Most major and minor venues have exclusive ticketing contracts. You can sell tickets to a high school gym but if you want to play anywhere that can handle a real crowd you’re stuck with the monopoly.
more like monopoly on the venue service. (a place where you have the permit to organize large group events, so proper exits, toilets, accessibility (if required); bag/clothes storage, waiting area, permit to sell alcohol, staff for all this, sufficient electricity connection, HVAC, ability to assemble a stage and the frame for lights and the soundsystem)
for example rave organizers in LA can do it in a lot of potential warehouses, because they have the staff & process to get the permits, setup the tech, cleanup, etc.
but as the gig grows fewer and fewer venues can host it, and that's how LiveNation managed to consolidate most of the high-capacity venue market
and there is efficiency in vertical integration, for everyone involved. what people find atrocious is the lack of cost breakdown transparency.
bands and ticketmaster/LiveNation could simply hide everything, display just the actual final price and then distribute the cash according to their actual contracts (which they do anyway)
why they anger the masses with this is completely beyond me, but ... after spending a few years on the outskirts of this industry, I think they just have bigger problems, never really understood UX anyways, nothing forces them to do so, aaand it absolutely keeps the conversation on them and not on bands/venues, etc.
So why don't some enterprising well known artists/VCs/record labels/ pool together some money to build a new large venue, and control the ticketing themselves?
Big record labels are absolutely uninterested in this. They get their cut and that's it. Small labels don't matter.
Festival headliners, and other big big big artists in general have managers, make a shitton of money, have a lot of other problems on tours besides ticketing anyway, plus they have guest lists, so in the end they don't care.
Those few artists that are big and care, well, they care to solve the problem for their own situation, for their fans, and don't really want to solve the general problem.
Because in general it's not their problem. :/
Oh and LiveNation is a public company, it has a nice business moat, so it's like a successful unicorn.
