Its not 100% about the sky high prices. Its the tactic TM has used to make more money off of every ticket they sell. Allowing scalpers to use bots to buy up tickets, or even outright working with scalpers to get them tickets, with the expectation that the scalpers resell the tickets on ticketmasters resale platform meaning TM gets the original fee from selling the tickets, then a fee from both the seller AND the buyer upon the resale. Its a pretty crooked way of doing business
I agree the market should set the price for scarce goods; however, it would be helpful to everyone if Ticketmaster had reputable, independent competition, wasn't able to directly sell in bulk to "affiliated" resellers and the use of automated purchasers (bots) was not allowed.
Perhaps if the entertainment and sports businesses were to support another option the market might create a credible, non-affiliated, alternative?
If regulators want to create or refine the oversight of the system's operations, and somehow encourage credible competition those might be good places for histrionic politicians, in all provinces, to spend their efforts. Bitching for sound bites and clicks isn't helpful and they should be working on more important things.
And yes Scott, Ticketmaster's system, both on phone and desktop, seems to want to make even everyday, lower demand purchases as difficult as possible for everyone. After dealing with them for over 13 years I still would often wish I could only have the pain and frustration of a root canal on the wrong tooth rather than have to deal with them. Whenever the venue offers the choice I will try to use their box office rather than TM.
If only someone at TM would respond with a reasonable defense or even a good plan going forward: but of course if you own the market why do you care what your victims (customers) think.
Yeah, politicians really shouldn’t interfere in free markets. It distorts incentives and sends people underground. High demand low supply goods should be expensive. Seeing a ball game isn’t a right.
Guess the World Series will provide more content for at least a few days longer. Hopefully the politicians can keep themselves out of trouble and focus on the things that actually matter rather than the social media cirque de jour.
All goods and services should be sold at whatever price the buyer and seller agree to. Full stop. This applies to everything. Any attempt to circumvent this fundamental mechanism makes everything worse.
And what about a monopoly that sits on both sides of that transaction, taking 15-30% on either end? That's not exactly a free market. I agree with the general push of the article, there's only one Taylor Swift and she's only going to be able to perform for something like 7.5m people a year (150 shows x 50k each) of a market of a few billion.
But that doesn't begin to cover the incestuous, fucked up relationships between Live Nation, Ticketmaster, and the performers. In a lot of ways the first two are simply paid an extremely lucrative fee to catch shit on behalf of the performers, who know exactly what is going on and are getting a cut of those transactions while being feces free.
The best way to distribute these limited goods would be to have a truly transparent and open auction system, mostly cutting out the middleman so that most of the excess profit goes to the performers. How to get there, I have no idea.
The most efficient way to distribute any scarce good or service (Taylor Swift tix, parking spots, rental apartments, etc.) is via an independent auction. But the auctioneer still needs to be paid for his or her or their time and effort. Are you suggesting Taylor run her own ticket auctions?
Even if the middlemen are making "excess profit" (whatever that means), that the events they represent are routinely selling out at the prices they charge suggest they're still pricing their product below the equilibrium price. If Ticketmaster disappeared overnight, do you really think the artists and their management would leave all that extra money on the table?
Your argument also implies tickets to live entertainment are a commodity like with no immediate substitute, like gasoline. And that's simply not true. Without gasoline, modern North America grinds to a halt, people starve, etc. Without Taylor Swift concerts, the world will continue to spin and people will find alternative way to be entertained.
"Are you suggesting Taylor run her own ticket auctions?"
Nope. If anything, given the nature of the live entertainment market, ticketing and promotion are almost always going to tend towards a natural monopoly, so there's an argument for there being some sort of regulated utility to handle that. But like I said, how you get there is not something I have any good ideas on.
There's no realistic prospect of a real competitor to Ticketmaster coming about, let alone 3 or 4 which would be required to create a genuine competitive market between them.
"If Ticketmaster disappeared overnight, do you really think the artists and their management would leave all that extra money on the table?"
No I don't, and nowhere did I make that argument. I said the exact opposite in fact in my comment about excess profit going to the performers and not the middleman.
"Your argument also implies tickets to live entertainment are a commodity like with no immediate substitute, like gasoline"
Same thing here. Of course there are other things people can spend their entertainment dollars on. Try engaging with what was actually said as opposed to reading someone's mind.
Politicos' defence of the poor people who can't afford a world series ticket is laughable and shows one of two things:
1. How truly out of touch they are with the real world
2. That they use any issue, even the most minor one (this is a pretty minor one as far as issues go) to distract from the fact that they have no grasp on anything.
Ford's government would be better off addressing real problems (cost of living, housing, crime), but no they choose to focus on asinine issues that waste everybody's time.
It shows how much contempt they have for the plebs and how little they care about anything, but their own well-being.
Counterpoint… as long as sports teams go cap in hand to governments expecting bribes or tax breaks… then the “right” to see a baseball game at a low price has been purchased for the residents by the government and team owners need be forced to live up to their side of the implied bargain.
Or alternately…. Can we progress to the superior version of capitalism where the business of sports is given as much and as little preferential treatment by governments as the business of granite countertop installation?
Yes. The subsidization of billion-dollar stadiums for the benefit of highly profitable enterprises is one of the greatest scams perpetrated by governments.
Not addressed in this article... why is a filthy American company allowed to have a monopoly on ticket sales in Canada? Would the Americans tolerate Canadians controlling the sale of tickets to NFL games?
Maybe that should be Doug Ford's angle if he wants to make hay out of this.
Don’t quote me but I would bet a few bucks that Ticketmaster offerings are being bought by … wait for it … Ticketmaster and the re-sold by … yes, you’re right … Ticketmaster, all businesses operating under various aliases. Multi sales = multi fees. A great way to get richer.
Maybe you can't eliminate *fully* the re-sale market, but if TicketMaster wanted to, they could radically reduce it to the point that it wouldn't affect much of anything. Tickets are almost universally sold online and so could easily be tied to the online account tied to your real-world identity. TicketMaster could do these things, but they don't, so I conclude that they don't want to.
It's not like there's an unstoppable airline ticket resale market for airline tickets and Air Canada is just unable to prevent Bob Smith getting on a flight to Australia under the name "Jane Erickson" with Jane Erickson's ticket that she sold him.
The problem for fans appears to be that they don't want a ticket scalping market to exist, but the people selling the tickets and the act DO want it to exist.
People who pay the scalpers huge markups to attend sporting events have to realize that they may not get what they paid for.
I attended an NHL game a few years back and bought tickets from a reseller who won them in a draw. The reseller politely sold them at face value and not a cent more. Good for me. The game was a wild blowout, but my good luck continued because all the goals were scored by my favourite team.
This is where value enters into how much a ticket is worth. Those who paid through the nose to get 18 innings of World Series experience did okay. Those Dodgers fans who paid big money to attend the Game 1 humiliation might be wishing they hadn't bothered.
Resale tickets are already sold through illegal channels. Those illegal channels are allegedly controlled by Ticketmaster. Ford is correct that people are getting ripped off, and he's correct that government must take action to restore law and order. The US government is doing something:
Bar cities and government funded stadiums from signing exclusive rights deals with Ticketmaster. They’ve locked down every major venue in North America, so there is no alternative. I would also look long and hard at the contracts Ticketmaster signs with resale sites like Stubhub. I suspect a big part of why its so hard to get tickets is because Ticketmaster is incentivized to sell to resellers as they make a cut of everything going through Stubhub.
Also, you could make concerts like airline tickets, requiring identification etc, that would wipe out the secondary market tomorrow. I’m not sure that’s desirable, but its definitely doable. The point is that government has a lot of options available that aren’t as ridiculous as trying to enact price caps on a private market.
In 1990 I had tickets to Madonna's Blond Ambition tour. Due to work conflicts I could not go. I simply put a note on the physical bulletin board outside the company cafeteria offering the tickets at face value. They were quickly snapped up. I had no interest in making a profit, I just wanted to pass the experience on to someone else.
The artists themselves discovered long ago that their most devoted fans, young or old, would demonstrate their "superfan" status by going to lengths both physical and financial to get tickets. I remember standing in long lines for hours to get tickets back in the 1970's. Then phoning, for hours, to get tickets or win tickets from a sponsoring radio station. Then the bot technology kicked in which kicked the odds of the average human caller or queuer, getting tickets, down to almost zero. Opportunists, scammers and insiders have always existed but now they have been incorporated into the process. Thanks to technology, Ticketmaster and Live Nation have taken the live entertainment market and concentrated demand on a global scale capitalizing on the FOMO and YOLO mentality driven by social media.
Ticket sales desperately need regulating. Ford is not wrong but his rationale is a bit off unsurprisingly. Yes there is an opportunity cost to every single purchase- if I buy item A I will have to forgo Items B and C. That’s life and one of the first hard lessons that children have to learn from parents who actually wish they could give them everything. If B and C is rent and groceries….. well you can always charge it. And pay more fees on fees to big rich corporations. Some choice!
Its not 100% about the sky high prices. Its the tactic TM has used to make more money off of every ticket they sell. Allowing scalpers to use bots to buy up tickets, or even outright working with scalpers to get them tickets, with the expectation that the scalpers resell the tickets on ticketmasters resale platform meaning TM gets the original fee from selling the tickets, then a fee from both the seller AND the buyer upon the resale. Its a pretty crooked way of doing business
I agree the market should set the price for scarce goods; however, it would be helpful to everyone if Ticketmaster had reputable, independent competition, wasn't able to directly sell in bulk to "affiliated" resellers and the use of automated purchasers (bots) was not allowed.
Perhaps if the entertainment and sports businesses were to support another option the market might create a credible, non-affiliated, alternative?
If regulators want to create or refine the oversight of the system's operations, and somehow encourage credible competition those might be good places for histrionic politicians, in all provinces, to spend their efforts. Bitching for sound bites and clicks isn't helpful and they should be working on more important things.
And yes Scott, Ticketmaster's system, both on phone and desktop, seems to want to make even everyday, lower demand purchases as difficult as possible for everyone. After dealing with them for over 13 years I still would often wish I could only have the pain and frustration of a root canal on the wrong tooth rather than have to deal with them. Whenever the venue offers the choice I will try to use their box office rather than TM.
Thanks Scott!
Baseball is finished, but concerts continue all year and Ticketmaster continues to screw people over all year. Blow-up the monopoly.
If only someone at TM would respond with a reasonable defense or even a good plan going forward: but of course if you own the market why do you care what your victims (customers) think.
Yeah, politicians really shouldn’t interfere in free markets. It distorts incentives and sends people underground. High demand low supply goods should be expensive. Seeing a ball game isn’t a right.
Guess the World Series will provide more content for at least a few days longer. Hopefully the politicians can keep themselves out of trouble and focus on the things that actually matter rather than the social media cirque de jour.
All goods and services should be sold at whatever price the buyer and seller agree to. Full stop. This applies to everything. Any attempt to circumvent this fundamental mechanism makes everything worse.
And what about a monopoly that sits on both sides of that transaction, taking 15-30% on either end? That's not exactly a free market. I agree with the general push of the article, there's only one Taylor Swift and she's only going to be able to perform for something like 7.5m people a year (150 shows x 50k each) of a market of a few billion.
But that doesn't begin to cover the incestuous, fucked up relationships between Live Nation, Ticketmaster, and the performers. In a lot of ways the first two are simply paid an extremely lucrative fee to catch shit on behalf of the performers, who know exactly what is going on and are getting a cut of those transactions while being feces free.
The best way to distribute these limited goods would be to have a truly transparent and open auction system, mostly cutting out the middleman so that most of the excess profit goes to the performers. How to get there, I have no idea.
The most efficient way to distribute any scarce good or service (Taylor Swift tix, parking spots, rental apartments, etc.) is via an independent auction. But the auctioneer still needs to be paid for his or her or their time and effort. Are you suggesting Taylor run her own ticket auctions?
Even if the middlemen are making "excess profit" (whatever that means), that the events they represent are routinely selling out at the prices they charge suggest they're still pricing their product below the equilibrium price. If Ticketmaster disappeared overnight, do you really think the artists and their management would leave all that extra money on the table?
Your argument also implies tickets to live entertainment are a commodity like with no immediate substitute, like gasoline. And that's simply not true. Without gasoline, modern North America grinds to a halt, people starve, etc. Without Taylor Swift concerts, the world will continue to spin and people will find alternative way to be entertained.
"Are you suggesting Taylor run her own ticket auctions?"
Nope. If anything, given the nature of the live entertainment market, ticketing and promotion are almost always going to tend towards a natural monopoly, so there's an argument for there being some sort of regulated utility to handle that. But like I said, how you get there is not something I have any good ideas on.
There's no realistic prospect of a real competitor to Ticketmaster coming about, let alone 3 or 4 which would be required to create a genuine competitive market between them.
"If Ticketmaster disappeared overnight, do you really think the artists and their management would leave all that extra money on the table?"
No I don't, and nowhere did I make that argument. I said the exact opposite in fact in my comment about excess profit going to the performers and not the middleman.
"Your argument also implies tickets to live entertainment are a commodity like with no immediate substitute, like gasoline"
Same thing here. Of course there are other things people can spend their entertainment dollars on. Try engaging with what was actually said as opposed to reading someone's mind.
Brown Paper Tickets exists... just sad that no one is using it.
Are you talking about the NEP?
Politicos' defence of the poor people who can't afford a world series ticket is laughable and shows one of two things:
1. How truly out of touch they are with the real world
2. That they use any issue, even the most minor one (this is a pretty minor one as far as issues go) to distract from the fact that they have no grasp on anything.
Ford's government would be better off addressing real problems (cost of living, housing, crime), but no they choose to focus on asinine issues that waste everybody's time.
It shows how much contempt they have for the plebs and how little they care about anything, but their own well-being.
Counterpoint… as long as sports teams go cap in hand to governments expecting bribes or tax breaks… then the “right” to see a baseball game at a low price has been purchased for the residents by the government and team owners need be forced to live up to their side of the implied bargain.
Or alternately…. Can we progress to the superior version of capitalism where the business of sports is given as much and as little preferential treatment by governments as the business of granite countertop installation?
Yes. The subsidization of billion-dollar stadiums for the benefit of highly profitable enterprises is one of the greatest scams perpetrated by governments.
Other cartels like Canadian dairy or telecom industries nod their heads approvingly.
It’s perpetrated primarily by the business owners as they are the ones primarily benefiting.
Well they wouldn't perpetrate without the full cooperation of the government.
100% accurate. Thanks for saying it so clearly.
Not addressed in this article... why is a filthy American company allowed to have a monopoly on ticket sales in Canada? Would the Americans tolerate Canadians controlling the sale of tickets to NFL games?
Maybe that should be Doug Ford's angle if he wants to make hay out of this.
Don’t quote me but I would bet a few bucks that Ticketmaster offerings are being bought by … wait for it … Ticketmaster and the re-sold by … yes, you’re right … Ticketmaster, all businesses operating under various aliases. Multi sales = multi fees. A great way to get richer.
Maybe you can't eliminate *fully* the re-sale market, but if TicketMaster wanted to, they could radically reduce it to the point that it wouldn't affect much of anything. Tickets are almost universally sold online and so could easily be tied to the online account tied to your real-world identity. TicketMaster could do these things, but they don't, so I conclude that they don't want to.
It's not like there's an unstoppable airline ticket resale market for airline tickets and Air Canada is just unable to prevent Bob Smith getting on a flight to Australia under the name "Jane Erickson" with Jane Erickson's ticket that she sold him.
The problem for fans appears to be that they don't want a ticket scalping market to exist, but the people selling the tickets and the act DO want it to exist.
People who pay the scalpers huge markups to attend sporting events have to realize that they may not get what they paid for.
I attended an NHL game a few years back and bought tickets from a reseller who won them in a draw. The reseller politely sold them at face value and not a cent more. Good for me. The game was a wild blowout, but my good luck continued because all the goals were scored by my favourite team.
This is where value enters into how much a ticket is worth. Those who paid through the nose to get 18 innings of World Series experience did okay. Those Dodgers fans who paid big money to attend the Game 1 humiliation might be wishing they hadn't bothered.
Resale tickets are already sold through illegal channels. Those illegal channels are allegedly controlled by Ticketmaster. Ford is correct that people are getting ripped off, and he's correct that government must take action to restore law and order. The US government is doing something:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ftc-sues-ticketmaster-live-nation-resale-illegal-1.7638489
Bar cities and government funded stadiums from signing exclusive rights deals with Ticketmaster. They’ve locked down every major venue in North America, so there is no alternative. I would also look long and hard at the contracts Ticketmaster signs with resale sites like Stubhub. I suspect a big part of why its so hard to get tickets is because Ticketmaster is incentivized to sell to resellers as they make a cut of everything going through Stubhub.
Also, you could make concerts like airline tickets, requiring identification etc, that would wipe out the secondary market tomorrow. I’m not sure that’s desirable, but its definitely doable. The point is that government has a lot of options available that aren’t as ridiculous as trying to enact price caps on a private market.
If supermarkets sold prime rib at 5 cents per pound you can bet that bots and re-sellers and brokers would get involved.
In 1990 I had tickets to Madonna's Blond Ambition tour. Due to work conflicts I could not go. I simply put a note on the physical bulletin board outside the company cafeteria offering the tickets at face value. They were quickly snapped up. I had no interest in making a profit, I just wanted to pass the experience on to someone else.
The artists themselves discovered long ago that their most devoted fans, young or old, would demonstrate their "superfan" status by going to lengths both physical and financial to get tickets. I remember standing in long lines for hours to get tickets back in the 1970's. Then phoning, for hours, to get tickets or win tickets from a sponsoring radio station. Then the bot technology kicked in which kicked the odds of the average human caller or queuer, getting tickets, down to almost zero. Opportunists, scammers and insiders have always existed but now they have been incorporated into the process. Thanks to technology, Ticketmaster and Live Nation have taken the live entertainment market and concentrated demand on a global scale capitalizing on the FOMO and YOLO mentality driven by social media.
I'd like to see Ticketmaster make a serious effort to stop or at least reduce bots from purchasing tickets. Not holding my breath.
Ticket sales desperately need regulating. Ford is not wrong but his rationale is a bit off unsurprisingly. Yes there is an opportunity cost to every single purchase- if I buy item A I will have to forgo Items B and C. That’s life and one of the first hard lessons that children have to learn from parents who actually wish they could give them everything. If B and C is rent and groceries….. well you can always charge it. And pay more fees on fees to big rich corporations. Some choice!