Why ticketmaster is a monopoly

What can the government do about it? The Justice Department is already looking into whether Live Nation engaged in anti-competitive practices by allegedly pressuring concert venues to use Ticketmaster. But the clearest solution is for the government to reverse its position: to effectively undo the merger, breaking the companies apart again.

Promotion, ticketing, and artist management should be separate. Furthermore, no single company should be allowed to control 80 percent of the ticket sales market. That ought to be broken up as well, enabling competition on price and quality. You could do the same for the secondary market by limiting the number of event tickets for sale at any one exchange. In other words, the bullying and deception at the heart of this industry would end if the market were structured to benefit ticket buyers, not giant companies.

You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser and improve your visit to our site. David Dayen ddayen. Two summers ago, Live Nation lobbied New Jersey lawmakers to rescind a longtime consumer protection law that prohibited venues from holding back more than five percent of tickets. Because of SafeTix, some fans who purchased valid tickets from other sellers have been stranded outside of their shows. And these are not fake or counterfeit tickets but are real tickets bought from Ticketmaster and then resold on the secondary market.

All of these anti-competitive actions are violating free-market principles and harming consumers. As a direct result of the merger, consumers have increasingly been at the mercy of a single company for access to tickets. And artists might want to find ways to make low-cost tickets available to hardcore fans who might be younger or just not have the disposable income to spend on what tickets would go for if they were all just auctioned off to the highest bidder.

So artists might be willing to forgo ticket revenue in the short term, if it builds up their fanbase in the long term, and creates goodwill. In general, instead of viewing a ticket as the right for its bearer to attend an event — how tickets have traditionally been conceived — Ticketmaster increasingly ties them to the buyer.

This makes all kinds of traditional activities — ticket giveaways, gifts, and yes, selling tickets to events you can no longer attend — difficult or impossible. In addition to harming consumers by reducing competition around things like transaction fees, this structure creates a perverse incentive: Ticketmaster and concert promoters can sell tickets in the first instance at low prices, and use that to show their community-spiritedness, yet take a piece of the action when some of those tickets are resold at closer to their market prices on the secondary market platform they control.

Holdbacks are a practice where only a portion of tickets to an event are actually put on sale on the first day of availability. This is less about helping fans, than creating a feeling of artificial scarcity that allows tickets to be sold for more up front, and in fact creating demand on the secondary market — which Ticketmaster then profits from again, due to its control of the platform and the resale restrictions it has put in place.

The company is now leveraging its position in the primary channel to drive out competition in the resale market and allowing for potentially unfair and deceptive practices. However, LNE is using this program to ensure that tickets can only be resold or gifted within the Ticketmaster system. Media reports tell of patrons who purchased tickets on a competing resale platform being literally left out in the street while the show went on without them.

If true, these reports may support claims of unfair and deceptive practices by LNE. Throughout the coronavirus disease of COVID pandemic, LNE has rebranded its anticompetitive ways under the guise of protecting the public health.

Although, sadly, the pandemic continues to prevent a return to packed venues, hope is on the horizon that live events will begin to resume. Indeed, the governors of New York and New Jersey recently announced the easing of restrictions on live events in large venues.

When live events return in earnest, it is imperative that consumers have access to a market that is transparent, fair, and competitive. We know that LNE is not sitting idle during this lull. Your agencies must guard against one company dictating the conditions of the return of live events and cannot permit LNE to mask its anticompetitive instincts under the guise of public health.