<story><title>Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?</title><text>It seems there are a variety of solutions to prevent value from being transferred from artists&amp;#x2F;fans&amp;#x2F;venues to resellers. Why does it seem like there have been no significant attempts to implement an alternative?&lt;p&gt;The only YC company[1] I can find in this space seems to be DOA.&lt;p&gt;[1] https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;companies&amp;#x2F;the-ticket-fairy</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>koolba</author><text>TicketMaster has exclusive contracts with the vast majority of venues and just about every large one. These contracts include kickbacks where TicketMaster will add $X of fees to each ticket it sells and pass back Y$ (Y &amp;lt; X) to the venue.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s essentially the venues and artists outsourcing the job of &amp;quot;being the asshole&amp;quot; to TicketMaster as a large chunk of the money eventually flow back. They get to publicly blame TicketMaster, claim they have no involvement, and still get their slice of the &amp;quot;processing fees&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;If you are attending any event and you can actually buy the tickets directly at the box office then go that route. You&amp;#x27;ll likely save anywhere from 25-60% off the price of the tickets. Plus you&amp;#x27;ll get actual physical tickets.&lt;p&gt;Sure this doesn&amp;#x27;t work for some crazy in demand show, but nobody goes to those anyway right?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Justsignedup</author><text>So much this. And just to add, any startup that even attempts this, EVEN WITH 100% ARTIST SUPPORT, cannot work out because venues have the exclusivity contracts.&lt;p&gt;And worse, you can&amp;#x27;t split a venue up to 2 different sellers. They don&amp;#x27;t have a communication protocol for which seats are sold, so you end up in a position of double-booking. Also bad.&lt;p&gt;Basically the only way for this to work is:&lt;p&gt;a) a system exists where venues publish an event and seating&lt;p&gt;b) the system does nothing but keep track of sales and seats. They don&amp;#x27;t care who sold, just tracking that it was sold. Also allow full API access so any service can reserve and claim the seat, the service is now on the hook for that seat.&lt;p&gt;c) allow venues to indicate which services can sell their tickets&lt;p&gt;This will commodotize ticketmaster, but at the same time, there will very little value add, so who would compete. It&amp;#x27;ll be a race to the bottom with barely any money. And the service you build could take a small fee at best otherwise nobody would use you. AND you&amp;#x27;d be competing against ticketmaster with almost no money.&lt;p&gt;And don&amp;#x27;t forget, the double booking problem... Your service will have to basically integrate with ticketmaster, who will never willingly do this given that you&amp;#x27;ll commodotize them, and they will not simply sacrifice themselves just to make some sort of positive outcome, and then also be completely beholden to another company.&lt;p&gt;Its a perfect monopoly field.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Why is it so hard to disrupt Ticketmaster?</title><text>It seems there are a variety of solutions to prevent value from being transferred from artists&amp;#x2F;fans&amp;#x2F;venues to resellers. Why does it seem like there have been no significant attempts to implement an alternative?&lt;p&gt;The only YC company[1] I can find in this space seems to be DOA.&lt;p&gt;[1] https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;companies&amp;#x2F;the-ticket-fairy</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>koolba</author><text>TicketMaster has exclusive contracts with the vast majority of venues and just about every large one. These contracts include kickbacks where TicketMaster will add $X of fees to each ticket it sells and pass back Y$ (Y &amp;lt; X) to the venue.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s essentially the venues and artists outsourcing the job of &amp;quot;being the asshole&amp;quot; to TicketMaster as a large chunk of the money eventually flow back. They get to publicly blame TicketMaster, claim they have no involvement, and still get their slice of the &amp;quot;processing fees&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;If you are attending any event and you can actually buy the tickets directly at the box office then go that route. You&amp;#x27;ll likely save anywhere from 25-60% off the price of the tickets. Plus you&amp;#x27;ll get actual physical tickets.&lt;p&gt;Sure this doesn&amp;#x27;t work for some crazy in demand show, but nobody goes to those anyway right?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>idunno246</author><text>You still get hit with fees at the door in my experience. Considering most venues bigger than a bar are owned by livenation which is the same company as Ticketmaster…</text></comment>