He also predicted the future for after the merger.

Its funny - of all the stuff people make up that was Obama's fault, no one ever mentions his admin allowing Ticketmaster and Live Nation to merge. Now they need to be broken up, probably like the Bell System back in the day. But I'll keep on dreaming about that.

Worse, they are all owned by the same company now. It’s all a multi-headed hydra of suck. Live Music has been completely monopolized.

Vendor lock-in by any other name boils down to monopoly. The moat is their lobby.

They also own a lot of the venue infrastructure across the industry such as catering, tour buses, security,...

They have leverage with venues they dont own and a monopoly across industry verticals.

Sickening situation for music.

Because a large proportion of the money flows out the door. Most of their revenue is pass-through revenue, due to the sports teams and concert promoters (and by extension musicians) they sell tickets for. Ticketing works as a high volume low margin business.

You need to deduct at least 70% (or more) from their topline to get a true picture of the company’s revenue vs revenue that walks straight out the door.

Precisely this. Ticketmaster's entire business model is based around taking the blame. Artists don't want to set a face value for their tickets that represent a realistic market-clearing price, for fear of being seen as greedy; this leaves a lot of money on the table for scalpers. TM scrape as much of that value back for artists and venues, who get a cut of all the fees and charges and "authorized secondary resale". Selling tickets is the easy part; the secret sauce is selling tickets for as much as possible, while allowing the artists to pretend that they're being sold for a "fair" price.

Complicity assumes every venues has the same options, but they don't.

Pearl Jam tried to tour without Ticketmaster in 1994 but several venues turned them down because of contracts. They ended up signing with TM a few years later. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-taki...

When signing with TM is survival and not signing means your venue sits empty or your band has a hard time booking large venues, that's not a free choice. That's just coercion.

Without regulation, yes. Brokers (i.e. scalpers) will buy up tickets to events and take all of the risk off of TM’s plate, and reprice however they’d like. ~80% of tickets in the U.S. are sold this way. Stubhub has done a great job of lobbying for this since their existence depends on ticket brokers.

> $10000+ for a ticket that originally costs around 2k should be illegal. Most of these tickets will go unsold I'm sure.

I'm not so sure. See this article in the Washington Post where multiple season pass holders they talked to sold their seats for $5k+ quite quickly: "His tickets fetched more than $8,000 each within the first few hours of going up."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2026/06/08/knicks-seas...

It's not impossible - in Ontario, it required a law. Resale ticket prices capped at original ticket face value.

see https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ontario-ticket-resale-cap-e...

In my opinion, the scalping problem isn't really the primary problem with Ticketmaster's monopoly. Scalping is just the result of a gap between sale price and fair market value.

I also think that many of the things Ticketmaster could do to stop scalping would build further walls around their monopoly. To me, a ticket should generally be like a piece of a paper that has right of first sale. I don't want a situation where Ticketmaster has the right to hold my tickets hostage (which they're already doing quite a bit of with digital tickets).

As it relates to the resale market, Ticketmaster's main sins are:

- Making it impossible to engage in a safe secondhand ticket marketplace outside of their own platform. It would be technologically trivial to implement some kind of pre-purchase mechanism for buyers on third-party sites to verify the authenticity of resold tickets and ensure ownership gets transferred upon successful purchase, but the only real mechanism is transferring tickets somewhat blindly via email accounts. E.g., I go to StubHub and pinky promise that I'll transfer my tickets to the buyer via the Ticketmaster account when they pay, and the buyer pinky promises they won't fraudulently report that the ticket wasn't transferred. Ticketmaster could easily implement some kind of technological solution to having a more open escrow market that helps keep third-party transactions secure. There could be a buy/sell/trade API that they open up to providers like Venmo, Cash App, Zelle, PayPal, etc. But they keep it all within Ticketmaster to maintain that monopoly.

- Double-dipping on huge transaction fees on their own second-hand market. The only truly safe place to buy second-hand tickets is Ticketmaster (see above), and they take excessive fees far outside the realm of a fair transaction fee.

It's really the artists, vendors, promoters, teams who control the side that prevents scalpers from leaving seats empty. For example, I recently went to a concert where the artist/promoter simply didn't turn on ticket resale at all. I assume this was done to keep more hardcore fans in the seats rather than giving people temptations to sell.

You saw $10,000+ prices for a ticket, but the Knicks game will be filled all the way. It's just overpriced for now until game time gets closer. Or, perhaps $10,000 is just the fair market value. The building only fits 19,000 people inside. New York City has 350,000 households with over $1 million net worth.

Manhattan Scalpers won't leave unsold seats to a game like this, but they will try to offer prices far above fair market value until they figure out what that fair market value is.

It's also a situation where we either have to accept that New York City has a lot of wealthy people bringing up the fair market value, or the team has to decide to sacrifice revenue to enhance the fan experience (e.g., do a ticket lottery + named tickets that must match your ID).