Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds

It always feels like the scene in Lord Of The Rings where they're waiting for the Ents to deliberate on the big war that's going on, and then after an agonizing amount of time they announce that they just said Good Morning and decided their guests weren't Orcs.

Like jeez can justice move any slower?

The verified re-sale thing as you have correctly pointed out just allowed them to pretend like something was being done about scalping while it actually just let them make more money on the resale fees.

Consider portajohns for an outdoor festival- incentivizing folks to wait until the last possible minute makes it impossible to determine what the needs are there, so how do you plan for how many shitters you need to bring and maintain for, say, a 3-day festival?

Consider that "festivals discount early sales" might be a kind of Chesterton's Fence, and you might question why they do that...

The monopoly findings were about vertical integration, but the resale issue wasn't. I think, if you do some research, you discover that the vertical integration issues they were concerned about are actually a bigger part of the problem.

> Ticketmaster has no real incentive to try to prevent resellers from buying up all the tickets on first sale, because it gets to charge fees on all the resales through its platform.

The incentives for to prevent abuse of the primary ticket sale is that the venues, who actually decide how tickets are sold, don't like it. If Ticketmaster doesn't make them happy, they go elsewhere and lose out on the primary market. Perhaps ironically, they are often less concerned about abuse if they still have control over the ticket resale as well, which they often do when the resale happens on Ticketmaster. In practice though, most of the resale doesn't happen on Ticketmaster; this gives both the venues and Ticketmaster plenty of incentive to combat abuse.

> I'd like to see tickets sold by dutch auction.

Pretty much everyone who first enters the ticketing industry thinks auctions are a better way to sell tickets until they learn how the industry works. Interestingly, Ticketmaster offers auction-based ticket sales. You wouldn't know this, because venues don't want to use it. You might think a dutch auction for tickets would be great, but people who experience the reality often don't. Dutch auctions work when you're selling a commodity where each item is effectively the same as the other. Often people value each seat for an event differently. Dutch auctions, by their very nature, require the a fixed time window for the auction, which makes them difficult to fit the outcome you're describing... that would more be handled by some form of yield management where venues release blocks of tickets for sale at specific time windows, which is something that already happens in the live event business.

There's all kinds of dark aspects to the live event business, but it's generally completely different from the perception of the general public.

The customer picks an option (no resale, limited or not resale price, etc...) and Ticketmaster does it, taking a commission in the process. Maybe the commission changes depending on the formula, but really, they don't care about the details, they are getting the money no matter what.

The problem is not the situation about resale and all that, I would say that part is the customer fault, not Ticketmaster, they are the ones who picked a formula. The problem is that by being in a monopoly position, they can charge high fees, making the tickets more expensive. And by more expensive, I mean something like 30% more expensive, not 300% more expensive.

I don't think Ticketmaster offers a dutch auction, but I guess that if you are big enough and if that's what you want and if you can pay, they can deliver.

Why should it have such incentive? And even more so, why it should be a concern for the court that it should have it?

Its their product. Why would you want to take that choice away from them?

An example, I spent some time working for an organization who felt strongly that retirees living on a fixed income should always be able to afford tickets to their events. They would bring in big name musicians to perform and charge a fair price specifically so those people could afford it. Why would you want to take that choice away from that organization and force them to price out the elder community members they were trying to serve?

Its the organizations event, they should always have the choice to charge whatever they want.

Current primary and secondary ticketing markets are not ideal, but this proposition disenfranchises whole market segments from consuming art as experience based on economic factors. That's bad for art, it's bad for artists, and it's bad for consumers.

Unless it's something really, really popular, you don't have to be waiting the morning they go on sale. In fact you can usually pick up tickets for events a few weeks after they go on sale, or even longer. If they run out, there's often a small amount of resale tickets available for a bit more cash but not multiples.

Having come from the UK where you'd damn well better be online in the first 30 seconds or you're out of luck, and reseller sites fill up with tickets at high multiples of face value within minutes, it's a breath of fresh air. (I understand the UK is introducing similar resale price-caps soon)

Of course it may partly be that Perth people just don't go out that much. Either way it's really nice.

The incentive would be to jack up the prices themselves and take any profit which would have gone to scammers. Supply and demand.

Similar problem with "healthcare" insurance companies in the US.

We need a global crackdown on the breadth of markets a company can be involved in - somehow.

This is more why DOJ cases should remain independent from the executive branch. Politically controlled prosecutions means justice is intrinsically unequal. Having states be independent is helpful, but not in this regard.

Yes. It's good that the states can serve as a check on the Federal level government. But why can the federal level government give up on cases on a national level? Just because a different party was voted in?

> The companies could also be assessed penalties. In addition, sanctions could result in court orders that they divest themselves of some entities, including venues such as amphitheaters that they own.

I ended up going to the physical box office, where they still charged an extra 40% of the ticket cost in service fees.

Apparently the state AGs dropped one of the charges that would have led to a more reasonable number there to try to make the decision easier for the jury.

Mid/high profile venues know they will sell out regardless, they can shop around the venue rights to the highest bidder.