The proposed idea is a technical one that doesn't work for the promoters or artists or venues.
The promoters want to know very early whether the venue is the right one for the number attending and whether to upsize, add dates, or even to go the other way to a smaller venue. The time to book a venue is very long... So they need as complete data as they can about sales as early as possible (they would love if 80% of the tickets that will sell can be sold in the first week - as then they can quickly make a decision about whether this is the right venue and if more dates are needed).
The artists want to enable as many fans to get in as possible, including young and poorer fans... Who tend to be more evangelical about an artist and drive their growth more and ultimately are more loyal and spend more over the lifetime of being a fan. They are poorer but more sticky. The artists also want to play to as full a venue as possible as that is the best atmosphere.
The venues want to have surety in their bookings (see the promoter dilemma as to whether to change venue) and for the capacity to be as close to full as possible as they will make more revenue from bar and food sales than from pure ticket sales.
All of these... All of them... Are not solved by the technical solution proposed except when it doesn't matter... When you're absolutely sure you're going to sell out. In which case you also don't need to change anything or invest in anything new because you're going to sell out anyway.
There are solutions that can threaten the current model... But this blog is not one of them.
In fact, the idea that "I have more money and deserve more to have a ticket over someone that doesn't have as much money" is antithetical to the thinking of every artist I've ever worked with.
There is the old trope that McDonalds is primarily a real estate business.
In the same line of thinking, you could say Ticketmaster is a "scape goat" business so the artists and venues can get max profit while still coming of as innocent angels.
It is now all Ticketmaster's fault. Venues and artists are innocent.
This would explain why you can't fix it: where would the scapegoating go? When you have larger demand than supply, then prices will always be high. And when venues + artists prefer full venues, then demand must be higher than supply.
I guess I see the entertainment industry in two tiers. There are the mega-stars like Taylor Swift, etc. that occupy one tier, and then the majority off smaller artists, up and coming artists that represent the lower, if you like, strata.
Perhaps you are describing, and perhaps the author are tackling the upper strata. For myself, I swore off big venues decades ago. If I am unable to set my beer behind the monitor speaker, I'm not going.
I wonder if the lower strata could use a kind of "artists coop" to manage ticket sales. All smaller venues (bars and the like) could participate, all smaller artists could as well.
I think more artists would handle selling their own tickets if it was easy to do. In that way the artists are served (of course) and presumably they will do what is best for their fanbase.
Connecting artists and venue owners with a web portal, allowing ticket sales to fans via the same site shouldn't be heavy lifting for a lot of the readers on HN.
> Connecting artists and venue owners with a web portal, allowing ticket sales to fans via the same site shouldn't be heavy lifting for a lot of the readers on HN.
The tricky part isn't making the website, it's persuading enough people on both sides of the equation that your business is a better option compared to alternatives.
And despite the situation with Ticketmaster it's not like they're literally the only tool available in a market waiting for a second option - there's already lots of much smaller ticket-selling options that you'd be competing with, ranging from single person PHP websites you can host yourself to companies with significant traction in their niches that are like Ticketmaster just much, much smaller.
That's not to say that an idea like yours couldn't succeed, but the fact that lots of people could do the coding doesn't make it a likely, or easy, business to make successful.
Yeah pretty much any big tech company could spin up a team to launch a ticket purchasing website in a year or so that could handle the traffic.
For example, Amazon always loves adding benefits to prime, if they thought they could break into the ticket market they would do it in a heartbeat. Same with Spotify or Apple. If these massive corps cannot break into the market then why would some startup be able to?
The problem with Ticketmaster is the same as any consolidation play. If you let a middleman control the wholesale and retail side of the transaction, you’re gonna get a bad deal.
The solution is really simple, but the government no longer has the regulatory ability to do anything. You segment the distributor function from the retail, and end up with a bunch of retailers running volume driven low margin sales channels.
Ticketmaster brilliantly positioned itself as distributor, retailer and supplier for resale. So they have an exclusive on a venue, get a fee for the sale, get a seller commission for the resale, and a buyers fee for the resale. They “own” the customer and the venue.
In a transaction of the style of musical performances, I think it’s inevitable that an entity like Ticketmaster would begin to exist. The issue is that we have a many to many to many relationship between fans, artists, and venues.
In database design when you have such a pattern it is common that you’ll have a new table to maintain the complex relationship. It doesn’t make sense for venues to sell tickets because each artist has their own tour through many venues. Selling tickets for a tour becomes a hassle as many venues would have to coordinate. To complicate things, opening acts often switch during the course of a tour. Conversely, it doesn’t make sense for artists to sell tickets because the process of coming up with the ticket price and negotiating with the venue and handling transactions and returns , etc. is not their core competency.
This is why promoters like Live Nation exist—to bridge this gap and take on the capital risk necessary to put on a large tour. They aren’t necessary but their value to venues and artists (the business owners) is palpable. For Taylor Swift to go on a world tour, an amount of centralized coordination makes it much easier and much less likely to end in financial ruin.
They also, iirc, act a bit like a specialized bank for venues, by paying for contracts up front (and I think I read also loaning money directly?) in exchange for the fee upside in sales and resales later. Venues want as much revenue as they gdt to come in as close to on sale date as possible.
So it's "every sufficiently large company sells financial services", too.
But it is all their fault. They’re an obviously illegal monopoly that was allowed to thrive during our multi-decade experiment with not enforcing antitrust laws.
If artists literally ALL wanted to hire a scapegoat that rips off fans then sure. But many don’t. The fact that there’s no other alternative is WHY it works.
Also there’s no such thing as “venues and artists” since they own the venues too. Which is another part of the overall problem.
Seems like it’s not so simple to say that ticketmaster is getting artists/venues max profits. If you look at how much money could be made by scalping (before it became harder), that was money people would have potentially paid to the artist/venue instead.
I agree that the idea may not be the best for promoters, artists or venues, however, in my opinion, it's the worst for buyers, specially those who cannot spend a lot of money.
The process of purchasing a ticket will induce a lot of anxiety in the purchase process. They don't know the lowest price they could buy the ticket on, before it gets sold out. They have to pick a price and hope that it is available when the price reaches that value eventually. Many people may decide to go above their limits just to get tickets of popular concerts, decreasing their disposable income unnecessarily.
In theory this process sounds wonderful and exactly like an economics textbook envisions a free-market purchase, but I don't think buyers will enjoy this process. There are lots of other factors to consider in the purchase process apart from economics and API rate-limiting. I don't have a better solution to add for this though.
> [T]he idea that "I have more money and deserve more to have a ticket over someone that doesn't have as much money" is antithetical to the thinking of every artist I've ever worked with.
The problem is, with a limited supply of tickets you’re going to draw the line somehow whether you want it or not. Price sets the barrier explicitly. Attempts to avoid using that (e.g. in various social welfare programs all over the world, but also throughout the late Soviet consumer economy) have usually ended up instituting a different, implicit barrier that may seem less outrageous on the surface but at the end of the day is not that much better: networking or bribery skills, amount of time to spend standing in queue or refreshing the website (frequently turned back into price by various enterprising people—I wonder if the US Consulate in Moscow realizes the reduction in visa interview capacity a couple of years ago had as its main effect funnelling applicants’ money to a small, untaxed, and technically illegal industry of bot programmers).
If you’re trying to extract as much money from each customer as possible (as airlines and other “discriminating monopolies” do), those additional barriers might be intentional. Otherwise they don’t seem that much better than the original money one—I guess you could claim the most passionate fans will be able to buy cheap tickets that are sold out in hours (one possible barrier) but you’re automatically cutting off people who can’t afford the necessary time off work to monitor the sale as well, for example.
I don’t like this. But I don’t see a workable economic mechanism that can do substantially better, either.
The model that works is to build relationships with fans and afford them privileged access, and sell everything else at market clearing prices.
Ticketmaster tried too offer that through a "verified fan" route, but it failed under the weight of its own monopolistic ineptitude. Whoever cracks the fan management+ticketing service and offers it to bands will have an incredibly strong moat.
All kind of models are possible: associate your social ID and prove you've distributed band related content early in their career; associate multiple past purchases - for things like merchandising, fan specials, behind the scenes etc. etc.
The main theme is giving band and labels tools to maintain and curate this relationship with the fanbase, and only then add ticketing on top of it. If you have a certain mass and sign multiple names from the same genre, you can leverage that data to "migrate" say Green Day fans to some new alternative/punk band and offer them discounts, under the assumption this could build strong preferences for that band in the future.
Instead of maximizing present ticket revenue and "burning" a band's current fanbase, you maximize career-wide earnings, fan number and impact. That's a kind of moat that's unbeatable.
I love the idea of requiring the purchase of merchandise beforehand, although I'm not sure if this would only compound the problem of scalping. The problem with building moats is
a ) scalpers will write algorithms to predict where the moats are before fans can get there
Everything in the world discriminates against some class of people. Taylor Swift is optimizing for "verified fans" - i.e., people who will actively share how big of fans they are. It's just good business, because she's developing a lifetime customer base. Someone will need to attend the "final tours" she gives when she's 60, 70, 80. Also, Taylor Swift fandom is one of the most mainstream fandoms I can think of - there's little risk of a severe reputational risk for admitting it.
It's better for the fans since they get more content with less money, with the tradeoff of some personal information.
Since the band and ticketing partner are not in the ad business and want to build long term, I expect that limited personal info to be much less likely abused than what the typical social network site does with even more sensitive data (yet, most people seem to agree trading those off to for free news of the Kardashians in their feed, so what do I know).
At the limit, any kind of price discrimination needs some type of information to execute, you can't subsidize completely anonymous fans because market forces will quickly close that loop and we are back to square 1. For example, a confidential association between my name and a record/stream purchase for the purpose of a substantial ticket discount in the future seems like a good compromise to me.
If you are sure to sell out you want to invest in such a system as this is the best way to extract maximum money from your fans. You still have a chance to sell out in the first days for multiple time the usual price.
This system is not used as it will be seen very negatively by fans.
Except extracting as many dollars as possible isn’t the goal. Many bands try to keep their tickets affordable.
The solution is to break up Ticketmaster. The companies they gobbled up handled this fine. Imperfectly, sometimes shoes sold out in minutes, but the prices and the fees were fair, and Will Call can wipe out the scalpers.
There will still be scalpers but now they will be committing fraud. At the end of the day there will still be a large number of real fans who will be pissed will call rejected their ticket.
The fans will need the smarten up and learn the rules. That would take time
My point on artists is that maximising value extraction isn't their priority.
I worked in the industry for almost a decade, had 2 record labels, and signed a number of bands that became famous (for some definition of that) as well as worked with bands that were famous (for any definition of that)... so I have some experience here even though that experience has aged a bit.
Artists are balancing revenue now, with future growth, with record sales, with drawing in new fans, with taking the tour to as wide a representation of their fanbase as possible... and it really truly isn't as simple as "charge the highest price possible".
Far better models can be seen in sales of things like the Glastonbury Music Festival (real identity required, but administered by See Tickets) and Dice ( https://dice.fm/ which allows fan to fan resale ).
Those are better because 1) they limit the ability of scalpers, and 2) the fan-to-fan resale also allows flexibility (less need for thundering herd, as there are always people who cannot attend and now they can safely and respectfully sell to their peers).
Both processes generate a vast amount of data on the sales process, as well as the resale process - which better informs promoters of venue sizing and ticket pricing in the future. Both are good platforms for future evolution of fan-to-fan resale in a way that can enable more of the value to be returned to the artist whilst balancing the other criteria well. What they do is provide promoters with richer data, which allows promoters to make better sizing and venue decisions earlier.
To the separate questions elsewhere in the thread as to how to tackle Ticketmaster, the answer is to not fight them in their space... i.e. to not sell tickets for venues under their exclusive control. Here you see Dice succeeding as they focused on major nightclubs, including Ibiza super clubs... they're selling larger venues than most rock venues, on a daily or weekly basis... outside of Ticketmaster... with more revenue going to the venue, artist and promoters despite the ticket price only having increased a few % points. Ticketmaster control some large venues... but think of festivals, smaller venues, theatres, nightclubs... Ticketmaster really only are present for a small number of super-sized venues, more of the industry exists outside the Ticketmaster venues than in it. Don't go for the red ocean market, go for the blue ocean market ( https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/tools/red-ocean-vs-blue-oc... ).
Data and time create a fairer market... not exclusive venue control or making people pay as high a price as possible.
Dice is fantastic. Another thing they do is allow you to join a waiting list for sold out events. People who have bought tickets and want to return them can return them to the waiting list (and people on the waiting list will get a notification offering them a few hours to purchase the newly returned ticket). If someone on the list buys it they are refunded.
Counterpoint: Dice is terrible. Sure it makes sense for bigger artist that will sold out, but for most it is not necessary and it forces you :
- To have a smartphone
- To give out your phone number
- To create an account
The worst? You can't even resale the ticket if the event is not sold out! Usually if I'm unable to attend a concert, I'll put my ticket up for sale for half the price, but with Dice, you just wasted money on empty seats. Great.
Dice say that if someone wants to be able to purchase your ticket then you can sell it to them via their platform at no cost to you. i.e. you can return your ticket if someone wants it.
I do not know of any ticket that can be returned "just because".
Even a theatre or opera will accept returns only if they have demand for them.
Now compare to the majority of platforms that don't allow returns even when there is demand for them... or that will charge late arriving fans a higher price than face value for the returned tickets.
Ticketmaster is in the news because they had trouble with sales for the upcoming Taylor Swift tour. I have trouble believing that they are worried about changing venues (I expect they chose the largest available in every case) or selling the shows out.
And the number of shows is a decision that is taking into account a lot of factors that aren't reaching as many fans as possible. That's fine, no artist owes their fans anything, but the goal rather obviously isn't to maximize attendance opportunities.
Taylor Swift is huge, a megastar. She has a fanbase in the millions. She doesn't want to tour endlessly as it is exhausting and impedes upon a family life and seeing friends. So... a big tour, but big venues.
Her fanbase is all ages, but probably veers towards teens and those in their twenties as she went mega-big after 1989 was released (in 2014).
The vast majority of the fanbase are younger, and therefore poorer (wealth is accumulated over time, and the cost of living crisis hits the young disproportionately).
Because the fanbase is so large, the minority with wealth could afford to purchase every ticket under a dutch auction and the vast majority of her fanbase wouldn't stand a chance.
Taylor Swift is famed for doing things for her fans, getting them in to gigs, visiting in hospital, sending messages to console... and basically having empathy and caring for them.
Can you even imagine the headlines on every front page as teens and twenty-year olds are priced out by older people who are wealthier... and the immense damage that would cause to a brand curated and sculpted over the past decade or more.
In this specific instance... Taylor Swift would consider the proposal in the article to be the worst possible thing she could do. It would still be flat-out rejected.
However this could work really well for sporting events. The Leafs usually sell out all of their tickets and a good number to scalpers, having at least a more legit way to buy tickets for a game would be helpful
The promoters want to know very early whether the venue is the right one for the number attending and whether to upsize, add dates, or even to go the other way to a smaller venue. The time to book a venue is very long... So they need as complete data as they can about sales as early as possible (they would love if 80% of the tickets that will sell can be sold in the first week - as then they can quickly make a decision about whether this is the right venue and if more dates are needed).
The artists want to enable as many fans to get in as possible, including young and poorer fans... Who tend to be more evangelical about an artist and drive their growth more and ultimately are more loyal and spend more over the lifetime of being a fan. They are poorer but more sticky. The artists also want to play to as full a venue as possible as that is the best atmosphere.
The venues want to have surety in their bookings (see the promoter dilemma as to whether to change venue) and for the capacity to be as close to full as possible as they will make more revenue from bar and food sales than from pure ticket sales.
All of these... All of them... Are not solved by the technical solution proposed except when it doesn't matter... When you're absolutely sure you're going to sell out. In which case you also don't need to change anything or invest in anything new because you're going to sell out anyway.
There are solutions that can threaten the current model... But this blog is not one of them.
In fact, the idea that "I have more money and deserve more to have a ticket over someone that doesn't have as much money" is antithetical to the thinking of every artist I've ever worked with.