Charge extra for each armrest. Charge extra for priority entry to the venue. Charge to bring in a purse. Charge to sit next to your family. Charge for adequate leg room. Earn points that become worth less and less as they accumulate.

Maybe not this _exact_ outcome but largely yes I suspect they did. Capitalists rent seeking all the way through their history and if you put money first in any business venture you will always feel pressure to enshitify. See 1994 Pearl Jam vs TM and monopolistic behavior 30 years ago.

I am lucky to have local independent music venues (First Avenue in Mpls, they own a few local venues) with sub $100 ticket prices that have acts I want to see, which isn’t the case for everyone. Taylor Swift fans (for example) are squeezed as hard as possible for every penny, I think it’s absolutely disgusting.

This will however allow people to pay for bots that will purchase tickets on their behalf. But I believe a verification system can prevent that from happening if one would like. But the incentives aren’t there to do so.

i felt like i accidentally made money on some esoteric stock market

In the music festival world, there is a TM subsidiary, In the same venue you can see fees differ by dozens of percent based on who the Artist, the ones known for being good people are much lower even if the base ticket price is identical

Ticket brokers are generally willing to take on the risk of buying up tickets to events on the primary market and constrain supply to turn a profit on the secondary market.

This works because TM and secondary platforms can claim ignorance and control the narrative: “we do our best to prevent bots”/“fans should be free to resell their tickets”

The only way around it is for the government to regulate prices, like they do in the UK (i.e. you can’t resell tickets for more than face value)

That means that TM/venues likely aren’t guaranteed as much profit, and ticket brokering businesses disappear, but both of those things are ultimately net negatives for consumers anyway.

First up you need to convince promoters to give you the tickets. Not artists. When an artist signs a deal with a promoter the promoter owns the tickets and can pretty much do what they want.

Problem is, a lot of good promoters in the US particularly are owned by Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster.

That’s fine though - just work with promoters who aren’t owned by Live Nation! Only problem is the venues those promoters are hiring are owned by Live Nation.

Also, a bunch of artist management companies are owned by Live Nation too.

So if you want to sell tickets for shows in non-Live Nation affiliated venues for non-Live Nation affiliated artists that’s fine.

But those are going to be small shows with relatively unknown artists. The risk increases in inverse proportion to the size of the show and profile of the artist. The promoter you’re dealing with is going to want cash up front, so as the ticketing company you’re going to have to loan them the money. If they run or the show flops or whatever else you are left holding the can.

And because you’re tiny and dealing with unknown shows you’re never going to get allocation for big name shows, so you’re not going to be able to build a valuable list of consumers that you can cross sell shows to.

And for the shows you’re selling you’re going to be left with remnant inventory and so you need someone with good lists who can shift that for you. So you’ll probably end up giving Ticketmaster 30-40% of your allocation from the promoters you are working with.

But what do I know, I'm better with computers than people.

eTix is good. The quoted price for a show was $20. I wound up paying $21.65 after fees. The fees were obvious at checkout. I didn't have to sign up for anything or download an app, either (which I don't like about Dice, but they are similarly good otherwise).

The problem is mostly vertical integration & abusing a monopoly over venues of a certain size. I understand I live in a place where there are more independent venues than other places and I'm glad I happen to be into the acts that play them...

Economics education in America sucks. (Along with civic, legal and other education, not for cynical reasons, but because we treat schools as job centres and day care.)

The housing debate reflects a base inability to grasp supply and demand. The antitrust debate, market failure.

Economics takes a modicum of effort to grasp. In the TikTok world, it’s easier to justify laziness by spouting common nonsense about economics assuming everyone is rational or whatnot.

I think this is a knock on effect of wealth inequality. People on here are talking about buying $700 tickets. My first thought is that the price sounds insane, but my second thought is to recognize that some folks have way more disposable income than I do. So $700 might be just another night out for someone else...