs out, by the time that happens, it's too late to get refunds on everything else.
And combined with the possibility of getting lower prices closer to the event (extra drops from the event, honest resellers who just can't make it, scalpers trying to cut their losses), even buyers wouldn't commit early to scalper prices.
Maybe limit total number of transfers among all tickets. Because it should be a small minority of legit transfers.
Scalpers should be less likely to take a chance their transfer will be denied, whereas to a legit customer and friend ticket is otherwise worthless and just a best effort anyway.
Or beyond the first X% of transfers you do more rigorous validation. Like asking for the original buyer to call in to confirm in realtime. Something not easily automated.
And I like your ideas but I don't see why the venues and artists don't want to capture more of what people are willing to pay enabled by what the parent comment suggested.
I wonder if in your system it actually attracts fans or just people that have the time to wait for tickets.
It’s kind of annoying in practice. For example you buy four tickets to go with your friends. But you get sick so you offer your ticket to a different friend instead. Oops that’s not allowed so now no one gets to go? Or you buy tickets as a gift for someone.
There’s a lot of legit reasons to want transfers, outside of scalping.
I can't do this with airline tickets, hotel bookings, train tickets, dinner reservations, or any other kind of receipt that allows me to put my butt in a seat at a specified time.
Airline tickets and train tickets are because they want to identify the person, for tracking/supposed national security purposes. Also, you typically can transfer train tickets. Depends on the country.
Dinner reservations: I’ve literally never had an issue “transferring” a reservation. There’s no verification, often, and the reservation tools typically let you change contact details. If I present myself as John Smith, I’ve never once had anyone question that.
Concert tickets are almost certainly in the 'dinner reservation' category. They have no need to identify me for national security reasons, so transferring them should not be a problem.
Airline tickets are done for identity at some level (although even that is dubious since until recently you could fly without any id at all), but at another level they charge exorbitant fees to change the name on the ticket or even to just cancel the itinerary.
> Concert tickets are almost certainly in the 'dinner reservation' category. They have no need to identify me for national security reasons
Admittedly I haven't been to many concerts, but 'national security reasons' seems like a reasonable rationale to me because a packed concert sounds like a great place to set off a suicide bomb vest for maximum impact. Have a cut-out who doesn't raise any red flags buy the ticket and hand it off to the person wearing the vest. No ID check? Mass panic ensues when the vest goes off, and people are hurt in the stampede for the exits even if the blast radius of the vest itself isn't all that large.
To be fair, we didn't start having the government screen people on planes when hijackers were merely endangering one plane worth of people. About 3,000 people died and likely tens of thousands of people were injured before we started doing that.
I like the combined suggestions of three other commenters:
1) Allow transfers during a very short window (e.g. 24h before the event)
2) Allow full refunds up to x days before the event
3) Release a small batch of tickets 24h before the event, as a way of reducing the chance for scalpers to make money, and giving real fans a last chance without paying exorbitant prices
All three together offer a reasonable tradeoff. The tickets will go (mostly) to real fans, yet still giving you flexibility in case your plans change (work, sick, etc). And if you know well in advance, you can get a full refund, without having to worry with reselling, paying commission, etc.
Also prohibit secondary markets entirely. Similar to airlines, there's no reselling of tickets.
Of course, this is just wishful thinking. Too many intermediaries benefit from screwing showgoers, so this will never be implemented.
I think they do kinda work that way. When you buy an airline ticket through some third-party website, the price is lower than the main site, yet they're making a profit. They must be hoarding then reselling tickets with the airline's permission, right? Same with cruises.
The thing is, you as an individual can't transfer tickets because of what the other person said.
> For example you buy four tickets to go with your friends. But you get sick so you offer your ticket to a different friend instead. Oops that’s not allowed so now no one gets to go?
Or you give your friend's names when buying their tickets so they can go even when you can't or you have them buy their own tickets, or you're sick so you get a refund for your four tickets and your friends each buy their own afterwards.
For many events, the demographics lean toward age groups where people have jobs with work schedules that aren't known more than a few weeks in advance. The initially planned friend group (e.g., four people) can have little overlap with who is actually free on the event date and actually attends. Also, if the event has assigned seating, people buying their own tickets typically has the adverse outcome that you can't sit together.
Most flights are available at high frequencies (on the order of days, weeks) compared to concerts (once a year or so). You also don't care as much about sitting together on a plane.
I disagree, if you can't get seats with your friends in a concert, you might just not go because the social aspect is part of the experience, but if you can't get neighboring seats on a plane, you'd (or at least I would) just tolerate it since you would still get to be together at the main event (the destination).
> It’s kind of annoying in practice. For example you buy four tickets to go with your friends. But you get sick so you offer your ticket to a different friend instead. Oops that’s not allowed so now no one gets to go?
Get a refund if you can't go
> Or you buy tickets as a gift for someone.
This is easy part.
> There’s a lot of legit reasons to want transfers, outside of scalping
There of course are but they pale in comparison to what is currently happening with scalping. And as many have pointed out, there are a lot of other "tickets" we buy that are 100% non-transferable, these are because wrong people are making too much money
That's fairly common in Japan: you can't transfer tickets, as they get a name attached at purchase, and many concerts use a lottery system. You register interest in tickets, and if you're selected, you get a window to buy them. No camping out the minute presales open, and the price is the price instead of rent-extracting dynamic bullshit.
Square Enix did that for the Final Fantasy conventions in the US as well (where details of the next FFXIV expansion will be announced later this month), but they added an additional requirement. You have to have an active subscription to the game to even have a chance.
The Savannah bananas do that for their tickets. You enter a free lottery to buy tickets then pay the same price regardless of when you buy them in that window if you're chosen. I don't think there's much scalping that happens with their tickets, so it must work.
That's exactly my point: boycott the artists who contract with Live Nation. Your life won't be any less rich if you go see a local band instead of Taylor Swift. People have so many options now and yet they're afflicted with this weird FOMO.
These are getting harder to find, but it's worth it. When I was in high school/college, I didn't need a YouTube algorithm to bring hip music to my attention. I just needed the flyer with upcoming shows at the church basement.
It should also be said that they could do anything at all to prevent these professional scalpers from scooping up all the tickets at once, including even merely closing those APIs entirely but they continue to do nothing about it.
The verified re-sale thing as you have correctly pointed out just allowed them to pretend like something was being done about scalping while it actually just let them make more money on the resale fees.
> It should also be said that they could do anything at all to prevent these professional scalpers from scooping up all the tickets at once
Oh they did something about it. The ticket brokers can't scoop up all the tickets because many of the best ones are now only released as "Platinum" tickets at 2-5 times the price.
The only "fair" ways are to have a lottery for non-transferrable tickets, or have something akin to a dutch auction so that the band/venue captures all of the value - meaning tickets would be astronomically priced.
It's long been speculated that they clandestinely participate in the resale market. If the goal of a business is to maximize profit and they control the market and technology around it, they have everything they need to push prices to the absolute limit that a customer is willing to pay.
Based on what came out during the course of the trial, it would not surprise me at all if they are double-selling tickets.
It's wild that everyone seems to have forgotten that Ticketmaster acquired TradeDesk and actively marketed to scalpers [1] just a couple of years ago. Seems they shut down the platform last year, maybe the "ticket bank" [2] idea worked better... Pretty clear to me that they will use any chance to monetize their monopoly.
it's all an aesthetic experience, no? for the live entertainment business, it is aesthetically important to fans of Bruce Springsteen that his tickets have a number on them that appears on a website that feels good, and that number happens to be "price of ticket," even if hardly anyone is actually paying that number - they are usually paying more.
personally, i don't think any of this legal shit matters. the sherman antitrust act is 1 paragraph long, so it is flexible in terms of how you want this stuff to work, from a, "I would like the world to work as though it were governed by a priesthood" point of view. so it's reductive to talk about, what does the law say? very little of interest.
how should it work? live nation should be able to do whatever the hell it wants. it would make more money for everyone, at the cost of nothing. it would be good for the music industry to make more money. apple should not have lost the antitrust case over books either. nobody forces you to go to concerts! if you have a problem with ticket prices, make tiktoks complaining about it targeted at the artists. stop listening to their music. but IMO, the live performance cultural phenomenon, it doesn't benefit from this kind of regulation.
Or easiest is to require KYC for all the buyers (tie ticket to person instead of allowing bulk purchases) and limit ability to resale at scale. This would easily allow them to blacklist scalpers. It's not like they don't know who you are from the payment information, and tickets are often verified against driver licenses at entry.
I'm always annoyed by this kind of news. The problem has existed for a long time, and finally, FINALLY, a court weighs in on some very narrow sliver of the problem, meanwhile things keep getting worse.
It always feels like the scene in Lord Of The Rings where they're waiting for the Ents to deliberate on the big war that's going on, and then after an agonizing amount of time they announce that they just said Good Morning and decided their guests weren't Orcs.
Having produced, performed in, and engineered a number of shows and festivals, this is a terrible idea for a pricing strategy.
Consider portajohns for an outdoor festival- incentivizing folks to wait until the last possible minute makes it impossible to determine what the needs are there, so how do you plan for how many shitters you need to bring and maintain for, say, a 3-day festival?
Consider that "festivals discount early sales" might be a kind of Chesterton's Fence, and you might question why they do that...
Not everything sells out right away, though. I've bought concert tickets on the day of the show more than once. Somehow they still managed to have all the concessions staffed.
But regardless, the formula for decreasing the price could be adjusted. For example, it could be an exponential decay toward the reserve price, with the decay rate set so that most of the decline in price is early.
Or, for shows that are entirely general admission, like festivals, you could use the alternative form of dutch auction: when tickets go on sale, everyone bids what they're willing to pay for some number of tickets. Then the bidding closes (with ample time for planning), and the bids are cleared in descending order of price, and everyone pays the amount of the lowest clearing bid. This method would find a price closer to the true market price of a ticket and discourage speculators.
Our basic findings suggest that the auctions “worked”: price discovery substantially improved; artist revenues roughly doubled versus the fixed-price counterfactual; and, perhaps most importantly, the auctions eliminated or at least substantially reduced potential resale profits for speculators.... And yet, over the decade that has passed since the time of the data, rather than coming into more widespread use, primary-market auctions for event tickets instead disappeared.... We conclude by speculating as to why the auctions failed to take off. As discussed in the introduction....
They don't seem to mention the most obvious reason: the same companies profit from both the primary and secondary market. Why would TicketMaster want to reduce the number of resales when it collects fees on them?
AFAIK Ticketmaster doesn't decide, they are a service provider with a variety of options for their customers (the performers).
The customer picks an option (no resale, limited or not resale price, etc...) and Ticketmaster does it, taking a commission in the process. Maybe the commission changes depending on the formula, but really, they don't care about the details, they are getting the money no matter what.
The problem is not the situation about resale and all that, I would say that part is the customer fault, not Ticketmaster, they are the ones who picked a formula. The problem is that by being in a monopoly position, they can charge high fees, making the tickets more expensive. And by more expensive, I mean something like 30% more expensive, not 300% more expensive.
I don't think Ticketmaster offers a dutch auction, but I guess that if you are big enough and if that's what you want and if you can pay, they can deliver.
I disagree whole heartedly. The organizations should absolutely have the choice to price tickets to their events however much they choose. And they should have recourse for people who choose to ignore their wishes.
Its their product. Why would you want to take that choice away from them?
An example, I spent some time working for an organization who felt strongly that retirees living on a fixed income should always be able to afford tickets to their events. They would bring in big name musicians to perform and charge a fair price specifically so those people could afford it. Why would you want to take that choice away from that organization and force them to price out the elder community members they were trying to serve?
Its the organizations event, they should always have the choice to charge whatever they want.
In case you wondered what the point of the federal (i.e. states not totally controlled by federal government) system is, here's a good example. If only the federal government were allowed to pursue this case, it would have ended when the administration changed. 30 states chose to keep the case alive, and good on them.
It makes you wonder why the DoJ settled so early. Or, rather, it doesn’t really make you wonder at all. It’s obvious there was a case and they should have let their lawsuit run. I wonder why they didn’t?
this really seems like a naive question. what about this administration dropping the case seems out of place from the rest of the corruption occurring within it? do you honestly think this administration dropping a case in favor of a powerful business instead of fighting for the consumer as anything other than corrupt?
Bribes, campaign donations, presidential ballrooms. The current administration has settled MANY cases that they'd already won, it's very easy to buy favors now.
On the other hand, I'm not sure a European style tribunal would have been allowed to settle the case early.
Yes. It's good that the states can serve as a check on the Federal level government. But why can the federal level government give up on cases on a national level? Just because a different party was voted in?
No matter what your politics, sooner or later someone you don't agree with will be in charge at the national level.
There are also cases where states take on cases that the national government never pursues in the first case. IIRC, states pursued the tobacco companies when the national government would not (Democrat or Republican).
Of course, it happens in federal courts, so you also need separate and independent branches at the national level. But states that can act independently are important as well.
The problem is that the Department of Justice is part of the Executive Branch, and due to the burgeoning of the Imperial Presidency over the past several decades, that means that as soon as a new President is voted in, he can order the DoJ to change all their priorities to match his.
Our system doesn't have to be this way, even with the federal/state split; it doesn't even have to be this way with the designation of the DoJ as being within the Executive Branch. It's taken a lot of erosion of norms and flagrant breaking of laws to get to the point the US is at now.
> In May 1994, the grunge band Pearl Jam filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice claiming Ticketmaster had cut the group out of venue bookings in a dispute over fees.[50] The investigation was closed without action in 1995, though the Justice Department stated it would continue to monitor the developments in the ticket industry.[51][52]
> By 1994, Pearl Jam was "fighting on all fronts" as its manager described the band at the time.[43] Reporter Chuck Philips broke a series of stories showing that Ticketmaster was gouging Pearl Jam's customers.[44] Pearl Jam was outraged when, after it played a pair of charity benefit shows in Chicago, it discovered that ticket vendor Ticketmaster had added a service charge to the tickets. Pearl Jam was committed to keeping their concert ticket prices down but Fred Rosen of Ticketmaster refused to waive the service charge. Because Ticketmaster controlled most major venues, the band was forced to create from scratch its own outdoor stadiums in rural areas in order to perform. […]
> The United States Department of Justice was investigating the company's practices at the time and asked the band to create a memorandum of its experiences with the company. Band members Gossard and Ament testified at a subcommittee investigation on June 30, 1994, in Washington, D.C.[52]
What is the moat of the major ticketing companies? Is it deals with venues? It is hard to rationalize how one company can even get a stranglehold on an entire market like this.
I feel like I could ping any random HN user and build something better in a week, which means it has been done many times already... why don't alternatives gain traction?
I cannot imagine how they came up with that number. If it were under $2 per ticket it wouldn't have been worth pursuing. This happened because they were taking tens of dollars for no other reason than that there was no alternative.
The jury in this case is required to rule by preponderance of evidence (= more likely than not given the evidence). One of the economic experts calculated this number as being overcharged based on internal ticketmaster documentation.
Cases aren't always about the actual problem, they're about what you can prove in court.
> The companies could also be assessed penalties. In addition, sanctions could result in court orders that they divest themselves of some entities, including venues such as amphitheaters that they own.
Sounds about right. The attorneys take $1.52 and leave the victim with $0.20. And then nothing actually happens that would restore a competitive marketplace.
They never should've been allowed to merge. Funnily enough Ticketmaster has the only free API I've found for concert data and it has a ton of results because it is a monopoly.
The question should be did Live Nation knowingly allow scalpers (aka ticket brokers) to corner the market on highest demand events AND create artificial scarcity by only posting a small handful of the tickets they controlled at extreme inflated prices increasing the percentage fees collected by Live Nation and Ticketmaster on every ticket sold.
I feel like we had a golden opportunity, years ago, to do something about Ticketmaster. In 1994 Pearl Jam, one of the biggest bands in the world at that point, boycotted and sued Ticketmaster. I wished at the time more bands had stood up and said, “Enough.” It would have worked.
But it’s easy to scare an individual artist, or make them feel like they’re locked into a contract, and fame is such a precipice. I suppose that makes it hard for them to work together for their own good.
Ironically sometimes artists complain about Ticketmaster and their stranglehold, but again, it takes some special bravery to actually do something about it.
My favorite is the local tax office charges extra for paying online vs going in to the office to pay in person. At first, I thought it was a way to recoup the processing fees as you're obviously paying by card online. The last time I paid in person with a card, that fee was not added on though. So they are charging you extra for not having to pay an employee to process your account.
I looked at buying tickets for a local hockey game last week, and the venue goes through Ticketmaster. The service fees were exactly the same as the actual ticket cost, maybe the total 200% of the list price.
I ended up going to the physical box office, where they still charged an extra 40% of the ticket cost in service fees.
I won't go anywhere that wants you to pay with phone period, cause it's just annoying and usually means bad food/service. If they somehow hid this fact until the end and wanted a fee for it, I'd just slap a bill on the table and leave. Don't think that's even a crime.
I think that's exactly the point. They've charged you $2 to process the request. They did that work. Even if you get the money back for the event, they still did the job, so they won't refund the service fee.
And then the restaurant lobby got the CA one rescinded for restaurant junk fees, which were probably the biggest culprit most people encounter day-to-day.
Apparently the state AGs dropped one of the charges that would have led to a more reasonable number there to try to make the decision easier for the jury.
Because the US espouses the virtues of the free market while embracing monopolies. If they cared about dealing with the latter they would empower more regulators like Lina Khan.
Great, so now they will have to repay the illegal profits and get some measures forced onto them to bring the inflated ticket prices back down, right? Right? Guys?
A monopoly with competition: "Shares of rival ticket brokers jumped on the news, with StubHub Holding Inc. climbing as much as 5% and Vivid Seats Inc. rising as much as 9.1%."
The horizontal control of venues is only one issue. A perhaps bigger issue is the vertical integration (if that's the right term) of first-party ticket sales and resale in one company. Ticketmaster has no real incentive to try to prevent resellers from buying up all the tickets on first sale, because it gets to charge fees on all the resales through its platform. The more times a ticket is resold, the better.
I don't believe a court would ever mandate this, but I'd like to see tickets sold by dutch auction: All tickets start off for sale at some very high price, like $10000, and the price declines by some amount every day until it reaches a reserve price on the day of the concert. Buyers can purchase as many tickets as they want, but professional resellers would have to guess the price that would let them clear their inventory at a profit. Under a system like this the best seats would go earliest (at the highest prices) while the nosebleed seats might still be available on day of the show, or not depending on demand.
Why not just ban the transfer of tickets and allow refunds? You buy a ticket, you show your ID at the door. Early refunded tickets get resold online and late refunds are sold at the venue. All seats, including the best seats, go to actual fans instead of scalpers just hoping to make a profit while providing zero value. First choice in seats goes to the most passionate and attentive fans.
Alternatively only allow transfers within a very short period of the event. Anyone with a legitimate reason (giving to a friend etc) can work it out even on the day of the event. But scalpers have to take on a big risk buying up the good seats early, because they have a short window of time within which to secure a sale (buyers won't risk pre-paying, sellers can't risk prospective buyers backing out at the last minute).
Another tactic I've seen when there isn't assigned seating - just different tiers of seating - is to hold back some small portion of tickets to release shortly before the event, devaluing the scalpers' listings.
Online streaming tickets can also help, especially if the fans have enough of an anti-scalper stance. They'd choose one of the endless live streaming tickets over buying from scalpers just to go in-person.
I can only assume that the people flippantly proposing that the solution should be to restrict consumer freedoms don't attend these types of events themselves. Why should we immediately jump to limiting freedoms when we can increase the risk of scalping enough to be beyond the tolerance of most scalpers.
What stops a scalper from buying early and then guaranteeing someone they will transfer the ticket on the day of the event?
How is a buyer supposed to trust that the scalper won't just run away with the money? And conversely, how is the scalper supposed to trust that buyers aren't just feigning interest and will back out at the last minute?
Even escrow systems don't necessarily bypass this because ultimately the buyer is likely spending on more than just the concert ticket. They're probably taking time off work, maybe traveling in from another city or country. So even if they might get their ticket money back if the seller backs out, by the time that happens, it's too late to get refunds on everything else.
And combined with the possibility of getting lower prices closer to the event (extra drops from the event, honest resellers who just can't make it, scalpers trying to cut their losses), even buyers wouldn't commit early to scalper prices.
We'll start a HN online marketplace, called "Dive Station" that will guarantee everything and offer insurance and double-your-money back guarantees.
We'll get bought out by TicketMaster within 5 years.
Maybe limit total number of transfers among all tickets. Because it should be a small minority of legit transfers.
Scalpers should be less likely to take a chance their transfer will be denied, whereas to a legit customer and friend ticket is otherwise worthless and just a best effort anyway.
Or beyond the first X% of transfers you do more rigorous validation. Like asking for the original buyer to call in to confirm in realtime. Something not easily automated.
Though this would be mildly annoying for the earnest case (selling a ticket to a friend), it would be the actual solve to the problem.
The parent's suggestion still creates artificial scarcity, which is the real issue: people buying tickets they have no intention of using.
The problem is that the artists, venues, and ticketing companies benefit from this artificial scarcity. So we'll never see it change.
We can agree scalpers are net negative.
And I like your ideas but I don't see why the venues and artists don't want to capture more of what people are willing to pay enabled by what the parent comment suggested.
I wonder if in your system it actually attracts fans or just people that have the time to wait for tickets.
It’s kind of annoying in practice. For example you buy four tickets to go with your friends. But you get sick so you offer your ticket to a different friend instead. Oops that’s not allowed so now no one gets to go? Or you buy tickets as a gift for someone.
There’s a lot of legit reasons to want transfers, outside of scalping.
I can't do this with airline tickets, hotel bookings, train tickets, dinner reservations, or any other kind of receipt that allows me to put my butt in a seat at a specified time.
Why are concert tickets special?
Airline tickets and train tickets are because they want to identify the person, for tracking/supposed national security purposes. Also, you typically can transfer train tickets. Depends on the country.
Dinner reservations: I’ve literally never had an issue “transferring” a reservation. There’s no verification, often, and the reservation tools typically let you change contact details. If I present myself as John Smith, I’ve never once had anyone question that.
Concert tickets are almost certainly in the 'dinner reservation' category. They have no need to identify me for national security reasons, so transferring them should not be a problem.
Airline tickets are done for identity at some level (although even that is dubious since until recently you could fly without any id at all), but at another level they charge exorbitant fees to change the name on the ticket or even to just cancel the itinerary.
Seems to be partly price discrimination, I guess that people willing to pay more will fork out for flexible tickets. Same goes for seat allocation.
> Concert tickets are almost certainly in the 'dinner reservation' category. They have no need to identify me for national security reasons
Admittedly I haven't been to many concerts, but 'national security reasons' seems like a reasonable rationale to me because a packed concert sounds like a great place to set off a suicide bomb vest for maximum impact. Have a cut-out who doesn't raise any red flags buy the ticket and hand it off to the person wearing the vest. No ID check? Mass panic ensues when the vest goes off, and people are hurt in the stampede for the exits even if the blast radius of the vest itself isn't all that large.
Metal detectors or whatever other measures are a more direct solution
Lots of big venues have metal detectors or wands, which targets the right thing, instead of privacy.
there are 300 people on the plane (big one) and 80k people watching taylor swift. national security is funny way to put this…
To be fair, we didn't start having the government screen people on planes when hijackers were merely endangering one plane worth of people. About 3,000 people died and likely tens of thousands of people were injured before we started doing that.
I like the combined suggestions of three other commenters:
1) Allow transfers during a very short window (e.g. 24h before the event)
2) Allow full refunds up to x days before the event
3) Release a small batch of tickets 24h before the event, as a way of reducing the chance for scalpers to make money, and giving real fans a last chance without paying exorbitant prices
All three together offer a reasonable tradeoff. The tickets will go (mostly) to real fans, yet still giving you flexibility in case your plans change (work, sick, etc). And if you know well in advance, you can get a full refund, without having to worry with reselling, paying commission, etc.
Also prohibit secondary markets entirely. Similar to airlines, there's no reselling of tickets.
Of course, this is just wishful thinking. Too many intermediaries benefit from screwing showgoers, so this will never be implemented.
For most popular events there are enough people who want or need to make plans more than 24h in advance that scalping would still be profitable.
Pretty sure with air travel it's just a security issue, and all the other ones you can totally do.
I think they do kinda work that way. When you buy an airline ticket through some third-party website, the price is lower than the main site, yet they're making a profit. They must be hoarding then reselling tickets with the airline's permission, right? Same with cruises.
The thing is, you as an individual can't transfer tickets because of what the other person said.
> For example you buy four tickets to go with your friends. But you get sick so you offer your ticket to a different friend instead. Oops that’s not allowed so now no one gets to go?
Or you give your friend's names when buying their tickets so they can go even when you can't or you have them buy their own tickets, or you're sick so you get a refund for your four tickets and your friends each buy their own afterwards.
For many events, the demographics lean toward age groups where people have jobs with work schedules that aren't known more than a few weeks in advance. The initially planned friend group (e.g., four people) can have little overlap with who is actually free on the event date and actually attends. Also, if the event has assigned seating, people buying their own tickets typically has the adverse outcome that you can't sit together.
The rebuttal is: works fine on airplanes (minus abusive change fees for economy seats)
Most flights are available at high frequencies (on the order of days, weeks) compared to concerts (once a year or so). You also don't care as much about sitting together on a plane.
You care just as much on a plane. Sitting beside wife/friend => stranger
I disagree, if you can't get seats with your friends in a concert, you might just not go because the social aspect is part of the experience, but if you can't get neighboring seats on a plane, you'd (or at least I would) just tolerate it since you would still get to be together at the main event (the destination).
> It’s kind of annoying in practice. For example you buy four tickets to go with your friends. But you get sick so you offer your ticket to a different friend instead. Oops that’s not allowed so now no one gets to go?
Get a refund if you can't go
> Or you buy tickets as a gift for someone.
This is easy part.
> There’s a lot of legit reasons to want transfers, outside of scalping
There of course are but they pale in comparison to what is currently happening with scalping. And as many have pointed out, there are a lot of other "tickets" we buy that are 100% non-transferable, these are because wrong people are making too much money
We don’t have to use one broken market (airline seats) as a model for another broken market (concerts).
Anyway back to the top post - a Dutch auction foods almost all these issues without weird rules.
A Dutch auction kills first day sales and would affect those who need to plan ahead. It will create less ticket sales for medium tiered acts.
> Oops that’s not allowed so now no one gets to go?
You sell your own ticket back to the event. Your three friends of course have their names on their tickets, so they can go if they want to.
> Or you buy tickets as a gift for someone.
Do you buy gifts to people whose name you don't even know?
I tend to buy 2-4 tickets for a show way in advance of me knowing which of my friends would go with me
That's fairly common in Japan: you can't transfer tickets, as they get a name attached at purchase, and many concerts use a lottery system. You register interest in tickets, and if you're selected, you get a window to buy them. No camping out the minute presales open, and the price is the price instead of rent-extracting dynamic bullshit.
Square Enix did that for the Final Fantasy conventions in the US as well (where details of the next FFXIV expansion will be announced later this month), but they added an additional requirement. You have to have an active subscription to the game to even have a chance.
The Savannah bananas do that for their tickets. You enter a free lottery to buy tickets then pay the same price regardless of when you buy them in that window if you're chosen. I don't think there's much scalping that happens with their tickets, so it must work.
That's too consumer friendly.
doesn't work. the venue/artist/original seller would have a huge liability for refunded value that they don't want to hold
"all seats, including the best seats go to actual fans" is not something solved by your solution
The venue would make less money this way, and preferential seats would be given to whoever managed to get a request in first.
Another option is to just go see live shows at local independent venues instead of letting Live Nation jerk you around.
None of the big artists people want to see ever play at those venues
That's exactly my point: boycott the artists who contract with Live Nation. Your life won't be any less rich if you go see a local band instead of Taylor Swift. People have so many options now and yet they're afflicted with this weird FOMO.
These are getting harder to find, but it's worth it. When I was in high school/college, I didn't need a YouTube algorithm to bring hip music to my attention. I just needed the flyer with upcoming shows at the church basement.
> Why not just ban the transfer of tickets and allow refunds? You buy a ticket, you show your ID at the door.
Because everyone on the seller side - including artists - make money on this.
If parties other than fans / buyers cared, it would be a solved problem.
I've seen quite a few artists opposed to it.
Quick example: https://www.instagram.com/p/DWWlQS-Dhj7/
Artists will claim to be opposed because fans like it when they do so.
The tickets are all electronic now and they can already do it. Most artists don't want them to.
It should also be said that they could do anything at all to prevent these professional scalpers from scooping up all the tickets at once, including even merely closing those APIs entirely but they continue to do nothing about it.
The verified re-sale thing as you have correctly pointed out just allowed them to pretend like something was being done about scalping while it actually just let them make more money on the resale fees.
> It should also be said that they could do anything at all to prevent these professional scalpers from scooping up all the tickets at once
Oh they did something about it. The ticket brokers can't scoop up all the tickets because many of the best ones are now only released as "Platinum" tickets at 2-5 times the price.
The only "fair" ways are to have a lottery for non-transferrable tickets, or have something akin to a dutch auction so that the band/venue captures all of the value - meaning tickets would be astronomically priced.
> including even merely closing those APIs entirely but they continue to do nothing about it.
At the same time I've been bit by a ticket vendor's anti-bot block by simply browsing the site and clicking their own "retry" button.
I'm sure if I'd've written a script, it would not have gotten hit by that garbage.
Creating a market by enabling middleman to sell you tickets at a higher price but with a better UX really is something.
It's long been speculated that they clandestinely participate in the resale market. If the goal of a business is to maximize profit and they control the market and technology around it, they have everything they need to push prices to the absolute limit that a customer is willing to pay.
Based on what came out during the course of the trial, it would not surprise me at all if they are double-selling tickets.
It's wild that everyone seems to have forgotten that Ticketmaster acquired TradeDesk and actively marketed to scalpers [1] just a couple of years ago. Seems they shut down the platform last year, maybe the "ticket bank" [2] idea worked better... Pretty clear to me that they will use any chance to monetize their monopoly.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/competition-bureau-ticketma...
[2] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/judge-signals-hell-le...
it's all an aesthetic experience, no? for the live entertainment business, it is aesthetically important to fans of Bruce Springsteen that his tickets have a number on them that appears on a website that feels good, and that number happens to be "price of ticket," even if hardly anyone is actually paying that number - they are usually paying more.
personally, i don't think any of this legal shit matters. the sherman antitrust act is 1 paragraph long, so it is flexible in terms of how you want this stuff to work, from a, "I would like the world to work as though it were governed by a priesthood" point of view. so it's reductive to talk about, what does the law say? very little of interest.
how should it work? live nation should be able to do whatever the hell it wants. it would make more money for everyone, at the cost of nothing. it would be good for the music industry to make more money. apple should not have lost the antitrust case over books either. nobody forces you to go to concerts! if you have a problem with ticket prices, make tiktoks complaining about it targeted at the artists. stop listening to their music. but IMO, the live performance cultural phenomenon, it doesn't benefit from this kind of regulation.
Or easiest is to require KYC for all the buyers (tie ticket to person instead of allowing bulk purchases) and limit ability to resale at scale. This would easily allow them to blacklist scalpers. It's not like they don't know who you are from the payment information, and tickets are often verified against driver licenses at entry.
I'm always annoyed by this kind of news. The problem has existed for a long time, and finally, FINALLY, a court weighs in on some very narrow sliver of the problem, meanwhile things keep getting worse.
It always feels like the scene in Lord Of The Rings where they're waiting for the Ents to deliberate on the big war that's going on, and then after an agonizing amount of time they announce that they just said Good Morning and decided their guests weren't Orcs.
Like jeez can justice move any slower?
Having produced, performed in, and engineered a number of shows and festivals, this is a terrible idea for a pricing strategy.
Consider portajohns for an outdoor festival- incentivizing folks to wait until the last possible minute makes it impossible to determine what the needs are there, so how do you plan for how many shitters you need to bring and maintain for, say, a 3-day festival?
Consider that "festivals discount early sales" might be a kind of Chesterton's Fence, and you might question why they do that...
Not everything sells out right away, though. I've bought concert tickets on the day of the show more than once. Somehow they still managed to have all the concessions staffed.
But regardless, the formula for decreasing the price could be adjusted. For example, it could be an exponential decay toward the reserve price, with the decay rate set so that most of the decline in price is early.
Or, for shows that are entirely general admission, like festivals, you could use the alternative form of dutch auction: when tickets go on sale, everyone bids what they're willing to pay for some number of tickets. Then the bidding closes (with ample time for planning), and the bids are cleared in descending order of price, and everyone pays the amount of the lowest clearing bid. This method would find a price closer to the true market price of a ticket and discourage speculators.
The issue is that most events don't even sell out. This is a terrible idea.
Ticketmaster actually experimented with this https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mic.20180230
Our basic findings suggest that the auctions “worked”: price discovery substantially improved; artist revenues roughly doubled versus the fixed-price counterfactual; and, perhaps most importantly, the auctions eliminated or at least substantially reduced potential resale profits for speculators.... And yet, over the decade that has passed since the time of the data, rather than coming into more widespread use, primary-market auctions for event tickets instead disappeared.... We conclude by speculating as to why the auctions failed to take off. As discussed in the introduction....
They don't seem to mention the most obvious reason: the same companies profit from both the primary and secondary market. Why would TicketMaster want to reduce the number of resales when it collects fees on them?
AFAIK Ticketmaster doesn't decide, they are a service provider with a variety of options for their customers (the performers).
The customer picks an option (no resale, limited or not resale price, etc...) and Ticketmaster does it, taking a commission in the process. Maybe the commission changes depending on the formula, but really, they don't care about the details, they are getting the money no matter what.
The problem is not the situation about resale and all that, I would say that part is the customer fault, not Ticketmaster, they are the ones who picked a formula. The problem is that by being in a monopoly position, they can charge high fees, making the tickets more expensive. And by more expensive, I mean something like 30% more expensive, not 300% more expensive.
I don't think Ticketmaster offers a dutch auction, but I guess that if you are big enough and if that's what you want and if you can pay, they can deliver.
I disagree whole heartedly. The organizations should absolutely have the choice to price tickets to their events however much they choose. And they should have recourse for people who choose to ignore their wishes.
Its their product. Why would you want to take that choice away from them?
An example, I spent some time working for an organization who felt strongly that retirees living on a fixed income should always be able to afford tickets to their events. They would bring in big name musicians to perform and charge a fair price specifically so those people could afford it. Why would you want to take that choice away from that organization and force them to price out the elder community members they were trying to serve?
Its the organizations event, they should always have the choice to charge whatever they want.
The reselling seems fine to me as long as other resellers can compete. It's a classic market.
What I'd like to see is the banning of real time dynamic pricing of any kind in all industries.
> Ticketmaster has no real incentive to try to prevent resellers from buying up all the tickets on first sale
The incentive would be to jack up the prices themselves and take any profit which would have gone to scammers. Supply and demand.
> A perhaps bigger issue is the vertical integration (if that's the right term) of first-party ticket sales and resale in one company.
Similar problem with "healthcare" insurance companies in the US.
We need a global crackdown on the breadth of markets a company can be involved in - somehow.
In case you wondered what the point of the federal (i.e. states not totally controlled by federal government) system is, here's a good example. If only the federal government were allowed to pursue this case, it would have ended when the administration changed. 30 states chose to keep the case alive, and good on them.
It makes you wonder why the DoJ settled so early. Or, rather, it doesn’t really make you wonder at all. It’s obvious there was a case and they should have let their lawsuit run. I wonder why they didn’t?
this really seems like a naive question. what about this administration dropping the case seems out of place from the rest of the corruption occurring within it? do you honestly think this administration dropping a case in favor of a powerful business instead of fighting for the consumer as anything other than corrupt?
Sorry, I was being satirical and that doesn’t come through always in text. It’s very obvious why they dropped it because they are corrupt as hell.
Bribes, campaign donations, presidential ballrooms. The current administration has settled MANY cases that they'd already won, it's very easy to buy favors now.
In particular, Live Nation gave $500,000 to Trump's "inauguration fund" [0] and took on a Trump flunkie onto their board of directors. [1]
[0] https://www.citizen.org/news/trumps-corporate-inauguration-d...
[1] https://variety.com/2025/music/news/live-nation-names-richar...
and sign of law enforcement taking tax payer money and not working.
On the other hand, I'm not sure a European style tribunal would have been allowed to settle the case early.
Yes. It's good that the states can serve as a check on the Federal level government. But why can the federal level government give up on cases on a national level? Just because a different party was voted in?
No matter what your politics, sooner or later someone you don't agree with will be in charge at the national level.
There are also cases where states take on cases that the national government never pursues in the first case. IIRC, states pursued the tobacco companies when the national government would not (Democrat or Republican).
Of course, it happens in federal courts, so you also need separate and independent branches at the national level. But states that can act independently are important as well.
The problem is that the Department of Justice is part of the Executive Branch, and due to the burgeoning of the Imperial Presidency over the past several decades, that means that as soon as a new President is voted in, he can order the DoJ to change all their priorities to match his.
Our system doesn't have to be this way, even with the federal/state split; it doesn't even have to be this way with the designation of the DoJ as being within the Executive Branch. It's taken a lot of erosion of norms and flagrant breaking of laws to get to the point the US is at now.
I remember Pearl Jam challenging them in the 1990s:
* https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taki...
> In May 1994, the grunge band Pearl Jam filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice claiming Ticketmaster had cut the group out of venue bookings in a dispute over fees.[50] The investigation was closed without action in 1995, though the Justice Department stated it would continue to monitor the developments in the ticket industry.[51][52]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticketmaster#Anti-competition_...
> By 1994, Pearl Jam was "fighting on all fronts" as its manager described the band at the time.[43] Reporter Chuck Philips broke a series of stories showing that Ticketmaster was gouging Pearl Jam's customers.[44] Pearl Jam was outraged when, after it played a pair of charity benefit shows in Chicago, it discovered that ticket vendor Ticketmaster had added a service charge to the tickets. Pearl Jam was committed to keeping their concert ticket prices down but Fred Rosen of Ticketmaster refused to waive the service charge. Because Ticketmaster controlled most major venues, the band was forced to create from scratch its own outdoor stadiums in rural areas in order to perform. […]
> The United States Department of Justice was investigating the company's practices at the time and asked the band to create a memorandum of its experiences with the company. Band members Gossard and Ament testified at a subcommittee investigation on June 30, 1994, in Washington, D.C.[52]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Jam#Vs.,_Vitalogy_and_de...
Someone tell Pearl Jam's Eddy Vedder his work to fight Ticketmaster some 30 years ago finally came to a head today.
> Ticketmaster sells about 10 times as many tickets as its closest rival, AEG.
Yeah, that's called a monopoly, even if it wasn't Ticketmaster's intention, which of course it was.
Alternative sources
- https://apnews.com/article/live-nation-ticketmaster-antitrus...
- https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/arts/music/live-nation-an... or https://archive.is/KA1wV
Background story by Matt Stoller https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-tic... (April 13, 2026)
And live coverage with the reactions of various AGs: https://www.forth.news/stories/Ca6C8cj6TyNe7TMMKUnFX
Matt Stoller is always worth reading.
What is the moat of the major ticketing companies? Is it deals with venues? It is hard to rationalize how one company can even get a stranglehold on an entire market like this.
I feel like I could ping any random HN user and build something better in a week, which means it has been done many times already... why don't alternatives gain traction?
from the NYT: > The jury determined that Ticketmaster had overcharged consumers by $1.72 for each ticket.
I'm already planning what I'm going to do with the $0.20 refund I receive for each ticket I bought.
I cannot imagine how they came up with that number. If it were under $2 per ticket it wouldn't have been worth pursuing. This happened because they were taking tens of dollars for no other reason than that there was no alternative.
The jury in this case is required to rule by preponderance of evidence (= more likely than not given the evidence). One of the economic experts calculated this number as being overcharged based on internal ticketmaster documentation.
Cases aren't always about the actual problem, they're about what you can prove in court.
Oh, silly me, that's why a $45 ticket came out to $78 at checkout.
From AP
> The companies could also be assessed penalties. In addition, sanctions could result in court orders that they divest themselves of some entities, including venues such as amphitheaters that they own.
Sounds about right. The attorneys take $1.52 and leave the victim with $0.20. And then nothing actually happens that would restore a competitive marketplace.
Back in my day, the federal government would break up monopolies.
Used to be they wouldn't allow such mergers to happen in the first place what with the law and all that.
Well, it’s also the courts. The government recently tried to break up Google but the judge refused
Bidens administration was breaking up Google before Trump came in and stopped the breakup.
Elections have consequences.
Do not pass go, do not collect $200.
They never should've been allowed to merge. Funnily enough Ticketmaster has the only free API I've found for concert data and it has a ton of results because it is a monopoly.
Venue contracts are a sort of political firewall against any relevant ticketing technology becoming massive globally.
Music festivals were a sort of guerilla attack on lack of venue contracts.
Lots of festivals are owned or controlled by Live Nation.
The question should be did Live Nation knowingly allow scalpers (aka ticket brokers) to corner the market on highest demand events AND create artificial scarcity by only posting a small handful of the tickets they controlled at extreme inflated prices increasing the percentage fees collected by Live Nation and Ticketmaster on every ticket sold.
I feel like we had a golden opportunity, years ago, to do something about Ticketmaster. In 1994 Pearl Jam, one of the biggest bands in the world at that point, boycotted and sued Ticketmaster. I wished at the time more bands had stood up and said, “Enough.” It would have worked.
But it’s easy to scare an individual artist, or make them feel like they’re locked into a contract, and fame is such a precipice. I suppose that makes it hard for them to work together for their own good.
Ironically sometimes artists complain about Ticketmaster and their stranglehold, but again, it takes some special bravery to actually do something about it.
Now do service fees and 'convenience' fees. Every ticket I buy for a movie somehow costs $2 extra now. (As with everything else). Robbery.
My favorite is the local tax office charges extra for paying online vs going in to the office to pay in person. At first, I thought it was a way to recoup the processing fees as you're obviously paying by card online. The last time I paid in person with a card, that fee was not added on though. So they are charging you extra for not having to pay an employee to process your account.
I looked at buying tickets for a local hockey game last week, and the venue goes through Ticketmaster. The service fees were exactly the same as the actual ticket cost, maybe the total 200% of the list price.
I ended up going to the physical box office, where they still charged an extra 40% of the ticket cost in service fees.
The one that pisses me off is when the waitress tells you to pay with your phone, and it's charged a "convenience fee."
I won't go anywhere that wants you to pay with phone period, cause it's just annoying and usually means bad food/service. If they somehow hid this fact until the end and wanted a fee for it, I'd just slap a bill on the table and leave. Don't think that's even a crime.
usually the service fee doesn't even get refunded, which feels additionally foul
I think that's exactly the point. They've charged you $2 to process the request. They did that work. Even if you get the money back for the event, they still did the job, so they won't refund the service fee.
Sure, but imagine a brick and mortar doing that? "we paid our cashier so we can't refund you the full cost"
running the service is the cost of doing business
California, Minnesota, Maryland, and New York have
And then the restaurant lobby got the CA one rescinded for restaurant junk fees, which were probably the biggest culprit most people encounter day-to-day.
Cool, can't wait for the slap on the wrist and a $4 coupon we'll get in 2031.
> The jury determined that Ticketmaster had overcharged consumers by $1.72 for each ticket.
I think the decimal point is a few digits too many to the left here... The various "fees" routinely add up to hundreds
That was the first part that jumped out at me.
Apparently the state AGs dropped one of the charges that would have led to a more reasonable number there to try to make the decision easier for the jury.
Well, the AGs need "wins" for their campaigns for governors (a common path). Who cares about right and wrong? I totally get it.
Concert seats should be handled the same as airline seats. I can buy the same airline seat from dozens of different places online. Why is that?
Airlines need distribution. Concert venues don’t.
Mid/high profile venues know they will sell out regardless, they can shop around the venue rights to the highest bidder.
Because the US espouses the virtues of the free market while embracing monopolies. If they cared about dealing with the latter they would empower more regulators like Lina Khan.
https://archive.ph/dfZVv
There has been a bunch of reporting on this over the past couple years but will this even effect them?
"The jury determined that Ticketmaster had overcharged consumers by $1.72 for each ticket."
Absolute horseshit. They were screwing consumers for more than that since the '80s. Over the last 20 years? It's 10 or 20 times that.
WTF.
Great, so now they will have to repay the illegal profits and get some measures forced onto them to bring the inflated ticket prices back down, right? Right? Guys?
This is very fork-found-in-kitchen.
A monopoly with competition: "Shares of rival ticket brokers jumped on the news, with StubHub Holding Inc. climbing as much as 5% and Vivid Seats Inc. rising as much as 9.1%."