The Ticketmaster Takedown

[Allison]

But don’t the artists/venues choose the channel through which the tickets are sold? There’s a difference between a monopoly and having economies of scale. From what I understand, if you’re Taylor Swift and the Rose Bowl or a local brewery and your neighbor’s garage band, you have the same access to the different vendors through which tickets are sold.

That’s why I don’t understand what the legal standing is. You can’t sue Wal Mart for putting local stores out of business because all they did was offer cheaper prices (a result of their own economies of scale) that customers CHOOSE to patronize. If we draw parallels to the Ticketmaster case, the customers here are the Taylor Swifts/arenas/stadiums of the world—they chose the vendor.

Now if Ticketmaster was working in tandem with rival ticket channels and agreeing to set prices at a certain level to keep business/demand at their preferred levels, THATS where you have an issue, and that’s what you’d have to prove in court.

If I’m misunderstanding the business model, then maybe this is all moot. Otherwise, what’s the end goal? You suggest a two-year limit on ticket agreements…that’s fine, but it won’t prevent preferred vendors from setting prices accordingly based on the demand from the talent and venues, it’ll just make contract negotiations more frequent.

I posted the links to read more about it, but, TM/LiveNation have complete control over most of the venues that a large artist would need to use to safely put on a show. So if you’re Taylor Swift and you’ve been playing stadiums for almost a decade now because that’s how big your audience is, you have to contract with TM/LN because there is no other choice. They will not allow an artist to play in a venue they control without contracting to TM/LN. That’s what this monopoly is and why so many people are fighting it now. The demand for this tour is record breaking, which is why this is now under such a microscope. LiveNation also controls Pandora, I Heart Radio, so their power over artists refusing to work with them can effect their careers drastically.

Here are some screenshots from the articles I posted of it being explained better than I can:

 

[OrlandoGuy]

^Thank you for that response! The part I was missing was the vertical integration from LiveNation. Now I understand, that is a problem.